I know it’s heretical in Zappa circles to say this, but I’m not a fan of Hot Rats. Can’t stand it, to be honest with you. But that’s pretty much my opinion of jazz music in general. 
For me, Lumpy Gravy is many orders of magnitude better. I love that album.
I should mention that I was first introduced to Zappa when a buddy at my high school turned me on to Sheik Yerbouti, Joe’s Garage, and You Are What You Is. It made for great listening pleasure during HS and college. Not so much now.
At the end of his contract with Warner Bros (in the late 70s), Zappa delivered a large amount of recorded material which WB then released in altered form as the albums Studio Tan, Zappa In New York, Sleep Dirt and Orchestral Favorites without his approval. As you can imagine Zappa was not happy with this and around that time he took the opportunity to broadcast his version of the material in a radio show, urging the listening audience to record/bootleg what was about to be played.
The material was then re-released officially years later in the form Zappa intended under the name Lather.
I appreciate Zappa for being an uncompromising, unstoppable force of music for decades despite all the crap the music business and public threw in his way. A lot of his music was great, some of his lyrics were vile, but whatever it was he did it his way. He taught himself just about everything and his expertise and energy from guitar-playing to composing to being a bandleader (Zappa’s band was arguably one of the most sought-after gigs of his time) to producing to mastering the latest technology to keeping his business a going concern was mind-boggling.
By all accounts I’ve read, he was a good family man, wasn’t a druggie, spendthrift, drama queen, etc. I’m sure they’re out there, but it’s hard to find anyone that would say much bad about him.
Of course his admirable qualities don’t make his music any more or less likable but anyway…
I was mostly into his 70’s-80’s stuff. Favorite albums are:
Joe’s Garage acts II and III
Bongo Fury
Zoot Allures
One Size Fits All
Overnite Sensation
You Are What You Is (an interestingly concise departure from his usual sprawling efforts)
Roxy and Elsewhere
Weasels Ripped My Flesh
Tinseltown Rebellion
I have The Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life, which I think is his last touring band that he broke up due to infighting but it’s weird in a ‘I can’t take anything seriously, even my own music’, sort of way.
One Size Fits All and Overnite Sensation are probably his best ‘starter’ albums, IMO.
As I’ve noted on the SDMB before, there’s a lot I admired about Zappa, but very littled I loved.
Lyrically, he was occasionally hilarious but mostly, well, kinda stupid.
He was a remarkable guitarist, he had an unmatched work ethic, he was magnificent at discovering and nurturing young musicians, and his work shows a complexity that very few “progressive” rockers can match.
Which is why I’m astonished that so little of the music he left behind (and he left behind a LOT) is good.
what we think of Zappa’s music is often shaped by our perception of him as a person. I found the public Zappa to be a smug, annoying, pompous jerk who wore a perpetual sneer. ANd no doubt that’s part of what MANY of his fans LOVED about him! He was the ideal musician for an intellectual, cynical, alienated teenage boy. Holden Caulfield would have adored him, because Frank and Holden (like most alienated teens) both thought “Everyone in the world is a phony or an a-hole except me.”
I found that pose boring and off-putting after a while. In some ways, I found Frank surprisingly phony and cowardly. What? Cowardly? Yes- when you compose a VERY pretty instrumental (as Frank often did) and then give it a puerile, scatalogical title, I think you’re being a coward and a phony. You’re committing an unforgivable copout, allowing yourself to pretend “If you don’t like this song, well that just shows what a dope you are, because it was SATIRE, and you’re just too stupid to get it.”
BUT… back to the original question. How do you appreciuate Zappa more? I’d start by looking on YouTube for his Bicycle COncerto performed on Steve Allen’s show.
NOT because the music is good (it’s not). NOT because Zappa is brilliant or sarcastic or angry. Just the opposite- he was YOUNG, he was clean shaven, and more astonishingly… he was a shy, bashful, awkward, goofy nerd.
I’ll never love Zappa, but knowing that underneath all the angry posturing and bitter sneering, he was once an awkward doofus makes me like him a little more.
According to former Zappa guitarist (and later King Crimson mainstay) Adrian Belew, Frank DIDN’T hire other guitarists because he COULDN’T play his own guitar parts well- rather, he did it for an odd reason: he COULDN’T play the guitar and sing simultaneously!
Watch old concert footage, and you’ll see that he invariably STOPS playing the guitar when he has to start singing. He could sing OR he could play guitar, but he couldn’t do both at the same time. That’s why he typically had a Belew or a Steve Vai or some other guitarist to play in concerts.
Zappa addressed this in a HIGH TIMES interview sometime around 1979-80. He compared playing and singing at the same time to walking and chewing gum. A refreshing admission, IMO.
Aye, that was in the March 1980 issue (#55).
He also reiterates that he couldn’t do both at the same time in The Real Frank Zappa Book.
I also really liked this part:
B. B. King; another guitarist who can’t sing and play at the same time. He’ll trade off guitar and vocal lines. Kind of an odd handicap for someone in that business, but you work with what you have.
I don’t think it’s all that odd. While most guitarist-singers in popular music can at least accompany themselves, it doesn’t seem to me that many of them can play and sing simultaneously when both parts are technically intricate, or when the guitar and vocal parts are quite different melodically. (Jimi Hendrix was one of the exceptions). Most “Chicago style” electric blues guitarists I can think of do or did little more than vamp while actually singing.
Come to think of it, the liner notes to Freak Out actually indicate that FZ doesn’t even perform on that album; it’s actually just the Mothers, of whom Zappa doesn’t seem to be an actual member. He’s presented more as a composer and guiding light of the act so to speak. Despite such verbiage, I find it hard to believe that’s not him on most of the lead vocals.
Of course Zappa performs on the album. Those liner notes (which also suggested that Zappa seldom joined the Mothers for their live performances, which is obviously total bullshit) were an early exercise in FZ’s self-mythologizing.