Frank Zappa: Does Humor Belong in Music?

My copy of this CD still has its £16.49 price label from the Virgin Megastore on Oxford Street (which kind of undermines one of the stories I told earlier). That was a lot of money for a student in 1986. I remember spending a lot of time by the racks deciding whether I should take the risk of buying it — twenty years later a £16.49 price label would present me with an easy decision: back in the rack.

Yes, I always felt there was a really good Zappa album out there somewhere; I just hadn't found it yet. (I think it may be Freak Out!, but that's another story.) This isn't it. There isn't much humour involved, either. There's some quite good straight jazz playing on Let's Move to Cleveland, but the version of Trouble Every Day isn't a patch on the original one that I would discover later (on Freak Out!).

Actually I think one of the things that might have swayed me to buy this was that I'd only had a CD player for a month or two at this stage, and this was the first CD I'd seen that had DDD on it, meaning "digital tape recorder used during session recording, mixing and/or editing, and mastering (transcription)". Digital seemed so shiny and exciting then.

Question: in What's New in Baltimore?, Zappa sings, "What's new in Baltimore / What about that new chord that Ray played" (and then he chuckles to himself). I always assumed that "Ray" was Ray Charles. I can't remember why. Can you think who it might have been?

MusicBrainz entry for this album

Comments

[Christian Obermaier]

>I always assumed that "Ray" was Ray Charles. I can't remember why. Can you think who it might have been?

It's Ray White, one of his guitarists, standing right next to him, who apparently mucked up one of the gazillion chord changes a Zappa musician is forced through to finally arrive at the vocal passage, and this didn't go unnoticed by the master himself, so in his unimitable spontaneity, he handed him the dunce cap, right there for everyone to see. As this version is edited from two concerts, cut right between instrumental and vocal parts, we might never actually hear the slip that caused this little gem.

Christian