Frank Zappa’s Stewards Give Apostrophe (’)’s So-So Mix A Superb Remaster

GIVEN WHAT THEY HAD TO WORK WITH, HOW MUCH BETTER COULD IT BE?

Michael Fremer has misplaced his 1974 pressing of Frank Zappa’s Apostrophe (’), so he got a friend to hook him up with a loaner. When we pulled out the dust sleeve: Great googly moogly!

“Rick, I’m tierd [sic] of you putting me down all the time. You do’nt [sic] know how much you hurt me,” begins a ballpointed breakup screed, from one Nancy. Reader, it’s a rough one: “All I ever here [sic] from you is that I’m fat, and ugly … I’m sick of you calling me a slut … You have killed me mentally … I was like a slave to you. I got you ice tea, I went to the store for you to eat, I scratched your back…” on and on it goes. It ends with a tiny, enraged “Goodbye Nancy.”

“The unmitigated audacity!”

Maybe this process — playing a fresh pressing against an original, for the sake of a Tracking Angle review — has teed me up for fighting words. (After all, as a huge Elliott Smith fan, playing that subpar new XO against an OG borderline radicalized me.) But as soon as I put on the newly remastered and expanded Super Deluxe Edition of Apostrophe (’) — out September 13 via Zappa Records/UMe — it was clear I could holster my guns. An aggrieved Nancy I was not.

Apostrophe (’) was Zappa’s sixth solo album and 18th in total; it’s his most commercially successful album stateside, and remains a crucial landmark of his mid-’70s heyday. Many of its musicians — like saxophonist Ian Underwood, trumpeter Sal Marquez, and keyboardist George Duke — carry over from its predecessor, 1973’s Over-Nite Sensation.

The rude humor remains — the malodorous “Stink-Foot” is a musical prank for the ages — but it’s tempered just enough to not scare off the Zappa-curious. If someone on the first rung of the fandom ladder asked for a gateway album, I’d hand them this or Hot Rats.

It’s not as if this Apostrophe (’) sounded perfect or anything like that; plainly, the original mix is far from it. For whatever reason, Zappa — and/or one of five credited engineers — favored a very toppy, wiry, needling mix. While the 1974 pressing is perfectly acceptable (well, side A beats side B), it tends to chafe against this middling mix, inadvertently magnifying sibilances and other engineering flaws.

This 2024 remaster is predictably excellent: the great Bernie Grundman, who cut lacquers using the original analog tapes, should, once again, take a bow. (Tracking Angle regularly sings his praises: “Grundman’s dynamic cut kills the original,” Fremer wrote of the Doors’ L.A. Woman. About a Steely Dan mainstay, lacquers cut by you-know-who: “The best Aja you will ever hear and it’s not even close.”)

From the aurally clarified arctic gales that usher in “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow,” Apostrophe (’)’s opener and Zappa’s first charting single (the big 8-6, baby!), it’s clear this key Zappa release is, too, in excellent hands.

Through Fremer’s king’s-ransom setup, every backing vocalist uncannily feels in the room. The sound effects — vivid enough, but somewhat caked onto the rest of the music on the 1974 platter — are Star Wars-level immersive. Every guitar seizure from the 46th-best guy to ever do it (Rolling Stone says; I’d put him higher) feels neck-snapping, live-wire, positively vital. (I caught the superlative Zappa hologram show in 2019; the man continues to feel so very alive.)

The quality happily holds as the disc keeps spinning. While, again, this mix is what it is — hey, Zappa clan, get Steven Wilson or Giles Martin on the horn! — it’s a delight to hear clearer horns, clearer bass, clearer everything. On the flatter, more canned original pressing, it’s easy to miss the transition from “Excentrifugal Forz” to the hypnotically grooving title track; more than its predecessor, the 2024 master will render you goofily air-drumming. Zappa’s work can flex the prefrontal cortex more than most, but I just felt the music.

If I were to rank the 2024 remastered vinyl, the 2024 remastered CD, and the 1974 vinyl, it’d be in that order. About that CD: as the soundfield goes, it’s something of a shaved-down circle to the vinyl’s perspicuous, panoramic square. Which has next to nothing to do with any of the engineers dropping the ball, and just about everything to do with the limitations of the format.

Only the CD edition contains Both vinyl and CD consumers get outtakes and alternate mixes, which might be the crux of the biscuit of what you’re out for.

While the 2010s and 2020s have constituted an undeniable golden age of Zappa fandom, dumping a Mack Truck’s worth of material on our lawns (and culminating in Universal’s 2022 purchase of 1,000-plus hours of film and video), live material has insofar dwarfed studio outtakes.

If you’re in the 99th percentile of Zappa zealotry, I’m thrilled for you to get your paws on these Colorado Springs; Salt Lake City; and Dayton, Ohio tracks. For the rest of us: we’ve already got enough bonus tracks for several lifetimes, and contextualizing these gigs within this mind-bendingly prolific artist’s live canon seems as daunting as advanced Mandarin.

(Which is no criticism! The historical value is ironclad, and how could good music be too much of a good thing? If you’re not on this level, enjoy the first disc[s] and move on.)

I’ve liked or “loved” Zappa since I was a kid, but an immersive weekend of Apostrophe (’) redux has constituted my true baptism. Like so much of his voluminous catalog, this is unpredictable, subversive music, suggestive of psychological liberation, giddy to crack open the id like an egg.

And, to those still not jumped in, yet open to the idea: guess what? You get to discover this gateway album in its finest form in 50 years. “Deep down inside I guess you really weren’t for me,” Nancy seethed at the end of her dust-sleeve kiss-off. While the innately divisive Zappa will always garner those reactions, this Apostrophe (’) should considerably thin out their numbers.