Sheik Yerbouti

Sheik Yerbouti

When I look for a good Zappa album, I look for one thing above all, since just about every Zappa album (at least to me) is chock full of excellent music. It's what I call "clarity of vision". How does the album work as a whole? Is there a major theme? Is that theme brought out successfully?

Sheik Yerbouti is one of a handful of Zappa albums that manages to capture American civilization as it is (or as it will be). Zappa comments on society, government, religion, people, and music with both biting satire and insightful observation. Sheik Yerbouti's target is America in the mid-to-late 1970's. Disco is popular. Dylan is resurgent. Kiss is still wearing makeup and spitting blood. We are a nation of "Flakes", slaves to our consumerism. We are college students about to move back in with our parents.
This album takes you on a ride through 1970's musical styles, admittedly on the hard rock edge. And, last but not least, this album contains what is, in my opinion, the single greatest Frank Zappa guitar solo ever put to tape: Rat Tomago. As far as I can tell, it is a solo lifted from the middle of a live performance of The Torture Never Stops, recorded on a four-track reel-to-reel. Just guitar, bass and drums. It is whole-tone scale madness. It is Zappa unbound.
One more point on the experimental nature of some of the songs on Sheik Yerbouti: One "song", Rubber Shirt, is actually a melding of two completely separate tracks, one bass and one drums, playing in different time signatures. Also, the solo on Yo' Mama is what Frank would come to call (on the Joe's Garage album) an "imaginary guitar solo", meaning that the solo was placed over a background rhythm from an entirely different song. This experimentation cannot be emphasized enough. It led directly to Frank's re-evaluation of what it meant to improvise on the guitar. To use a Vonnegut reference, after Yo' Mama, and Joe's Garage, Frank's actual solos became "unstuck in time", leading to an entirely new form of guitar improvisation (best heard on the three-vinyl LP set Shut Up 'N Play Yer Guitar).