After giving all credit where credit is due, we have to start asking some other questions. When Zappa dissolved the Mothers, he explained that they were going
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to "wait for the audience to catch up" with them. Whatever that meant at the time, it takes on increasing irony as the passing months bring new Zappa and old Mothers.
Uncle Meat was a good album, but not nearly as involving as the three that preceded it. I seriously doubt if very many members of the Mothers' audience had trouble with bits like "God Bless America at the Whiskey" and "Louie Louie at Albert Hall." And the jazz on there, "King Kong" and others, was good—about as significant a movement from Coltrane's shadow as the work of, say, Charles Lloyd. As for the more "serious" material, I suppose you could say that it adds to the 20th Century Classical tradition without borrowing too obviously from any one source, but without being worked into structures more pointedly vernacular it loses its force—interesting, but hardly compelling as both Edgar Varese and Little Richard are compelling.
Most of the albums released since then have been insubstantial, even allowing for the fact that something like Burnt Weenee Sandwich is something of a Mother's sampler. Hot Rats was brilliant, filled with fine, strong solos most of which could easily stand beside the current work of some of the best jazzmen in America, even if Zappa's guitar solos were carrying too few ideas through too many minutes, just as they had in "Invocation of the Young Pumpkin."
Burnt Weenee Sandwich sounded to me like a collection of Hot Rats rejects and warmups, groping, relatively simple and obvious improvisations which never really got off the ground. And Weasels Ripped My Flesh didn't stand up very well, either—a couple of good songs, some lukewarm jazz (what a chance was blown when "Eric Dolphy Memorial Barbecue" failed to communicate any of that great musician's ideas to people who were in grade school when he died!), and some pointless, pretentious electronic noise. Lots of people gave these albums good reviews, and lots of others bought and listened to them solemnly, I suspect in a dutiful spirit akin to: "Well, now Uncle Frank's gonna sit us down again and teach us something else about that great wide world of music we don't know anything about because we've been fucking off listening to rock 'n' roll all these
