Electric Aunt Jemima (The Track)

Notes About This Song

"Electric Aunt Jemima" was Frank's nickname for his guitar amplifier.

I get kind of a laugh out of the fact that other people are going to try and interpret that stuff and come up with some grotesque, I mean really grotesque, interpretations of it. It gives me a certain amount of satisfaction. You can imagine how insane that must get on a song 'Electric Aunt Jemima' which was written about an amplifier. Yes, it's a Standall amplifier, about this big, that I used on a couple of sessions. But there are some other references in the song to a meeting held in the Denny's Coffee Shop in Lancaster California about six or seven years ago at about four o'clock in the morning. Don Vliet, who is otherwise known to the world as Captain Beefheart, and I were sitting in this coffee shop discussing what we were going to do to the music business, and it's the line about 'Monza' because we were discussing the problems of lyrics in the music we were being fed on the radio. I always felt that the music I grew up with, except for the rhythm & blues, was just horrible and I didn't want to be subjected to it and I wished that I'd had something better to choose from. But I couldn't get anything better so we were talking about this and I said, 'Well I'm going to do this', and Don says, 'Well, I'm going to do that', and I said, 'OK, well let's go do that'. - Frank Zappa interview International Times (issue 63) 1969