Zappa Studio Tan

Studio Tan is one of four albums culled from the ill-fated 1976 box set Läther and released by Warner Bros. without Frank Zappa having a word to say about the final product (including the horrible artwork). The 21-minute opener, "The Adventures of Greggery Peccary," is the culmination of Zappa's art of storytelling. A complex piece painstakingly assembled in the studio over three years, it allies the comedy rock of the Flo & Eddie era with the jazzy feel of The Grand Wazoo and the twisted prog rock of the 1973-1974 band. Yet, it is greater than the sum of its parts, proposing an unmatched musical narrative that makes "Billy the Mountain" the work of a child and amounts to a stunning synthesis of the man's influences, stylistic range, and studio techniques…

Released in May 1982, Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch marks Frank Zappa's entrance into the 1980s. From this point on, his rock records would focus on single, simple rock songs (the previous year's You Are What You Is had them organized in interconnecting suites) with occasionally more complex instrumental numbers. The recipe would be extended to The Man From Utopia (1983) and Them or Us (1984). Side one features three studio songs that would never be performed on stage. By 1981, Zappa had become a master at manipulating vocal tracks, a technique featured in each of them, but most successfully in "Valley Girl," where daughter Moon Unit (aged 14 at the time) pastiches rich girls from the San Fernando Valley…

Released in May 1982, Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch marks Frank Zappa's entrance into the 1980s. From this point on, his rock records would focus on single, simple rock songs (the previous year's You Are What You Is had them organized in interconnecting suites) with occasionally more complex instrumental numbers. The recipe would be extended to The Man From Utopia (1983) and Them or Us (1984). Side one features three studio songs that would never be performed on stage. By 1981, Zappa had become a master at manipulating vocal tracks, a technique featured in each of them, but most successfully in "Valley Girl," where daughter Moon Unit (aged 14 at the time) pastiches rich girls from the San Fernando Valley…

Released in October 1984, Them or Us is Frank Zappa's last studio rock album (unless one counts Thing-Fish). It contains a little of everything for everyone, but most of all it has that cold and dry early-'80s feel that made this and other albums like The Man From Utopia and Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers of Prevention sound dated pretty quickly. The record begins and ends with covers. "The Closer You Are" is one of those '50s R&B tunes the man loved so much. As for the Allman Brothers' "Whippin' Post," it answered a request from an audience member in Helsinki back in 1974 (go figure). In between one finds the usual offensive lyrics - the cliché-ridden "In France," the sexually explicit "Baby, Take Your Teeth Out." Crunchy guitars are found in "Ya Hozna" and "Stevie's Spanking" (named after Steve Vai, playing guitar in it, too), arguably one of Zappa's best straightforward rock songs from that period…

Fifty years ago today, Frank Zappa’s inimitable, groundbreaking first solo album, Hot Rats, was released, putting the songwriter and musician on the map as a virtuosic guitarist and changing the course of music forever with its conceptual, compositional and technological innovations. Self-described as a “movie for your ears,” the mostly instrumental 1969 album was a new musical avenue for Zappa following the dissolution of his band The Mothers Of Invention as he melded the sophistication of jazz with the attitude of rock and roll to create a highly influential masterpiece widely hailed today as a pioneering album of jazz-rock fusion.