If you’ve been wondering why I haven’t been posting, it’s mainly because I got sucked into a vacuous black hole called “society” and I decided to play its bullshit rules. Now, things have changed for the better. I’m back behind the keyboard and typing at will. At first I’d look at this blog and feel hard pressed to write something since the universe had decided to crush me. Then I realized the large thumb that had me pinned was my own. Without further ado I return.
Years ago before going off to some St. Louis church trip I bought two albums to entertain myself with, Jeff Beck’s “Beckology” and Frank Zappa’s “The Weasels Ripped My Flesh”. A friend, Devin Kipple, had recommended Beck to me after describing him as part of a triumvirate in which the other two I was already aware of. Verbatim from Devin upon the following guitarists, “Eric Clapton is the best, Jimmy Page is the smoothest, and Jeff Beck is the fastest”. In 9th grade I took these words wholesale and once I saw a 3-disc set of Beck I snapped it up.
As for the Zappa entry, there rests a longer story. “The Weasels Ripped My Flesh” kept crossing my path. I would see it in the “Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll”, at music stores, and in my guitar teacher’s vinyl collection. Usually I would think how silly the cover was, point it out to a friend, have a laugh, and then purchase something “safe” along the lines of Led Zeppelin or Jimi Hendrix. Asking my guitar teacher he told me, “It’s really challenging music”. I felt like that sentence lit the fuse that threw the gauntlet down. Months later while walking around the music section of Barnes & Noble in Lancaster with a copy of “Beckology” in my hand, the bright yellow cover of “The Weasel’s Ripped My Flesh” caught my eye. Without hesitation I bought the album. My sister, who loved Hanson at the time, poked fun at me for my “silly CD” purchase on the drive home. I wouldn’t listen to the album till lifting off from Baltimore to St. Louis on my flight to some Lutheran Christian Festival that was being held in the Edward Jones Dome.
At first listen, I was shocked to the point that I promptly put the album away in favor of a Led Zeppelin compilation. The screaming dissonant sound of the drums and free form trumpet on “Didja Get Any Onya?” wasn’t anything that I was familiar with. I felt like I wasted money on an album that was sure to waste space in my collection. That was until I realized how painfully boring the time spent in St. Louis was going to be. There were fun times and neither of them had to do with the Lutheran Christian fest or staying in the hotel. The fun was when my friends and I would get to walk around St. Louis and look around. To kill time at the hotel I would sit down and listen to music while the other guys tried to scam pay-per-view porn from the front counter. I was never a fan of porn where the female was getting fucked by another guy. The females were fine, just seeing other naked men wasn’t apart of my interest. So I would lean back in my chair, close my eyes, and listen to my CD-player. Halfway through the week I would nearly exhaust the little black 12 capacity CD case that I had. Every CD except Mr. Zappa’s “The Weasel’s Ripped My Flesh”. I was about pass over it again and ask my friends for their collections when I remembered my guitar teacher’s words, “It’s really challenging…” and popped the album into my cheap Sanyo disc player braced for noise.
This time I was ready and the challenging sounds poured into my brain. Sitting there, I was already insanely tired from walking around, so I had my eyes closed and felt like I was sent to Wackyland home of the Looney Tunes’ Dodo. The second time around the album had unfolded in a way that I must have been too afraid to experience earlier. Song structures would pop up and fade into what sounded like a warped and sped up conversation. Then the reward, “My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Mama” where I had realized that Zappa had a razorblade-like skill in guitar-shredding and a comical lyrical style had paid off.
I would come back to this album over and over since that week in a shitty St. Louis hotel. I would also move into the other albums of Zappa, but I’ll always credit the persistent weirdness of “The Weasel’s Ripped My Flesh”.
And with that I’m back. I’ll be putting up review based material and not 1,000 word essays, I just had to break the ice.
