Stop the Week 25

All week long I’ve been greedily reading the Mojo Frank Zappa Special that I brought back with me from Southampton airport. The bike’s been off the road, stymied by a rear-wheel puncture, so I’ve been literally walkin’ the dog and perfecting my technique of directing my feet on automatic pilot while my head is buried in the text.

Francis Vincent Zappa, family man

I’ve always been a casual fan of Frank’s without ever being a serious fanatic. His face used to grace my bedroom wall on the top floor of our house in Belfast. My mother thought he was the devil incarnate, with his twisted mop of dark hair and that trademark combination of droopy moustache and bushy ‘Imperial’. She changed her tune a little when I pointed out that he was happily married and had two children – though I didn’t tell her that they were named Dweezil and Moon Unit.

Hot Rats has always hovered around my Top 5 albums, despite the indignity of being caught by my mother one afternoon, playing along to ‘Willie the Pimp’ with my Slazenger tennis racket ‘plugged’ into an old fan heater. You can’t really wriggle your way out of that one. Just grin and bear the mortification.

The Mojo Special painted a picture of a difficult and driven creative glutton, who never hesitated to hire-and-fire assorted band members in the pursuit of musical excellence. Captain Beefheart, his High School friend and fellow ‘difficult genius’, shared a love/hate relationship with FZ, who reminded him of a ‘cataract’ and whom he described memorably as looking ‘like a fly’s leg’.

Ironically, a lot of his copious musical output is far from excellent. Like so many autocratic prolific creative geniuses, he could have done with a stringent editor. Someone who might have excised some of the puerile dross that peppers his albums. For that reason, I’ve stuck mainly to Hot Rats and taped compilations of gems like ‘Montana’ and ‘King Kong’ that lurk among some of the more disposable items in his huge back catalogue. 

But the man was never less than interesting and while I’d never label myself as quite such a misanthropist as he seemed to be, I always related to his contempt for human stupidity in all its guises. I read my comic from cover to cover, as I used to do when I subscribed at various times to The Topper, The Victor, Fabulous, Football Monthly, The Cricketer and Melody Maker. It was a shock to be reminded of the fact that the man died in his early 50s. Frank must have been far too busy creating his vast legacy to read magazines from cover to cover.

It served me a salutary reminder that he was younger than I am when he died. Younger, too, than Hugh Laurie. Which brings me very neatly (or not), ladies and gentlemen, to an interesting programme I watched during the week on the other half of the Stephen Fry double act. As you may know, Hugh ‘Dr. House’ Laurie, has just been paid to go and record an album of his favourite New Orleans classics with a band of solid Noo Orlinz session musicians and a few invited luminaries.

It’s a sad fact of life that the record company in question clearly recognised that the album will probably sell in big numbers on the strength of his famous name alone. That said, Hugh had the good grace to recognise his huge good fortune and his infectious exuberance throughout the programme would have won over the most died-in-the-wool sceptic.

I was very pleasantly surprised by his musical and vocal competence. He’s certainly no Allen Toussaint, but he had the good sense to hire the great man – the man behind hundreds of the finest recordings from the Crescent City – to arrange some of the numbers. He also had the exemplary good taste to cover a couple of the beloved Professor Longhair’s numbers. If he introduces a few new listeners to the likes of ‘Fessy’, Irma Thomas and Huey ‘Piano’ Smith then he deserves all the plaudits and sales he can garner. (But what a lucky bastard, eh?)