fortytwo

Frank Zappa – Uncle Meat was not my first encoun­ter with Zappa. That came years later, in 1974 with the dou­ble live album Roxy & Else­where, which a for­mer class­mate recom­men­ded to me. My English was not good enough to under­stand ever­y­thing (actually I still do not under­stand ever­y­thing, which is with some lyrics pro­bably quite good …). Howe­ver, we had an English teacher, Ms. Krohn of the Mar­tin Buber-Oberschule (high school), which trans­la­ted »rock music« lyrics with us. Since that day I can memo­rize the lyrics of Tommy by The Who But the Zappa lyrics she could not trans­late as well. To this day I do not know if she could not, or — because of the quite adult texts — not wan­ted. Later two books of the publis­her zwei­tau­send­eins (Plas­tic People – Song­book und Zonx) hel­ped me trans­la­ting. I highly recom­mend the recently publis­hed (Ger­man) book Grand Zappa – Inter­na­tio­nale Frank Zappa Dis­co­logy.
By the way. Frank Zappa is the first and pro­bably only artist who »made it« with an instru­men­tal album in the U.S. on the index »Par­en­tal Advi­sory — Exp­li­cit Content«.