Eat That Question

This Zappa instrumental has one major strength going for it: George Duke. His keyboards are spectacularly groovy, and the song fits his playing style perfectly. The Grand Wazoo was released in 1972, and the song Eat That Question featured Ansley Dunbar on drums and Alex Dmochowski on bass as well as George Duke. Dunbar has played with David Bowie as well as playing drums on Berlin, my favorite Lou Reed album. But today we are listening to Frank Zappa and Eat That Question.

Black Napkins

Zoot Allures was a fantastic Zappa album. It features two instrumentals - yesterday's Zoot Allures and today's Black Napkins, and they are both great - they are by far my favorite Zappa instrumentals along with Peaches En Regalia and tomorrow's song. Sometimes guitar solos get boring - even Zappa's solos, but this one hits me hard every time I hear it. Still featuring Terry Bozzio on drums, this song also features Napoleon Murphy Brook on vocals, Roy Estrada on bass and vocals, and Andrè Lewis on organ. I still consider this an instrumental, as the vocals are only ooohs. This one is more laid back and straightforward than yesterday's title track - I hope you like it!

Zoot Allures

It's time to curse in French today. Zoot Allures is the name of a Frank Zappa album from 1976 - and it was the first Frank Zappa album I heard. Today's song is an instrumental - the title track - and it features Frank Zappa on lead guitar, the mighty Terry Bozzio on drums, the wonderful Ruth Underwood on marimba, Dave Parlato, who only played with Zappa for a limited time, on bass, and whenever you hear a harp, it is played by Lu Ann Neil.

Joe's Garage

Today's song is about rock bands. While the band in the song do pretty good for themselves, there are many that simply give up along the way - and having played in one of them myself, I completely recognize the beginning of the song. I am smiling thinking back to the days with Coma - three good friends making music just for our own sakes. It was fun and it was honest. We made music we liked - although I think I forced my inner Bono on the other two in my pretentiousness...

All I can say is that we covered Comfortably Numb by Pink Floyd. Yeah... My idea. My favorite part is the line "There'll be no more aah aah aah" where the muted aah's that are lined up with the melody on the original became a bloodcurdling scream that forced itself to the forefront in our version. And my attempt at finding my inner David Gilmore. I was never really a lead guitarist. I wanted to be one, and I demanded to play lead guitar on quite a few songs - and the solos were ALWAYS long. And never really good. A couple were ok, but no... There is only so much you can do with the pentatonic scale and limited technical ability... BUT - like I said, it was fun. And there was a chemistry there. The last recordings we made were pretty good - the songs were getting better and better and we played pretty well together.

I have my friend Jørund Hitland to thank for the song today. I knew of Frank Zappa from before after having found the album Zoot Allures in my dad's record collection. But it was in Jørund's cd collection I found Joe's Garage, a rock opera about... Well, I am not always quite sure... But it follows Joe from his beginnings in a garage band that makes it pretty big - and he encounters all sorts of depravity and finds himself in jail before he finally gets out in act three and becomes a compliant member of society. While some of the lyrics are very immature, the music is spectacular throughout. Zappa and his band move effortlessly through various musical styles, and you can hear some of that even within the title track - it is well worth listening to, and the lyrics are pretty good as well.

December 8 - Ring Of Fire

The artist was Frank Zappa, who in the lead-in to Ring Of Fire over a vamp at the end of Heavy Duty Judy talks about meeting Johnny Cash and his wife in the hotel, and mentions that Cash was supposed to sing lead, but that June Carter Cash had taken ill and he was unable to come. They played it anyway, and it was released on the album The Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life in 1991.

Frank Zappa's 1988 tour was spectacular. The music released from the tour are found on three main albums: The Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life, Broadway The Hard Way, and Make A Jazz Noise Here. He includes covers of Cream and Jimi Hendrix - and he does a version of Stairway To Heaven where the horns play a transcribed version of Jimmy Page's guitar solo note for note. On one of these albums, he did indeed bring a guest singer up on stage, and it is a legendary singer, who happened to just release a new solo album this fall. He used to be the front man of a huge trio, and according to the intro to the song he performed with Zappa, someone claimed that the song was written by Satan and performed by the sons of Satan: Lucifer, Beelzebub, and the Horned One - but the singer confesses that he wrote the song. The questions for today shouldn't be too difficult given all this information: Who is this someone who made the claim about who wrote and performed the song, what is the name of the song, what was the name of the band, what album was it originally on, and what year was it released? It is a great song that was the b-side of this band's greatest hit (which all of you know, by the way - it was that huge), and it was only available on the CD and cassette version of the album in question, which, by the way, is a great album as well!

October 23 - Eat That Question

So we're at the end of a week of instrumental, and today's song is another of my many favorites. Frank Zappa has a multitude of releases to his name, and today, nearly 23 years after his death, more releases keep coming. However, back in the fall of 1991, when my cd collection was in its infancy (I had purchased my first CD player in January that year), I visited Bakklandet Bokkafe, a record store in Bakklandet, which is a quaint and historic part of Trondheim. I remember the visit because I left with no less than two Frank Zappa CDs: Jazz From Hell and Make A Jazz Noise Here. The former was played once, then shelved (it is a difficult CD to listen to, but I am finally getting there after about 25 years), but I loved Make A Jazz Noise Here. It was a live album from the 1988 tour, the final tour Frank Zappa ever did - and what a tour it must have been if you judge it by the live documents released so far. And in the midst of this double album there was a snippet of a tune - mainly the theme from Eat That Question (it is also now the title for a documentary about Frank Zappa using tv interviews from his entire career - check it out!). Eat That Question was originally on 1972's album The Grand Wazoo and features keyboard maestro George Duke in a very prominent role.

September 27 - Happy Together

In 1971, Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention were still only called the Mothers, and they included two singers who had known great success with the band The Turtles, Mark Volman (Flo, The Phlorescent Leech) and Howard Kaylan (Eddie - they were later known simply as Flo and Eddie). The Turtles had one massive hit with the song Happy Together, and when Flo and Eddie joined The Mothers, the song found its way into their shows. It was performed at Fillmore East in June of 1971, and found its way onto the live recording from that show - and I absolutely love this version - it always gets me in good mood...

And as a bonus - here is some live footage from a Dutch Frank Zappa documentary:

September 7 - Peaches En Regalia

Some days the music can do the talking. Today is one of those days. In 1969, Frank Zappa released Hot Rats, which included today's song, Peaches En Regalia. No more words - just listen...

July 19 - Dickie's Such An Asshole

OK - it's official: No theme this week. Today's song is inspired by yesterday's headlines, where some are drawing clear lines from Trump back to Richard Nixon, who in turn inspired Frank Zappa to write this nice little song satirizing Tricky Dickie and Watergate back in 1973. He took it out again on his spectacular 1988 tour, and it was included on Broadway The Hard Way, which is a solid collection of Zappa songs. Two other releases came from that tour: Make a Jazz Noise Here and The Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life. Between these three releases, you have the real foundation for my appreciation of Zappa. I wish he was alive today - he'd have a field day over the trump ascendance. After all, he had his own personal vendetta running against televangelists in 1988, including Jimmy Swaggart, who quite frequently was his target (the Beatles medley on this tour was never released, but exists in unofficial formats and is well worth listening to for their takedown of Swaggart).

Living in Michigan, this also has to be dedicated to our beloved widely despised governor, Richard Snyder, who didn't really worry too much about lead levels in the water of Flint, Michigan until it became politically expedient (and inescapable) to do so. The same governor who installed the person in charge in Flint who made the determination of switching water supply to a more corrosive source than they originally had.


So yes, there are quite a few deserving people. mr. trump, this one's to you (capitalization left out to conform to hand size).

June 10 - The Torture Never Stops

It's quite remarkable how a song title can get the pubescent mind interested. It's been about 30 years since I found Frank Zappa when Arve and I looked through my dad's record collection. I think I have written about how he used to tape music for a couple of guys at work - they would buy the record, he would tape it for them, and then he got to keep the record (I think he was the only one of them with a record player - and quite the receiver (Tandberg Sølvsuper 12, I believe). The stereo was really good, with great sound - although I later on wrecked the recording capabilities of the tape deck by running a bass guitar through it as an amp - not a good idea.

Anyway, the song The Torture Never Stops was found on the album Zoot Allures from 1976, and it features everything that was a Zappa trademark: great musicianship throughout, a great guitar solo, and lyrics that are nearly unlistenable for adults. The female screams heard throughout hints at misogyny, but I am not always certain that was his intention - he was too much of a deliberate provocateur. Anyway - the melody line is extremely compelling, so if you can listen past the screams and the lyrics, I think you can enjoy this. I did when I was 12 or 13, and I still do today. This song only features two musicians: Terry Bozzio on drums and Frank Zappa on everything else, including his role as "director of recreational activities" - although it is unclear who he directs.

February 8 - Inca Roads

I thought long and hard before I decided that I indeed should do this - have a week where I post "difficult" music. For me, this is music that it took me a while to grow into - sometimes the difficulty simply is with an odd meter, sometimes there are intricate polyrhythms, sometimes the song structure can be difficult, sometimes the song can be abrasive, sometimes it's all of the above - and sometimes it is simply a very different melody line, which is the case today with the song Inca Roads.

In 1973, Frank Zappa gathered his Mothers (of Invention had been dropped at this point) again - Napoleon Murphy Brock on sax, flute, and vocals; George Duke on keyboards and vocals, Ruth Underwood on percussion (her marimbas on Inca Roads are spectacular), Tom Fowler on bass, and Chester Thompson on drums - and in September 1974 they found themselves in Helsinki, Finland. The band was extremely tight - and they had really developed some serious speed to some of the material. Inca Roads is still played in a moderate tempo, but if you listen to the different runs throughout the song, it is still highly complicated. I have given up on keeping track of all the meters used throughout the song - and to me, the melody lines and different runs don't follow traditional melody structures, but appear to be more inspired by contemporary orchestral music - and perhaps Varèse and Stravinsky.

All I know is that I am hooked on the strangeness of the initial melody, but I don't lose myself completely until the guitar solo - and even more so in the ensuing keyboard and marimba solos. This is one of my favorite pieces of music, as it merges rock with jazz and classical music, and it is well worth a listen. And - if you don't "get" it on the first try, come back to it later. That is the purpose with the music this week.