Just Another Band From L.A.

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Release Info

Tracks

Players

Frank Zappa (guitar & vocals), Mark Volman (lead vocals), Howard Kaylan (lead vocals), Ian Underwood (winds, keyboards, vocals), Aynsley Dunbar (drums), Don Preston (keyboards, mini-moog), Jim Pons (bass, vocals)

Background

Cal Schenkel’s cover features the purple-jelly Chevy ‘39 seen on the back of the Uncle Meat booklet. The "4 secret clues" mentioned in the enlarged "snat" star in the lower right corner are as follows: Fuzzy dice hang from the rear-view mirror (alluding to the chorus of "Dog Breath" on both Uncle Meat and this album); the car sits atop a huge hamburger painted by Sherm Thompson (recalling "Cruising For Burgers," although these Mothers are evidently cruising on a burger); Frank’s toes snap with the "snat" sound from the Ruben cover; and again, the car was first seen in the Uncle Meat booklet. Still another "clue" is that the Mothers have returned to dog form.

Cal’s signature is on the car’s front license plate. Rifa, seen under the title, is a festive Pachuco exclamation. The back cover’s photograph was taken by Bernard (Buzz) Gardner, Bunk’s brother and one of Frank’s occasional Mothers.

Regarding "Billy the Mountain": Rosamond and Gorman are two California towns high in the hills north of Sun Village, near Lancaster—one of the many sites of Frank’s adolescence—and Edwards Air Force Base. When Billy the Mountain announces that he and Ethel are going to New York, the Tonight Show theme’s played and then repeated at a much slower tempo as Billy hums along in his deep, slow voice. (The title track of Tinseltown Rebellion also includes a bit of the Carson theme, since the show’s since moved from New York City to Hollywood.) The ‘60s-parodying line "...through the canyons of your mind" comes from either the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band’s humorous 1968 number "Canyons of Your Mind" or Bob Lind’s ‘66 song "Elusive Butterfly." Bob was born in Baltimore, Maryland like Frank. The phrase reappears in "We’re Turning Again" on the Prevention album.

George Putnam was a judgmental anchorman on L.A.’s KTTV. The phrase "wing nuts" is a common term for airplane mechanics, although it’s sometimes used to describe war pilots themselves. The "Oh, Mein Papa" that Billy creates in the Earth’s crust is a crack; the phrase is actually the name of an Eddie Fischer ("fissure") song from 1953. Comedian Jerry Lewis hosts a telethon because Billy’s leveled Glendale, the town connected to Burbank via the mentioned street Glenoaks. Howard Kaplan is rumored to be Kaylan’s real name. The germs from the underground dump, released due to Billy’s fissure (the implication being that the accusations leveled against him and Ethel are cover-ups to detract attention from the government’s buried "pools of old poison gas and obsolete germ bombs"), are spread over Watts (misleadingly and comically introduced by the revisited Tonight Show theme), possibly causing the Watts riots scorned in Freak Out!’s "Trouble Every Day" and reminding us of the government’s chemical experimentation on the masses, which Frank blames for the LSD cattle-feeding in San Francisco.

Chief Redden was the L.A. Chief of Police. Zubin Mehta was the conductor of the orchestral music featured here at the Pavilion on 5/15/70: the night on which Flo and Eddie approached Frank backstage with an interest in joining the band. "Piss on you, Jack" harks back to "Didja Get Any Onya." The reference to Neil Sedaka is a little joke connecting the upcoming weekday-based lyrics to Sedaka’s old song "Calendar Girl." Speaking of those lyrics, they’re also found, slightly modified, on the back cover of One Sizes Fits All (Billy’s earthquake is seen below). Frank creates an environment in which every detail is seen as significant, turning the rock music listener into a careful one on par with students of more (ahem) "respectable" musics. The boulders, wristwatch face and frozen beef pie are, incidentally, further "round things."

Irwindale, California often held drag races that featured "funny cars" (dragsters). "Big John" Masmanian was a star driver at the races. Walnut and City of Industry are actual towns near Irwindale. Dudley Do-Right was a Canadian Police cartoon character from the Bullwinkle Show (forecasting the Montreal setting of "Magdalena" later on the album). We hear that Hoch is illegally selling the Mothers’ previous live album -- "white albums I sent ya with the pencil on the front" (which was made to look like a bootleg anyway) -- updating Frank’s suspicions that the Mothers actually sold more copies of their first few albums than were reported and compensated for, the pressing plant allegedly having made and then pilfered extra copies for under-the-table cash and products.

Per diem means "daily" (payments). Hoch is exposed as being just as pretentious as the hippie types he condemns when his birth as a fictional element in a song is disclosed in a parody of the Crosby, Stills & Nash tune "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes." On the references in that section: Motorhead once dated Joni Mitchell, and she played briefly with the Mothers during their 1970 Fillmore East concert. Elliott Roberts managed Crosby, Stills & Nash. Cops did board David Crosby’s boat; he flushed his drugs down the toilet, but they floated up next to the boat. Neil Young underwent back surgery in late 1970, due to a slipped disk. (This section is left out of the performance heard on Playground Psychotics.)

Even Hoch’s name is purposefully contrived-sounding, being a perversion of the ‘50s car name Studebaker Hawk. He and Billy the Mountain are both mentioned in the song "Dental Hygiene Dilemma" on the 200 Motels soundtrack. The wordplay on vehicles named after birds recurs on Joe’s Garage, Acts II & III, in a song called "Packard Goose" (a Packard being another out-of-circulation car and the goose its hood ornament). That song, like "Billy the Mountain," deals with media manipulation, and its title makes further sly little references: Vance Packard wrote The Hidden Persuaders, a book about ‘50s advertising contrivances. Also, a guy named Leon who worked at one of Frank’s record labels, Bizarre (and who’s mentioned in 200 Motels’s "Does This Kind of Life Look Interesting to You?"), lived next door to Martin "Mutt" Cohen (also brought up in that song), the lawyer brother of Frank’s manager Herb Cohen. Leon fed Mutt’s geese whenever Mutt was out of town. Leon’s aptly seen feeding geese in the cartoon sequence of 200 Motels. The action-show theme music attached to Hoch is played briefly before its full inclusion in the song to denote that "he," a word sung with sarcastic nobility, is Hoch. Nifty musical triggers like this are spread throughout the piece, reappearing when least expected for nifty surprise connections.

The Aunt Jemima syrup presages "Magdalena" and recalls "Electric Aunt Jemima," and as the latter is actually about a guitar amplifier, the insinuation here is that the music is actually carrying Hoch across the story’s landscape; an entire section of the song, frequently used onstage as a solo vehicle, provides his flying theme. He’s made himself some wings; he’s another kind of "wing nut." The flies shriek "Help me!" in allusion to the end of the ‘50s horror flick The Fly. Church of Scientology founder L. Rob Hubbard is referenced; Frank parodies him on Joe’s Garage, Acts II & III as L. Ron Hoover, purveyor of erotic, animate vacuum cleaners at the Church of Appliantology. The words "He might play dirty/He’s over thirty/Getting old" recollect one of the reasons for which the Mothers want to abandon Frank in the 200 Motels script.

In "St. Alfonzo’s Pancake Breakfast" on Apostrophe (‘), the "Billy" lyrics rhyming "queen" with "marine" are changed, but they still refer to pretentious folks whose concealed sexual desires are manifested abnormally (Hoch’s "cocksucking" flies lap the syrup off his inner thighs).

The last two words of the "Call Any Vegetable" line "Why is a vegetable something to hide?" are sung like "I can’t hide" from the Beatles’ "I Want to Hold Your Hand," changed from the "Twist and Shout" send-up in the Absolutely Free version. Jack Lalaine is a fitness "expert." "God Bless America," heard alone here, is one of the melody lines mixed with others in a Charles Ives fashion at the end of the original "Call Any Vegetable."

Zachary All, mentioned in "Eddie, Are You Kidding?," was a clothing store owned by a guy named Eddie and located above Frank’s Bizarre Records office on Wilshire Boulevard. The phrase "sixteen tailors" is sung to the tune of the Crests’ old hit "Sixteen Candles."

The "doodle doodle" vocals in "Magdalena" make fun of the commercials for Adee Plumbing. At the end of the question-and-answer section in "Call Any Vegetable," Mark answers the stomach-pumping query by quoting the company’s ad slogan, "Adee do!". While begging his daughter to forgive him, the old man hurts his case by admitting to aberrant sexual fantasies in which the digestive medicine Kaopectate plays a part, going along with the plumbing-company reference. Jon Provost played the little boy in the Lassie TV show. Leo G. Carroll starred in the 1955 horror film Tarantula. The Cinegrill was a Hollywood Boulevard nightclub. Shell pest strips were anti-bug traps manufactured by the Shell oil company (this recalls the Fly movie reference in "Billy the Mountain"). Sparklett’s was bottled water. The Tonight Show’s cited again as the father finds another excuse for his behavior.

Conceptual Continuity

Versions