Featured Essay: A Short Guide to Zappa Albums

by David Buck

I’m a big Frank Zappa fan. After learning about FZ from The Dr. Demento Show, I decided to go on a quest to collect everything I could get my hands on. Then I went to college and had to sell the entire thing. Now, I listen whenever I can and still love his music. I just don’t have any desire to go out and collect a bunch of fancy, packaged nonsense. 

Give me the music and maybe some album art, and I’m all set (I wrote about my favorite FZ album cover a few months ago, if you care to read about it).

As a Frank Zappa fan and musician, people often come up to me and say, “hey, where do I get started with FZ’s music?” Well, I’ve got an answer for ya.

I’ll echo what literally everyone on every single Frank Zappa community tells newcomers and say Joe’s Garage is probably one of the best entry points for Frank Zappa’s music. It’s also one of my favorite albums. 

I also think Overnite Sensation, Apostrophe, and Sheik Yerbouti are also pretty solid entry points. For instrumental stuff, you can’t go wrong with Hot Rats and The Grand Wazoo. What gets me about Joe’s Garage is just how well the narrative flows and how emotional it gets during Joe’s imaginary guitar solos. That whole sequence in Act III has an emotional dimension to it that you don’t often see in FZ’s work. Ending the record with “A Little Green Rosetta” is just such a Zappa thing to do, and sort of captures the absurdity of life in a way. 

Here’s a fun story about my experience with Joe’s Garage: my spouse (who was just a friend and coworker at the time) asked me out one night around Christmastime. We seemed to get along well, so we decided to meet at a Pizza Hut for dinner. This was back when Pizza Hut still offered dine-in areas. As we sat in the dining area, we noticed the salad bar had been completely closed out and there didn’t seem to be anyone around. We were also the only customers in the entire place. After about 20 minutes or so, someone finally came out but didn’t take our order. Instead, they told us they were closing early for their holiday party. We laughed, said “ok”, and went back to the car. We decided to go to a record store instead. At the time, I was trying to rebuild my own RYKO Zappa collection. Luckily, this local record store had a ton of FZ discs. They were a bit on the pricey side though, often being marked up 20% or more. As we looked at the available albums, I told her just to pick whichever one she thinks she’d like best. She selected a CD-copy of Joe’s Garage. We listened to the entire album together in the car. The date ended at 4am the following day, and now we’re married. And you know what? She might not be the biggest FZ fan, but she always has songs from Joe’s Garage on her playlist. One year, she bought me Act I on vinyl, and I sourced a rather beaten up copy of Acts II & III from Goodwill a few years later. I wouldn’t go so far as to say Joe’s Garage is “our” album, but she did say “yes” when I proposed a few months later, so, I’m with FZ on this one. Music really is the best. Not long after that first date, I managed to get a hold of the harmonica player from the album (a guy named Craig “Twister” Steward who was an arborist by trade) and talked playing harp for Zappa over email. I sadly lost those messages years ago (it was AOL, after all), but I remember him telling me that he thought John Popper was an excellent harmonica player. I don’t disagree. 

I hope you enjoy Grand Wazoo. My favorite song is the title track, but “Eat That Question” strikes all the right chords nowadays. I’d give the record five stars if it weren’t for “Calvin & His Next Two Hitchhikers.” 

But who knows? Maybe it’ll grow on me in the next twenty years. 

David Buck is a former radio and TV guy whose work has appeared on Tedium, How To Geek, SyFy Wire, Nerdvana Media, and Vice. He’s a writer, researcher, podcaster, and musician who writes about the absurdity of our modern world and other offbeat topics. He loves weird music, the old web, retro video games and tech, and researching strange, yet interesting things. Currently working on a variety of music, web, and writing projects. Visit me on the web at https://whistlingnose.neocities.org/ or check out my portfolio at https://djbuckfreelance.neocities.org/