Mike Nesmith and Frank Zappa on "The Monkees"

[JSngry]

[fasstrack]

Insane funny!

[ejp626]

Yeah that was pretty weird all right. When they decided to play the car, I wondered if the director of this Art of Noise video had been aware of this:

[Teasing the Korean]

You may as well post the Tim Buckley video. The smashed up car is in the background.

[Jazzmoose]

Art of Noise??? Great; I'll be on youtube all night, and just after spending this morning tracking down Bram Tchaikosvsky and the Motors. Nostalgia is a terrible thing...

Edited April 11, 2011 by Jazzmoose

[RDK]

I don't admit this often, but I've just never gotten Zappa.

Edited April 12, 2011 by RDK

[.:.impossible]

I think I get him mostly I guess, it's just that he's generally not all that funny. Maybe what I like about him. He doesn't seem to care. He amuses himself and probably calls bullshit on others that are as amused. This is definitely abrasive with a mean spirit directed toward anyone that wants some. Really odd bit of television there I feel.

I like a lot of Zappa's music, but his character(s) come off a little bit strong.

[Jazzmoose]

I don't admit this often, but I've just never gotten Zappa.

I never admit it; Zappa fans tend to turn evangelical on you.

[fasstrack]

Now somebody oughtta post video of Zappa playing a bicycle on the old Steve Allen show. In his formative years, before the mature artist graduated to cars.

The funniest thing to me is that I wrote the previous two sentences in dead-on seriousness (well, the second one was definitely the inner imp coming out...Zappaesque?)

[Big Al]

I don't admit this often, but I've just never gotten Zappa.

Me either. Additionally, I've always thought that Nesmith inadvertently exposed Zappa for the snob that he was. There's a part where Nesmith gets a good zinger in on Zappa, and Zappa looks off-camera as if to say, "Did you hear what this jerk just said? Does he not know who I am and how important I am?"

The essence of Zappa, caught in a few scant frames of TV. This is why Mike is my favorite Monkee.

[Tom Storer]

I don't admit this often, but I've just never gotten Zappa.

I think I probably do get Zappa, and that's why I don't like him. But Zappa's many fans are fiercely loyal so I tread carefully.

[GregK]

Wow, a Monkees thread. Is this place turning into the Hoffman forum?

[Chuck Nessa]

[Jazzmoose]

Wow, a Monkees thread. Is this place turning into the Hoffman forum?

We obviously need a Monkees forum, or at least a list of the threads pinned...

[AllenLowe]

Zappa was a terrific composer who, to me, illustrates what's wrong with the Academy. Listen to the things on The Yellow Shark. His stuff employs a lot of "contemporary" musical rhetoric, but with a sense of life and experience, as opposed to most academic composers (or, for that matter, most current-day composers working in the avant-classical idiom; or even someone like Lamont Young, who is, to me, a prisoner of theory). Also, having heard the original Mothers (June 1968 at Columbia University), I have to mention what an amazing group that was. Zappa was a real musical auteur, shaping everything about that unit while still allowing their own individual realities to come through. And what other contemporary rocker (or, really, any musician from any age) could have done as he did that night, playing through intense passages of composed music one minute and then, the next, bringing Sam The Sham onstage to do a letter-perfect version of Wooly Bully?

Edited April 14, 2011 by AllenLowe