“The Torture Never Stopped” (1976) – Frank Zappa * Written and produced by Frank Zappa * LP: Zoot Allures * Label: Warner Bros.
“The Torture Never Stopped” reaches you like an exercise in willful discomfort. Zappa bombilates right in your ear about a ghastly dungeon scenario which seems like the ideal plot device for a man with a Ph.D. in scatalogy. Here’s another possible raison for its etre you may have come up with: he’s counteracting San Francisco’s Grateful Dead, an ensemble that the Los Angeles king Mother likely didn’t like. Their 1975 Blues for Allah album brought forth “The Music Never Stopped,” which had this for an opening line: “There’s mosquitoes on the river, fish are rising up like birds.” Here’s the opening line on Frank’s: “Flies all green ‘n buzzin’ in this dungeon of despair.” But it turns out Zappa was already performing this live with Captain Beefheart before the Dead album came out. (You can hear on The Muffin Goes to College how morbidly gleeful Van Vliet sounded in contrast to Zappa’s official version.) Biographer Barry Miles tells us that “The Torture Never Stopped” is actually a direct response to Zappa’s 10-day sentence, in the spring of ’65, in the San Bernardino County Jail. He wound up there for an alleged pornographic recording he’d made, and the experience quite possibly unleashed the outraged and outrageous libertine persona that held forth for the rest of his prodigious career.