Cheaper Than Cheep Tells (Almost) All About Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention
50 years after it was recorded, Zappa's TV special sees daylight
Early in “Let’s Make the Water Turn Black” on the recently unearthed 1974 TV special Cheaper Than Cheep, just after the first appearance of a hook that could have been a hit for Three Dog Night, Frank Zappa starts talking. He’s using his narrator voice, setting a scene right out of some radio drama:
“We see them after school, in a world of their own,” he says evenly. “To some, it might be creepy what they do.”
Cue the raised eyebrow, because what follows is quintessential Zappa: Further discussion of Unsavory Kid Pranks into Outlandish Musical Pranks into his custom-tailored (and carefully orchestrated) audio delirium. Then comes a brilliant, uncharacteristically short guitar solo.
The next thing we know, it’s Sunday morning and Zappa is recalling (mythologizing?) his days as an unemployed musician, when he’d turn up at an LA bar called Dupree’s Paradise for the 6 AM Sunday jam session. The ensuing 9-minute piece is a Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra – if the orchestra was some house band slogging through the graveyard shift in a joyless smoke-filled lounge. And killing it.
It’s more Zappa misdirection: He’s evoking a place where the few remaining patrons are blotto comprehension-wise, while behind him, the Mothers of Invention tear through insanely challenging programmatic music that demands peak alertness – blindingly fast 32nd-note passages and intricate written lines and preposterously assymetrical broken-meter grooves that stop and start seemingly at random. Woozy-making music.
There are many such juxtapositions waiting in the time capsule that is Cheaper Than Cheep. An extended TV special (over two hours!) modeled loosely on then-popular shows like The Midnight Special, it was shot in a day, in the apparently sweltering confines of the band’s Sunset Blvd. rehearsal space, just after the end of a tour. Zappa financed the project himself; his intention to shop it to the networks was derailed at the start of post-production when it became clear that the audio and video didn’t sync up.
The footage sat in Zappa’s vault until it was uncovered by longtime archivist Joe Travers, who brought it to Ahmet Zappa. It took the two of them twelve years, and lots of digital magic, to get it ready for release. A scan of the personnel list for this version of the Mothers offers one reason the Zappa team might have undertaken such a marathon effort: The 1974 band stands among the very best in Zappa’s long career. It includes Chester Thompson (drums), George Duke (keyboards, vocals), Jeff Simmons (guitar, vocals), Napoleon Murphy Brock (tenor sax, flute, vocals), Ruth Underwood (percussion) and Tom Fowler (bass). To grok the level of musicianship, follow what Underwood does on this tune:
One thing to notice in the murky half-light of the video: There are no music stands. Though the pieces are loaded with technical and interpretational demands, none of the players is reading music – they’re operating entirely from memory. And they are not missing.
Zappa was a famous stickler for details whose scores are filled with technical landmines. That’s not audible: These musicians could be riffing on three chords. They sail through the eccentric composerly complexities of “The Dog Breath Variations” and other densely orchestrated works. They bring the composure of orchestral musicians to the bandstand but they are hardly Jedi robots: Having absorbed the contours and the pivots of this music through repeat exposure, they have reached the rarified place where each player can be totally free to stretch and interpret within the individual parts. And then the group, moving together, can similarly be free: If you need to be reminded about the power of this particular coherence, what it feels like, check the high-intensity shuffle rhythm that erupts from literally the first note of “Village of the Sun.”
It feels important to note that this totally organic type of rhythmic lock seems exotic now, but wasn’t unusual in the music ecosystem of 1974. It was expected. Lots of bands (Led Zeppelin, Parliament, Sly and the Family Stone) dug in this way, and didn’t let up. Intensity was a coin of the realm in live performance. Zappa emphasized grooves that were fun to play and easy to sustain over time, and then turned the band’s soloists loose so they could develop them further. Which Duke and Simmons and Underwood did, pretty much every time the spotlight hit them, in ways that stretched (or subverted) the compositional intentions of the tunes.
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There are plenty of paths to take to learn about Zappa, including many extended playlists that aim to provide curated “Zappa for the Uninitiated” introductions, as well as more focused ones that offer deep gazes into his classical/orchestral works, his satirical songs, his juvenelia, his nostalgia for doowop and cornball musical theater oddities.
But the elements that make Frank Zappa such a singular creative force also make him a confounding and challenging subject of study; these playlists are often too narrow to properly convey the irreverent spirit that drove Zappa’s enterprise — a spirit in abundance on Cheaper Than Cheep. They gloss over the endlessly clever ways he swirled musical devices drawn from many genres into a caterwauling whole. (See this version of “Wowie Zowie,” which begins with distorted guitar riffage, then zips through a panicky vaudeville chase before settling into a delirious loving sendup of surf-rock.)
And even the playlists of disconnected live tracks miss the palpable sense of risk, the stormchasing tightrope-walking element that defined this unusual, and for Zappa himself, this unusually demanding, show. As Underwood writes in the liner notes: “You’ll see a man wearing every possible hat, as he attempts to control all aspects of this filmed event from uncontrollable variable conditions and locations. He does this while presiding over and participating in the musical performance. That, in and of itself, isn’t new for FZ, but what is new is that we see it unfold in real time.”
Cheaper Than Cheep might not be “definitive” Zappa, it might not be high-res, but it’s an essential part of the discography. Simply because it captures an amazing band, operating at heightened altitude throughout a demanding set list. On a single day.
