From what I understand, Frank Zappa scared a lot of people back in the day. It\’s hard to truly understand why in 2017, since popular music has been rendered relatively harmless. After a couple of decades of needless hysteria surrounding rock music\’s alleged Satanic leanings, and then a couple decades of censorship crackdown, it got old for everybody after awhile. But in the mid-sixties there was no black metal, no particularly vulgar lyrics, there was barely even an edge to any of the music at the time. I mean, the Rolling Stones, dangerous? People treated them as if they were, and in the early days they sounded like the Beatles for fuck\’s sake. They had shaggier hair, granted, but they wore suits!

But in comes Frank Zappa, with his shaggy hair and shaggy mustache, and he\’s dragging along with him the Mothers of Invention, a band of equally scruffy-looking misfits. And they\’re all honestly creepy-looking, too, like you\’d find them on the Sex Offender Registry. This is what we\’re dealing with here out of nowhere in the summer of 1966, and the average Joe didn\’t take too kindly to the likes of them at the time. Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention\’s debut album Freak Out! kind of came out of nowhere. Hippie culture, at least the hippie culture caricature that young fucks like me are aware of, hadn\’t even peaked yet. Hippies had been around for years already, but the Summer of Love was still a year away. The Beatles were between Rubber Soul and Revolver. Nothing had really set the tone yet for such an album in the zeitgeist. Looking at the cover and the name, people thought it was some drug-fueled degenerate work of \”art\” by some unseemly types, the kind of dregs you wouldn\’t want to associate yourself with. Don Draper wouldn\’t want to be caught with his pants around his ankles fucking some broad in the same room as this album. If little Opie brought home a copy of Freak Out! you\’d better believe that Andy Griffith would pummel the Lucifer out of him with a belt while Don Knotts watched.

OK, fine, but what about the actual music? The original double LP (a first in rock history for a debut) consisted of 14 songs. The first 11 tracks seem relatively benign, I guess, with its 2-3 minute ditties that sound like early rock and doo-wop numbers, but then you get the wailing bluesy \”Trouble Every Day\”, the eight-minute weirdo-poetry suite \”Help, I\’m a Rock\” and then the twelve-minute dissent into Hell called \”The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet\”, which is likely the scariest thing to be released to the unwitting public until the world got to see the Twisted Sister Stay Hungry album cover.

The first 11 tracks are not without their sinister undertones, of course. What we didn\’t know yet about Frank Zappa is that his primary purpose in his art (and he did consider what he did \”art\”) was to take the existing paradigms and twist them, subvert them, pervert them, and bewilder the unsuspecting listener. Teenage social issues such as angst and love are presented on Freak Out! as trivial and pedantic (Frank was about 25-years-old at the time). And rightfully so, since the radio waves were riddled with songs with such juvenile subject matter. A smart guy like Frank doesn\’t want to miss the chance to show the world that he\’s picked up on how asinine it is, right? Asshole. Lovey-dovey lines like \”Wowie Zowie, your love\’s a treat. Wowie Zowie, you can\’t be beat.\” are delivered with a monotone sneer. Angsty lines like \”I never met no one who\’d care if I was dead and gone.\” are delivered as if it were from an upbeat lounge song. Up is down! Black is white! Chaos! Panic!

Oh wait, we\’re not done? It gets scarier? After 11 doo-woppy teeny-bopper rock and roll numbers we are treated with an electric blues number called \”Trouble Every Day\”, which was inspired specifically by the Watts riots and the Civil Rights Movement in general. Biting commentary on social injustice and police racism (sound familiar?). Hand-jobbin\’ Zappa fanatics will cite this song as the first ever rap song, but I strongly disagree and it\’s an irresponsibly stupid thing to say. Yeah, a white person invented rap music. Fuck off.

It gets even scarier? Next comes \”Help, I\’m a Rock\”, which is where the real freaking out begins on Freak Out! Experimental, psychedelic and unsettling, you can catch a whiff of the precursor to industrial music on this track (at least old-school industrial). Very cool.

Oh shit, I can\’t handle it anymore. Buckle up, because the extra-long \”The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet\” closes up the album with a fervor or experimental and psychedelic drumming, complete with eerie wordless grunting and scary electronic tuning radio-type noises. Not for the faint of heart, gang! Frank himself has said that this was supposed to be the rhythm track for an unfinished composition, so all we have on the album is the bones of something bigger, but it works very nicely as it is. Frank never would finish the composition, but he may have agreed that it was good enough.

I don\’t think I\’ll be one to bandy about the \”Very Good\” rating too often, but if one were to dive headfirst into Frank Zappa\’s immense catalog then this would be one of the finer places to start anyway. It\’s pretty cohesive (something that doesn\’t happen too often), the freakouts don\’t completely alienate the listener (something that does happen too often), and overall it\’s a catchy, listenable record. Historically, it\’s influential to the progressive/symphonic rock movements and, uh, Matt Groening of the Simpsons fame too I guess. Paul McCartney cited Freak Out! as an influence to the Beatles\’ Sgt. Pepper\’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Frank would return the favor by making fun of the Beatles two albums later.