Mothermania Manassas VA

Mothermania

Frank Zappa / Mothers Of Invention

Verve, 1969

REVIEW BY: Christopher Thelen

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: 09/05/2005

It may be of interest to only myself, but Mothermania is the only Frank Zappa release being covered inthis retrospective that has never been released on CD. Basically acontract-finishing album that Zappa put together for Verve, thisrelease focuses solely on the first three Mothers releases,surprisingly ignoring Uncle Meat, which I still feel was their best release fromthat period.

Interestingly enough, while the 11 tracks that make up thisrelease are good, I'd be hard-pressed to say that anyone should payblood money to buy a used copy on vinyl from eBay. As solid as thetracks are, it seems a bit redundant that the Mothers would beputting out a greatest-hits release after only three years.

Perhaps it's because I've done little more than listen tonon-stop Zappa in the last 24 hours, but unlike many best-ofcompilations, the tracks contained herein lose little to none oftheir power when taken out of the context of the albums theyoriginally came from. Tracks like "Who Are The Brain Police?,""Brown Shoes Don't Make It" and "Call Any Vegetable" offer solidproof that the Mothers, even in their early days, were a solidmusical unit that never really got the credit they deserved, simplybecause the music they made didn't fit the mold of popular music...then, or now.

What is unexplainable to me is that We're Only In It For The Money has only two tracks culledfrom it - and, at least if it had been up to me, I'd have replaced"The Idiot Bastard Son" with "Let's Make The Water Turn Black".Then again, these kind of arguments could apply to every singlebest-of released since the beginning of time. And while I do feelthat the disc leans too heavily on Absolutely Free, I can't make a good argument for cuttingany of the selected tracks.