Cruising With Ruben & The Jets
The fictitious bio about Ruben Sano next to Frank’s high-school photo on the back cover ends with the fan-club-spoofing fact that the singer “has 3 dogs. Benny, Baby & Martha.” If we return to the back cover of Absolutely Free, we find a wall of graffiti that reads “Benny, Joe, Ruben, Mar[tha], Steve” under an advertisement for Fydo dog collars.
The poodle, a frequent Zappa symbol of the unnatural, repressive shaping of a media-influenced person, appears as Fido the talking dog in “Stink-Foot” on Apostrophe (‘), Fido the sex-starved monster in “Cheepnis” on Roxy & Elsewhere and Evelyn the modified (clipped and sculpted) dog listening to the Lumpy Gravy piano-dwellers on One Size Fits All. On the front cover of the latter, God’s hand is tattooed with the Pachuco cross (the Californian Spanish gangster emblem from Frank’s teenage memories), which is also found in the Absolutely Free graffiti. The “God/dog” blasphemy comes into play, implying in this context that religion’s just another media tool that collars the unwary, when God’s hand is seen in the One Size Fits All picture and when one considers the title “Dog Breath, in the Year of the Plague” from Uncle Meat; plagues were among the historical events in Christian history, and the character in the song sings like a Pachuco (“mi carrucha,” etc.). God’s sofa is seen on the One Size Fits All cover as well; the Hebrew term En Sof means “the Boundless One.”
A small word balloon on Ruben’s front cover, far off to the left, has one of the musicians (whose noses are extended like dogs’ in order to fit their enlarged brains, as the Uncle Meat booklet explains) going “quackquack,” spoofing people who try to be cool at the expense of being themselves (acting like a duck rather than a dog). In this case, the quacking singer’s trying to sound black; it’s Frank’s self-effacing joke about being a white person who tries to sing the blues. Duck bills resemble black people’s lips, as the Thing-Fish album points out via its sarcasm-based mockery of those who stereotype.
In the army to the left on the Grand Wazoo cover, we see not a singing dog breaking character, but a quacking horse riding into battle (horses have big lips). A similar horse is seen on the back wall in the Ahead of Their Time drawing, also quacking. On the floor is a book called Uncle Duck, under the only non-dog character in the drawing: a bird. The French word oiseau (say “wazoo”) means “bird.”
Frank’s “Love of My Life,” Frank and Ray Collins’ "Fountain of Love," and Ray's “Anything” and “Deseri” date from the Studio Z period. Original Pal Studios founder Paul Buff collaborated on the latter.
The title of “Jelly Roll Gum Drop” illustrates its lyrics’ mixture of sexual fervor with teen-idol-song triteness; old blues lyrics referred to sexy women as jelly rolls, but Robert Johnson or Howlin’ Wolf would never have dreamt of calling anyone a gum drop, which is more in line with ‘60s radio pop. The “Pachuco Hop” mentioned in the lyrics is a dance either inspired by or memorialized in the 1952 Chuck Higgins instrumental of the same name, which is also alluded to in “Debra Kadabra” on Bongo Fury.
At the end of “Later That Night,” Ray pays tribute to either Ruth Brown’s “Three Letters” or the Velvetones’ “Glory of Love” (or both). He then laughs at his own exaggerated soulful pronunciation of the word “there.” Frank theatrically gulps some air; “There’s no room to breathe in here!” he complains from the vocal booth. This might be left in to indicate the suffocating pop formula, the dry timbre of the vocals (in the liberated atmosphere of the future reissue, the song will fade out before Frank starts his gasping), and/or the fascism that he likes to warn about detecting in the USA's governmental and corporate actions, considering that plenty of songs deal with poisoned air -- “Billy the Mountain,” “San Ber’dino” and “Wind Up Workin’ in a Gas Station” are just three -- and that the latter associates concentration camps and Nazi tactics (referred to in the liner notes of Money, the 200 Motels film and many Zappa lyrics) with the subtle psychological “torturing” of citizens by the government and media as they sell lifestyles and products based on “perfect human” images (the Zoot Allures album deals heavily with aberrant sexual practices and explains that the torture never stops).
After all, Ray’s phrase “right on top of some dog waste” ties in with the title of Uncle Meat’s ”Dog Breath, in the Year of the Plague” (another reference to breath, of course), and the character in the final Ruben song, “Stuff Up the Cracks,” threatens to kill himself with poisonous gas. Ray also refers to his “shirts with the Mr. B collar,” a collar that was patented by bandleader and trumpeter Billy Eckstine, whose button configuration gave the neck room to swell.
The introductory notes from Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring are incorporated into the delivery of the repeated closing line “fountain of love” as well as the backing vocals that immediately follow. An extract from the Moonglows’ “Sincerely” is heard in the “oooohs” and in Frank’s baritone vocal part.
