It’s 1966 and it seems only Frank Zappa and his Mothers realize just how freaky and weird things are about to get, and Frank never even did drugs (beyond cigarettes and coffee). Nevertheless he could see them — the Brain Police. Or more to the point, he felt them, because you can’t see the brain police, can you? They’re within you, hiding behind your devices of oracular perception. Recording things. Seriously, they are there, implanted at birth.
“Everybody’s got that Frank Zappa track which, for whatever reason, hooked them into realizing, holy sh**, this guy’s way more than just a hippie weirdo with a dirty sense of humour. For me, don’t ask me why, it was For Calvin and His Next Two Hitchhikers. Maybe it was the relaxed yet deranged bigness of sound, because The Grand Wazoo was definitely a big sounding endeavor. Maybe it was the oddly incomplete story being told concerning the two dudes in the back of the car. Where did they come from? Where did they go? Did they find a sandwich? Did they eat it in the dark? And why do I care? Maybe it was that leakage from the drain in the night. Early 1980s sometime. There were probably psychedelics involved.” (Philip Random)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QBkD1Xub3k
In which the good captain (Beefheart, that is) kicks out more of those blues so authentic it can only feel surreal to hear them coming from a white man. But then you actually listen to what’s going on and you realize, this isn’t authentic at all. It’s mutant, working curves and angles that feel positively alien. Of course, he did go to high school with Frank Zappa. Which raises the question, who the hell else went to Antelope Valley High back in the day? And what was in the water?
Installment #46 of the Solid Time of Change aired on Saturday September 16th (c/o CiTR.FM.101.9).
Youtube playlist (not entirely accurate).
The Solid Time of Change is our overlong yet incomplete history of the so-called Prog Rock era – 661 selections from 1965 through 1979 with which we hope to do justice to a strange and ambitious time indeed, musically speaking.
Part Forty-Six of the journey went as follows (38-29):
Fresh episodes air pretty much every Saturday night, starting 11 pm (Pacific time) c/o CiTR.FM.101.9, with streaming and download options available within twenty-four hours via our Facebook page.
In which Mr. Frank Zappa and his Mothers of Invention ditch the Junior High humor for three minutes or so and spit out the necessary truth about all the slime that was oozing out of folks’ TV sets and radios back in the early 70s (and it still is). Not just gross, perverted, vile, pernicious, obsessed and deranged, but a tool of government (and industry too) destined to rule and regulate. So why do we keep watching?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhtyNMS3gaY
As already noted, John and Yoko’s Some Time in New York City has to rate as mostly disastrous, there being far too much Yoko Ono in the mix, and the sort of one-note politicking that feels like a repeated kick to the head. And yet there are a few moments such as the live take on Well (Baby Please Don’t Go) which happens to include Frank Zappa (and at least some of the Mothers) tearing things up with all due savagery and respect. Even Yoko’s saxophonic wailing kind of works, at least for a while.
Randophonic 
