"Sounds like a sound track for a move starring little pigmy twilights intent on pursuit of their devices and machinations"
Lol!
Roxy and Elsewhere... iddint that the greatest live album you ever heard? Those were the prime years with the best personnel, in my opinion.
"Zappa just couldn’t stay away from that discordant comedy, his burden of intelligence."
That, sir, is so precisely true:
"Any composition (or improvisation) which remains consonant and 'regular' throughout is, for me, equivalent to watching a movie with only 'good guys' in it, or eating cottage cheese." -FZ
But what can you do when there is no real market for more serious music, and you gotta pay the bills? That's right, you move into the rock n roll industry with your tongue in cheek. You do it, and do it incredibly well, but you ain't gotta like it.
There's basically two operating Zappa personas. You have the comedy-rock for making satire of American culture (basking in the self-satisfied superiority he had as a artist while laughing at everyone)... and you have the more serious composer who truly enjoyed experimenting with very difficult stuff regardless of whether or not it sold (but it did, fortunately). But the comic element was almost always there, even when he wasn't lambasting something for being so stupid and dull.
"I’d say that the fundamental difference between Stevie Wonder and Zappa is that Wonder echoes nature’s sounds, and Zappa is more of a reactionary"
Didn't see that coming but I think I'll buy it. Interesting comparison. Frank greatly admired the soul of rhythm and blues and was actually raised on it, but his genius naturally forced him beyond those constraints and into more experimental environments. Wonder more or less kept to that general formula but absolutely expanded upon it... also moving into the more progressive, jazz fusion environment. Ever heard
Contusion? Steve put his foot down on this one, man. I swear something hit all the great artists in the middle of the seventies like all of a sudden. A solar flare or magnetic shift of the erf maybe, I dunno, but shit got really, really good almost over night.
Also check out 'Too High' and 'Superwoman' by Wonder, as well, if you haven't heard them.