Frank Gets Primordial On Our Asses - Again

Uncle Meat is perhaps the best-recorded double album in the history of rock, pop n' roll, and second only to Freak Out in terms of what-the-actual-fuck! factor. What a sumptuous offering it was - encrusted with Cal Schenkel's finest berserker-obssessive schnoodlings and packed with gnarly goodness. It's hard to imagine now that all this - from playing to packaging - was done without a computer present even as a possibility. Magnetic tape and paint. Scissors. Zappa's genius was to make art as a community process - this is not the labor of the artist in seclusion from the world, creating something according to a lofty ideal. Listen to a Zappa recording and you're listening to Los Angeles, the nexus of Western Civilization, for better or worse.

And it turns out that, as with Lumpy Gravy (Smile's ugly sister), there was an earlier version that for one reason or another or none, was replaced by a later. 2016's Meat Light, in addition to - at last - giving us a digital transfer worthy of the original vinyl - gave us that first, uh, iteration for the first time. And it came as a surprise even to the most spittle-spattered wire-haired Zappaphile. Only problem was, it was burntweeny inbetweenied the "real" album and a bunch of outtakes, and split across two CDs. Way to lose audio integrity and coherence.

Today's toothsome serving of redundancy is just those original original tracks, packaged in this swell cover design what I did under the mystic astral tutelage of Calvin. So you can, you know, play the album without having to delve for it archeologically? Upspeaking?