Album Review: Frank Zappa - Lather

                           The Avachives Department of Musical Preservation

THE RUMPELTonian REVIEW

Läther — Frank Zappa

An Aesthetico-Forensic Examination by Dr. Hieronymus Grackle

Formerly of the Thistledown Institute for Unruly Studies

Case File No. 77-L: The Musical Corpse That Refused to Remain in Pieces

Subject: Läther (1996)
Original Intended Form: Four LPs
Present Condition: Three compact discs, approximately 173 minutes of evidence
Classification: Musical poltergeist; aggravated compositional excess

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Preliminary Examination: A Crime Against the Filing Cabinet

There are albums, there are double albums, and then there is Läther—a musical warehouse fire in which the furniture, the building inspector, and the fire marshal are all playing different time signatures.

Frank Zappa intended this sprawling assemblage as a four-record statement in 1977. Warner Bros. declined to release it as conceived, and the music was subsequently scattered across Zappa in New York, Studio Tan, Sleep Dirt, and Orchestral Favorites. The complete conception finally emerged in 1996, allowing investigators to examine the remains in something approaching their original order.

I consider this history significant. A dismembered work of art is not necessarily a dead work of art. Sometimes the limbs continue twitching in separate record sleeves.

Zappa's alleged crime was not simply ambition. It was the refusal to acknowledge that an album ought to behave like a well-trained domestic animal. Läther has no intention of sitting, staying, or refraining from biting the postman.

Exhibit A: The Orchestra Has Entered the Premises

The proceedings begin with “Re-Gyptian Strut,” a jaunty, elaborately arranged instrumental that sounds as though an Egyptian funeral procession has accidentally wandered into a Broadway rehearsal. Its exuberance is suspicious. Nothing this cheerful should be permitted to contain so many moving parts.

Then comes “Naval Aviation in Art?”, a brief orchestral interruption that appears to have been delivered from a neighboring dimension. Zappa places elaborate composition beside rock music without asking permission from either tradition.

This is one of the album's central peculiarities: the serious music is genuinely serious, even when the surrounding circumstances are ridiculous. Zappa's compositions possess structural discipline, but they seem determined to wear false noses.

I have encountered similar behavior in the archives.

Exhibit B: The Human Specimen Under Observation

The vocal numbers are less concerned with harmony between human beings than with exposing the absurd machinery by which human beings torment one another.

“Tryin' to Grow a Chin” presents adolescent insecurity as a grotesque little theatre of masculine inadequacy. The performance is funny, but the laughter has an unpleasant aftertaste. Beneath the caricature is the recognizable misery of somebody desperate to become the person he believes the world expects him to be.

“Broken Hearts Are for Assholes” proceeds with considerably less delicacy. Romance, self-pity, and emotional exploitation are thrown into the same industrial blender. Zappa does not offer the listener a sympathetic character so much as a specimen jar containing several competing varieties of human foolishness.

And then there is “The Legend of the Illinois Enema Bandit.”

Here, the good doctor must pause to adjust his spectacles.

The piece transforms a lurid criminal story into a theatrical rock spectacle, complete with musical tension and outrageous black comedy. It is vulgar, certainly. But vulgarity alone is not an artistic achievement, and Zappa occasionally seems so delighted with the indecency of his material that he forgets to ask whether the joke has finished doing its work.

The distinction matters. A scalpel is an instrument of investigation; waving one about in a crowded room is merely bad manners.

Exhibit C: The Musicians Are Not Innocent

The instrumental performances provide the strongest evidence that this sprawling enterprise is more than a collection of provocative jokes.

“RDNZL” is a marvel of tightly coordinated musical activity. The musicians negotiate abrupt changes, intricate passages, and rhythmic obstacles with the concentration of railway engineers attempting to direct several express trains through one tunnel.

“The Black Page #1” is even more revealing. Its reputation for rhythmic complexity is well earned. Notes appear to have been arranged according to a filing system devised by an enemy of ordinary human comprehension. Yet the composition is not merely difficult for the sake of difficulty: its precision has its own strange beauty.

Meanwhile, “The Purple Lagoon” stretches out into a muscular, jazz-inflected instrumental landscape. The ensemble can sound playful one moment and almost ferocious the next. Zappa's guitar and arrangements make the music feel less like a conventional rock performance than a dispute among highly educated animals who have recently discovered electricity.

I must emphasize that this is a compliment.

Exhibit D: The Guitar as an Unlicensed Medical Instrument

Zappa's guitar playing deserves particular attention on “The Ocean Is the Ultimate Solution.” Here the comic provocateur retreats, allowing the instrumental music to occupy the room without an accompanying lecture.

The result is expansive, searching, and at times almost hypnotic. Zappa's guitar does not simply decorate the composition; it argues with it. Phrases emerge, stretch, recoil, and return in altered forms.

The music possesses a quality I have previously identified in certain ritual objects: the longer one examines it, the less certain one becomes about whether one is observing the object or being observed by it.

This is not a claim that the guitar contains supernatural properties. The Thistledown Institute has already made its position on my supernatural claims abundantly clear.

I am simply reporting what I heard.

Exhibit E: The Final Manifestation of Greggery Peccary

The album concludes with “The Adventures of Greggery Peccary,” an extended satirical operetta that transforms bureaucratic absurdity, modern civilization, and the human appetite for systems into an elaborate comic hallucination.

Greggery is surrounded by a world that seems to have been assembled by a committee whose members have never met, whose minutes are missing, and whose chairman is a pig.

The piece is demanding. Its changes of pace, verbal absurdities, and musical detours require considerable patience. Listeners who prefer their albums to conclude with a tidy chorus and a reassuring fade-out may find themselves wandering the corridor in search of an exit.

Yet the extended form is precisely the point. Zappa allows the absurdity to develop its own internal logic until the logic itself becomes absurd.

I have devoted several unpublished papers to this phenomenon. One was rejected because the editor claimed that my footnotes had become longer than the subject they purported to explain. This is not a recognized scholarly objection.

Final Diagnosis: A Masterpiece With Several Unsupervised Rooms

The difficulty with Läther is also its greatest strength: it attempts to contain too much.

The comedy can be juvenile. The sheer duration can be exhausting. Some pieces strike with the force of revelation, while others seem to exist because Zappa possessed the materials, the musicians, and an unshakable conviction that somebody ought to hear them.

The transitions can feel deliberately disorienting, and the album occasionally mistakes accumulation for inevitability. Not every experiment produces gold. A few produce interesting stains.

But the larger achievement is undeniable. Läther presents Zappa as composer, guitarist, satirist, arranger, and theatrical ringmaster, often within the space of a few minutes. Its collisions between orchestral music, jazz-rock, hard rock, and grotesque comedy are not incidental decorations. They are the substance of the work.

The record company's decision to scatter the project inadvertently created one of rock music's more fascinating archival mysteries: a major work whose identity was obscured by the distribution of its own parts.

When restored to something resembling its intended form, Läther reveals a musical mind unwilling to recognize the boundaries between the respectable and the ridiculous.

And that, dear reader, is where I must register my professional objection.

Respectability is a filing cabinet. Ridiculousness is what happens when somebody opens the drawers and discovers that the documents have been breeding.

Dr. Grackle's Findings

Compositional ambition: Exceptionally high.

Musical execution: Frequently dazzling.

Comic restraint: Missing, presumed deceased.

Recommended listening conditions: A comfortable chair, an unhurried afternoon, and sufficient mental flexibility to accept that a symphony orchestra, a guitar solo, and a joke about human depravity may occupy the same building without notifying the authorities.

Final verdict: Läther is a magnificent, unruly, intermittently exhausting monument to the proposition that music need not choose between intellectual ambition and bad behavior.

It is not a perfectly integrated work. It is something more peculiar: a sprawling musical organism whose excesses are inseparable from its vitality.

I award it four and a half out of five suspicious feathers.

One feather has been withheld because the patient occasionally talks too much.

Signed,

Dr. Hieronymus Grackle
Aesthetico-Forensic Scholar, Retired Against His Will

Postscript, added in the margin: I have been informed that Frank Zappa did not intend the album to be interpreted as a supernatural document. This is precisely the sort of disclaimer one expects from a man whose music has already escaped the laboratory.