Burnt Weeny Sandwich [Original recording remastered]

From the Label
Originally released at the end of 1969, this is a collection of archival material from The Mothers of Invention, largely instrumental and featuring a lot of piano work from Ian Underwood. The doo-wopping "WPLJ" leads off a progressive jazz-influenced set including the full studio version of "Little House I Used to Live In" (far longer and more involved than the overture version on FILLMORE EAST); and "Holiday in Berlin, Full-Blown". Jimmy Carl Black, Roy Estrada, Sugar Cane Harris and Don Preston are among the supporting cast.

Burnt Weeny Sandwich,Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention,Rykodisc,Pop,Rock,Rock/Pop

Burnt Weeny Sandwich [Original recording remastered]

Average customer rating:

Yes, folks, it's yet another great Frank Zappa album...are you gettting tired of the excellence?
Fabulous...
A favorite meal
W's for White, the P is for Port, L is the Lemon, the J is the Juice
Worth The Calories

Burnt Weeny Sandwich
Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention
Manufacturer: Zappa Records
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

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Similar Items:

The Grand Wazoo
Uncle Meat
Weasels Ripped My Flesh
Waka/Jawaka
Hot Rats

ASIN: B0000009S5
Release Date: 1995-05-02

Tracks:

WPLJ
Igor's Boogie, Phase One
Overture To A Holiday In Berlin
Theme From Burnt Weeny Sandwich
Igor's Boogie, Phase Two
Holiday In Berlin, Full-Blown
Aybe Sea
The Little House I Used To Live In
Valarie

Customer Reviews:

Yes, folks, it's yet another great Frank Zappa album...are you gettting tired of the excellence? .......2007-02-04

This is a sister album to Weasels Ripped My Flesh. Zappa had disbanded the Mothers by this time, and this album is left over material from the Mothers. Despite that, it has an incredibly coherent feel (much like Weasels), and the material here is superb. I love the song WPLJ, showcasing Zappa's love of doo-wop ballads. A lot of the songs here are really intricate, and would probably be fantastic in an orchestral setting (like Overture to a Holiday in Berlin and Igor's Boogie, probably named after Igor Stravinsky, a good buddy of Frank's who was his roadie in the 1960's, and one of Russia's foremost composers). I love the way Zappa handles a heckler in The Little House I Used to Live In (and the song is good too). The title is one of Zappa's most memorable as well. Another superb album in the cannons of Zappa.

Fabulous..........2006-09-21

The only Frank Zappa Recording I like better than this is Hot Rats...but this a very close second. Fabulous from start to finish...

A favorite meal.......2006-07-26

I've been a Zappa fan for a very long time. I've owned Burnt Weeny Sandwich (on LP) for a long time. The odd thing is that I didn't figure out until just recently that Burnt Weeny Sandwich is one of my favorite Zappa albums. I think that part of the problem is that I didn't really understand the album when I was a kid--although I certainly didn't dislike it. It was one of the last ones I picked up on CD, so that after not really hearing it for years, I mostly heard a song at a time in isolation with the disc in my CD changers on random shuffle.

But as someone else mentioned, this is really a concept album of sorts, and needs to be listened to in its entirety to "get it". It's an odd concept, because it's not linked by lyrics or music so much as it is by a structural meta-concept--that of a sandwich. The first and last tracks, two pseudo-doo-wop songs, serve as the bread. All the songs up to "Little House I Used to Live In" are the toppings, condiments, and so on, and "Little House I Used to Live In" is the meat . . . well, er, the big burnt weeny. What's remarkable is that the basic tracks consisted of Mothers of Invention "outtakes", but Zappa, being a skilled Dadaist/collagist, could turn "outtakes" into beautiful, cohesive, seemingly composed from scratch works faster than you can say "Max Ernst". At any rate, let's look at the tracks.

Track 1: "WPLJ" 5/5
This has been performed live on a number of occasions--it appears on the Does Humor Belong in Music? disc, for example--but without a doubt, this is my favorite version of the song. Zappa achieves an appropriate 1950s-sounding production, including the female backup singers, and the music has a great, grooving looseness, including the horns. Roy Estrada's falsetto makes it even better, as does the Cheech-Marin sounding chicano dialogue over the end.

Track 2: "Igor's Boogie, Phase One" 5/5
No one, not even Zappa, loves/loved Stravinsky more than I do, plus I love Zappa just as much, so this "L'Histoire du Soldat" tribute/spoof works brilliantly for me.

Track 3: "Overture to a Holiday in Berlin" 5/5
. . . and it leads beautifully to this severely bent-intonation wonder. God I love that brief sax solo. And the outtro melody is gorgeous and orchestrated gorgeously.

Track 4: "Theme from Burnt Weeny Sandwich" 5/5
It begins as a guitar solo track, but with an extension of the orchestration from the previous track creating multiple layers underneath. It segues to some tape-speed manipulation percussion, ala that heard accompanying the Bruce Bickford animation in Baby Snakes. There it piqued your interest, but here it grows perfectly, organically out of the composition until it consumes everything in its path. Something like a melodic Tony Williams-on-a-ton-of-acid-and-speed drum solo.

Track 5: "Igor's Boogie, Phase Two" 5/5
The bookend (within a larger bookended work) that matches Track 2. Shorter, but just as good, and not just because of the added honking, although that rocks.

Track 6: "Holiday in Berlin, Full Blown" 5/5
Later used again on 200 Motels. Here it's a bit like "Peaches en Regalia's" mellow cousin. Gorgeous melodies, wondrous orchestration, and an amazing soprano sax solo leading to more tape-speed manipulation percussion. It ties a lot of the elements of tracks 2 through 5 together very nicely, then moves to one of Zappa's more lyrical extended solos.

Track 7: "Aybe Sea" 5/5
Speaking of lyrical guitar work, this is a mostly delicate, almost kinda traditional classical piece for guitars, keyboards and a bit of percussion. Of course, there's lots of twentieth century stuff in there, too, and in a surprising change for this album, the piano solo that closes it gets pretty quiet, sparse, and not so surprisingly, increasingly "outside", as it segues to--

Track 8: "Little House I Used to Live in" 5/5
In a very smooth transition, the continuing solo piano is suddenly more jazzy--kind of a cross between Gershwin and Copland's (underrated) piano pieces. It's contemplative and moving. Then the whole band joins in a Zappa-ish fusion groove. After the drum break, there's a great 11/8 groove that turns into some wicked carousel orchestration. Then more complex, fusiony, uptempo 3/4 stuff becomes some extremely skilled interplay between Zappa and his drummer (probably Art Tripp) before the extended, burning and soulful Don "Sugarcane" Harris violin solo, interpolated by a typically odd Don Preston piano solo. There is a couple of short, interesting "stomping" vamps to listen for here--one halfway between 3/4 and 5/8, one halfway between 4/4 and 7/8. I love those kinds of "in-between" grooves. It's difficult to say how intentional they were here, but they work. The end of this track becomes composed 20th Century classical again. The transition between a melancholic hurdy-gurdy block chord structure and a spastic carnival-gone-haywire groove is primo. Although the ending pretty much remains in 4/4, there is a lot of creative rhythmic and playing-with-tempo stuff between the keyboards and drums. After the track is over, we get the Zappa's infamous quote, "Everybody in this room is wearing a uniform, and don't kid yourself".

Track 9: "Valarie" 5/5
This is the bottom piece of bread, the second pseudo doo-wop song. It has an appropriate and enjoyable lazy, sloppy--maybe even "skanky"--groove, enhanced by the guitar fluttering through Leslie speakers. Especially with the vocals, it sometimes sounds like we're trudging through molasses. In other words, holy cow we're pleasantly stuffed after eating all of that Burnt Weeny Sandwich!

W's for White, the P is for Port, L is the Lemon, the J is the Juice.......2006-07-11

This is my personal all-time favorite FZ album and makes a perfect one-two punch with the seminal "Hot Rats," which came out around the same time... those two together are almost the perfect showcase for Zappa's compositional skills ("The Little House I Used to Live In"), his guitar prowess (Hot Rats' "Willie the Pimp"), as well as the mind-shattering instrumental talents of reedsmith Ian Underwood and violin madman Sugarcane Harris.

I agree with the assessment that this one is more the classical side of FZ and Hot Rats is more the jazz-rock avenue, but there is ample crossover on each from one to the other in terms of style and compositional intent. Anyway you slice it this is top-drawer, truly Progressive Rock in every sense of the word, wherein many styles and forms are united under the inclusive rubric of Rock, making a whole that is, at its best, greater than the sum of its parts.

I love everything about this album, from the almost modern-classical feel of the instrumentals to the fantastic doo-wop numbers that are the bookends of this most tasty Sandwich, which manage that rarest of accomplishments in that they sound like parodies AND tributes to the genre at the same time. Perhaps best of all is the concert interlude near the end where Frank defends the cops providing security at the show from screaming, disapproving hippies, with the admonishment that "every one in this room is wearing a uniform, and don't kid yourself...".

Again, there is no excuse not to own both this and Hot Rats, they are FZ at his apogee and worthy contenders for his best recordings ever.

Worth The Calories.......2006-07-07

Collecting Zappa is treacherous business, even for the die-hard fan - for the uninitiated it is on a par with sticking your head into a bucket of piranha fish. Even his very best work, (Uncle Meat, Freak Out, Hot Rats, We're Only In It For The Money, and Weasels Ripped My Flesh, to name just a few), is replete with dreadful flaws and grandiose missteps. The best rule of thumb is to seek out the earlier material, steer towards the more musically oriented work, and avoid the infantile humor and curmudgeon-ish political rants. This is harder than it sounds.

Fortunately, you can save yourself a lot of pain by going straight to Burnt Weeny Sandwich, easily one of Zappa's best, and most musically satisfying efforts. You'll have to sit through WPLJ and Valerie, two short satirical bits of ersatz pop fluff. These numbers are intended to be funny but get lost on the way, something that happens rather a lot in the wonderland of Frank Zappa & The Mothers Of Invention. But everything beyond that it smooth sailing.

The standout here is Little House I Used To Live In, 18:41 of mercurial magic that builds and builds, constantly switching gears, instruments, moods, and time signatures. The piece is a showcase for Ian Underwood and Don "Sugar Cane" Harris, whose virtuoso fiddling also appears on Hot Rats and Weasels Ripped My Flesh. Underwood, a musical prodigy, plays at a level of sophistication more at home in Carnegie Hall than in the dreadful arenas frequented by rock groups. His expressiveness and versatility are spellbinding. As is often the case with Zappa's better work, Little House I Used To Live In is a "movie for your ears," it seems to suggest a gallery of pictures you alone can provide. All other tracks are also orchestral and, though not as dazzling as Little House I Used To Live In, deliver the freight to the right address. Highly recommended because it's so darn tasty.