A Little Nostalgia For The Old Folks
With Mark Hoback quoting Stink-Foot a few weeks ago and today runswithscissors confessing that his mental jukebox is stuck on playing Mr. Green Genes, I thought I’d post a picture of my Zappa Memorial. More about that later, first I must post the first verse to Mr. Green Genes in case you’ve forgotten them: The second verse is here.
Eat your greens
Don't forget your beans & celery
Don't forget to bring
Your fake I.D.
Eat a bunch of these
MAGNIFICIENT
With sauerkraut
MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM -
Sauerkraut!
Eat a grape, a fig
A crumpet too ...
You'll pump 'em right through
Doo-wee-ooo
The humor is emphasized by having trained singers perform them. They have been going through my mind also the past few days. The standby Zappa tune in my mental jukebox, however, is Dog Breath. It hits me nearly every morning in the shower and sometimes lingers as I drive to work. Such lyrics, you probably think, must be profound. They are:
Primer mi carucha Chevy'39
Going to El Monte Legion Stadium
Pick up on my weesa she is so divine
Helps me stealing hub caps
Wasted all the time
Fuzzy Dice
Bongos in the back
My ship of love is
Ready to attack
What Frank did was paint with words. Notes and rhythms bring it all home.
Now back to my memorial. It took many years to make. There was a grapevine wreath on the wall, left there by an old girlfriend. I was drinking beer at the Red Baron when I turned to the section that had his obit. It was the first I knew. I’d heard from people in contact with him that he was not well, so it was not that much of a surprise, but it still made my heart sink. When I got home, I folded the obit and tucked it behind the wreath. That was on December 6, 1993.
I lamented that I hadn’t bought all his CDs, because they were becoming harder to find. Then Rykodisc announced they were going to re-release his entire catalog, which is over 60 CDs. I bought them all and saved the J-cards (or whatever you call them) and stuffed them behind the wreath as the CDs trickled out over about two years.
My friend Biffy The Elephant Shrew sent me a Xerox of the notes from Zappa’s elusive Apocrypha, a set of first rate boots that I never found (but all the tracks have now been released in some form or other). You can see Frank’s eye staring out from the center of the wreath. That’s Biffy’s Xerox.
As time passed, the number of J-cards exceeded the bandwidth of the wreath. They were constantly falling out and I had to keep stuffing them back in. So, two years ago, I bought a shadow box and put my favorite stuff in there. Now it is stable, but I wouldn’t call it finished. It can still become a part of something else. That’s the way conceptual continuity works.
6:06:07 PM 
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