A Stratocaster With A Whammy Bar

First off, with my last upload on this page, I forgot one important detail... why that particular song had meaning for me. I first heard it on my dorm room floor at ISU, as a pal had it on his computer. Well, the reason why that pal enjoyed it was that apparently, on a Chicago radio station at the time, they'd play the same songs on a schedule every morning. Yeah, I don't get it either. Anyhow, Tangerine Speedo was a tune that was on that setlist. Now you know.

Here is something that I was recently inspired to do-out of the blue-even though for awhile now I sometimes am inspired to look for a few of his tunes. I'm talking about the one of a kind musican (or hell, one of a kind person) known as Frank Zappa; thankfully Wikipedia has up a rather extensive biography on his life and his many accomplishments.

What inspired me to bring him up here was the awesome videogame known as Audio Surf. Sure, you have to download a service (free) just to play it, and while the demo is free, the full version is 10 bucks… it's well worth the money. It's a blast. Anyway, it turns out that the most interesting tunes to play on Audio Surf is Zappa songs, as his songs are usually complex so it makes for an interesting time; I know that quite a few Audio Surf users think the same way.

Anyway, up until recently I didn't know much about Zappa except that his idea of naming children is rather frightening and that he was extremely prolific. Aside from Valley Girl I wasn't even familiar with too many of his songs aside from the time I saw Baby Snakes on DVD (it was for rent at a very liberal videostore I used to go to back when I went to college in Illinois) and enjoyed the quirky but cool tunes that strange flick had.

Well, since then I've become more knowledgeable and realized that while not everything Zappa did was to my tastes (let's not even talk about Trout Mask Replica again, which he produced; I mean, let's just not), a lot of it was pretty cool and appealed to my quirky tastes.

Picking out just one song for this is very difficult as there's no really one tune that defines him, he was so experimental and did so many different styles. So, I'll instead pick a song that will probably appeal to the most people who read this. It's the title song to the rock opera album known as Joe's Garage. Usually, "rock opera" and other similar concept albums has me running to the hills to avoid it, but from the songs I've heard from this (I probably should just end up buying it from the store. I wouldn't mind giving money at all to the Zappa estate) it's something that's pretty cool, if a little profane at times.

The title track is all about a garage band that starts to have fame, and it's very catchy. This is the full album version rather than the single version that is more commonly found online. The mysterious voiceover is from The Central Scrutinizer, the figure that enforces laws in a dystopian future, including the banning of music altogether.

Given some of the stuff that's happened since this album was released in 1979 (such as how terrible the economy and many other things have been in the U.S. as of late… let's not talk about gas prices either; also, there's the frightening reality of music censorship, a huge topic in the 80's and since then it's been everpresent, being predicted; last but not least, the mocking of Scientology, a controversial topic that became much more so in recent years), the album has added meaning now.

Frank Zappa-Joe's Garage (5.64 MB, 128Kbits/second)

http://www.fileden.com/files/2007/12/28/1667157/Frank%20Zappa%20-%20Joe%27s%20Garage%20%281%29.mp3

As usual (for now), my next song will be up a week from today.