Review Summary: Zappa's biggest and brashest achievement resists being swallowed whole, but it's well worth the effort.
Frank Zappa said of 200 Motels: "The album is a thing all by itself. Even though it contains music from the film, it has its own continuity. Just as the film has its own continuity, the album has another kind."
Taken on its own, the 200 Motels album seems like an attempt to outdo Zappa's earlier masterpiece 2-record set Uncle Meat. On first (and tenth) listen, the 200 Motels music is perhaps his most abstruse and un-unravelable. At the same time, the lyrics and dialogue use what seems like a pretty juvenile and unsubtle mode to explore human sexuality through observation of groupies and band members in their natural habitat. The presence of Flo and Eddie (Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan of the Turtles) as erstwhile co-lead singers adds a brash crudeness to a musical style that already tends to the abrasive.
Rather than another Uncle Meat, this album is better seen as a continuation of the ideas of the second Mothers album Absolutely Free - it has clear divisions between sides, although each side isn’t necessarily a singular unit. There are sub-suites that span multiple tracks but sometimes get interrupted- "This Town" on Side A, "She Painted Up Her Face" on Side B, and the suite of pieces for incredible classical soprano Phyllis Bryn-Julson and a chorus on side D.
On the surface of it, Zappa would have seemed to arrived at his dream situation, having the disposal of one of the world's great symphony orchestras and the approved budget to make a cinematic gesamtkunstwerk. Fortunately or unfortunately, while trying to juggle film and album direction simultaneously, the difficulties and the unwieldiness of so many things going on at once transformed Zappa's vision under his own nose. He rode the wave and came out the other side with two media products nobody knows what to do with to this day.
Here's the director of the film, Tony Palmer, on the eve of giving up altogether: “Well, I think that Frank has had this dream for so long now, that I think even he has become unsure as to what exactly the dream constitutes. It’s a kind of mixture of childhood fantasies, adolescent fantasies, and grown-up fantasies now all somehow strung together to make some kind of enormous nightmare that he may or may not have had at some point in his life. And one’s problem as a director is to try to unfathom that dream and make some kind of coherent sense of it.”
There's not much to enjoy here if you're looking for the fusiony fireworks of Hot Rats or the meticulous studio filligree of Uncle Meat. Zappa uses 200 Motels as a clearinghouse for orchestral pieces he'd written in various hotel rooms in previous years. He’s trying to form his own distinct 20th-century orchestral voice, which is quite a challenge considering the scope of what had happened in "serious music" up to 1970. He follows his muse though and comes out on top, never sounding blankly derivative. His orchestrations have individuality and expertise. Any polish missing can be attributed to lack of rehearsal time due to budget considerations. As always, rock instruments and orchestral instruments resist peaceful co-existence. Here, the orchestra wins, and conventional rock songs seem insignificant. "Magic Fingers" is the only song that can easily be separated out from the album, and even it is tagged with an unsettling but ultimately funny monologue at the end.
Nowhere is the division between serious and humorous Zappa more widely explored than on this album. This is the work of someone who is determined not to be inhibited culturally, morally or artistically. The scatological and purple text goes intriguingly hand-in-hand with the extremely ascerbic orchestra writing that dominates the album. It's a reminder that complete, unmitigated honesty without filters isn’t pretty.
As Tony Palmer hints above, the conceptual framework of 200 Motels is a free-flowing exploration of surrealistically enhanced true stories of life on the road. To try to describe the specific plot points is a non-starter. In my view, there is one predominant event that seems to have burdened Zappa himself with elements of subconscious tension - the departure of bassist Jeff Simmons on the eve of filming 200 Motels. The supposed cause was that Simmons was too “heavy” to waste his time playing Zappa’s comedy music. Zappa uses the situation as a springboard for absurd tableaux and as an excuse for barbed mocking of Simmons. The event seems to have transformed the focus of the movie/album. And it continues years later via the link between "Dental Hygiene Dilemma" and "The Adventures of Greggery Peccary." Underneath all this, it feels as though a sensitive nerve of Zappa’s has been irritated. Professionally, he knew that the comedy aspect of what he created was what bankrolled everything. It earned him the leeway to do serious things later, but the people who would be most transfixed by the brainy muso goings-on of Orchestral Favorites and Sleep Dirt were not the people who were keeping his business afloat. Did young Zappa sometimes get frustrated that he had to keep pumping out the snarky, juvenile jokes in order to stay solvent?
200 Motels is famously imperfect. With familiarity the rough edges, including often muffled production become familiar landmarks, and sometimes endearing dimples. It can be enjoyed like the intellectual version of a guy wrestling an alligator on TV. It's one of the few albums I can listen to and feel at the end like I understand a little more about human nature. Whatever you do, don't fault the album just because its penis dimension is too big for its drawers.
