As surely as night must follow day, San Ber'dino must follow Evelyn, A Modified Dog.
I love this one. I love the sound, I love the rhyme scheme and the vocabulary, I love the way it tells a story with three-dimensional characters in so few words. And I love the gentle admonition against snobbery and judgement: "You may think they're dumb an' lonely, but you're wrong 'cause their love is strong." A bit of perspective we should all remember the next time we feel like looking down our noses at somebody.
Found this one last night and I love it. It is a Japanese man singing Evelyn, A Modified Dog. (Well, the first minute or so is. The rest he's just talking, and, well, let's just say his English is better than my Japanese. I have no idea what he is saying.)
I mentioned the other day that you can hear Zappa's inflection in Bozzio's vocals on Titties 'n Beer. Similarly, this nice young man copies Zappa's inflection perfectly, and though his accent is overwhelming he enunciates each word precisely.
My Japanese is rusty (I took one year back in college) so I'm not sure where this was or why they picked Zappa, but it appears that they performed the entirety of One Size Fits All (with Zomby Woof from Over-Nite Sensation replacing Can't Afford No Shoes). The videos are all titled "Live'98", so that's presumably the year they were recorded -- which means that's actually a surprisingly high-quality video, considering.
Another damn headache today. I haven't gotten them this frequently since high school; going to need to see a doctor about it.
So, just a Zappa post today. I guess technically that makes two in a row (though again, that RU Sirius one barely had anything to do with Zappa), but what're you gonna do?
This is Inca Roads by Zappa Plays Zappa, in two parts. Looks to be the same tour as the Camarillo Brillo video I posted the other week but probably not the same show, as Napoleon Murphy Brock is wearing a different red shirt.
I love his work on the flute. The flute was my first instrument largely because it can sound like that, but high school band arrangements give you little opportunity but to play high-pitched trilly things and get called a fag by the other kids. Eventually I switched to sax -- more over the former than the latter; if I were worried about people indulging in conjecture about my sexuality I wouldn't have photos on the Internet of me performing in Rocky Horror -- but haven't played it since graduating.
This one's only tangentially related to Frank Zappa, but I figured I'd include it because it's a fun read (for certain values of "fun"). I just saw this in a BoingBoing post by Mark Frauenfelder: The Belladonna Shaman, by RU Sirius, detailing his experience, at the age of 15, taking a recreational drug called asthmador, which, as the title implies, contained belladonna.
So what's this got to do with Frank Zappa?
I entered Our Lady of Lords Hospital wrapped up in a straightjacket and was immediately given a shot of morphine. Once they got me to stop flailing, they were able to find my wallet. They pulled it out to see who I was. In those far less paranoid times, teenagers didn’t necessarily carry ID cards. But my friend Vinnie had found these sort-of IDs that had a space on them to write your name and address and phone number and we’d had some fun one night writing the names of our heroes, or of odd characters, onto the cards and sticking them in our wallets. I had two cards on which I had written two different names. Since the admission authorities knew I wasn’t Ho Chi Minh, they figured the other ID must be the correct one. I was admitted as Frank Zappa.
So, uh, don't do belladonna, kids.
(And, ironically, Zappa was pretty vocally opposed to drug use.)
We were talking about Zappa's Senate testimony on the boards today. I mentioned that I loved the incredulous tone in Zappa's voice when Senator Hawkins condescendingly remarked that she would be interested to see what kind of toys his kids played with and he responded, "Why would you be interested?"
And something hit me:
Listen to the bit starting at 3:16. Bozzio as the Devil adopts the EXACT SAME tone of voice.
And this brings up something I hadn't thought much about before: Zappa not just as musician, composer, and conductor, but as director.
The 200 Motels credits say "Characterizations directed by Frank Zappa/Visuals directed by Tony Palmer". And sure enough, even in his music you can hear Zappa's direction on characterization.
Tangentially, I remember when Charlie Daniels played Devil Went Down to Georgia at the Super Bowl XXXIX halftime show. We were talking about what a great damn song it was, and my roommate Mike said, "Yeah, but you know what the best song about making a deal with the Devil is?"
You can probably guess which one he was talking about.
You know, I always wanted to see Joe's Garage as a stage show. And, poking about zappa.com last night, I found that somebody did it in 2008.
zappa.com notes that the choreographer was Jennifer Lettelleir, and the show won the LA Weekly Theater Award for Best Choreography. Lettelleir links favorable reviews in LA Weekly and Variety. The show was adapted by Pat Towne and Michael Franco and directed by Towne, performed by Open Fist Theatre Company.
I've been hoping to see someone adapt the show as a full-on rock opera for years and years -- glad to hear somebody did it, and I hope it's not the last time.
And I hope there's more video out there somewhere, too.
My dad had this up on his fridge for years, and I stuck a copy on the door of my dorm room in college. It ran a couple weeks after Zappa passed.
Groening, of course, famously said "Frank is my Elvis."
(Sorry for the lack of attribution on the scan -- which is much more legible than any other copy I've found online -- but this really is the copy I printed and put on my door about a decade ago and I have no idea where I originally found it.)
