Zappa Tweetables

Freak Out! peaked at number 130. Paul McCartney later said Sgt. Pepper was the Beatles' version of it.

Freak Out! was one of the first double albums in rock and the very first double-album debut by any band.

Tom Wilson signed the Mothers after hearing 'Trouble Every Day' and said: 'Zappa, without exception, is the biggest talent I have ever come across.'

Zappa thought naming the band the Mothers was presumptuous. On real musicianship, he said, they were 'right down there in the swamp.'

Carol Kaye claimed only the bassist and drummer from the band played on Freak Out! and the Wrecking Crew did the guitars. She also said only Zappa and Brian Wilson wrote their own arrangements in LA.

MGM gave Freak Out! a $25,000 budget when $6,000 was normal. After it sold 30,000 copies they cut the next album to $11,000.

Capitol paid Zappa $40,000 to write Lumpy Gravy. He composed it in eleven days and was barred from playing on it, because Verve owned him as a performer.

The bassoonist and bass clarinetist called Zappa's Lumpy Gravy parts unplayable. He said, 'If I play your part, will you at least try it?' Then he played them on guitar.

Verve censored a line on We're Only In It for the Money where engineer Gary Kellgren calls the Velvet Underground a shitty band.

Zappa on his 1967 albums: he could cut the master tapes apart with a razor blade, reassemble them in a different order, and it would still make one piece of music.

Uncle Meat runs 75 minutes, the longest studio project the Mothers made. It includes a taped argument between Zappa and drummer Jimmy Carl Black about money.

Ian Underwood plays almost every instrument on Hot Rats. Lowell George played rhythm guitar and went uncredited.

Hot Rats was Zappa's first 16-track record. He spent four of the sixteen tracks on drums alone, which nobody was doing in 1969.

The figure lurking in the empty pool on the Hot Rats cover is model Christine Frka. Casual fans still think it is Zappa.

Lester Bangs said Hot Rats whaled the tar out of every jam album of the previous two years. Christgau gave it a C and wrote 'Doo-doo to you, Frank.'

Zappa said Weasels Ripped My Flesh is 80 percent improvisation. The title came from a story in the September 1956 issue of Man's Life.

On 10 December 1971 a fan named Trevor Charles Howell shoved Zappa off the Rainbow Theatre stage into the orchestra pit. Broken rib, fractured leg, gashed head, one arm paralysed.

Howell said he pushed Zappa because he thought Zappa was flirting with his girlfriend. The fall crushed Zappa's larynx and permanently deepened his voice.

Tina Turner and the Ikettes sing backing vocals on Over-Nite Sensation. Neither is credited.

Beefheart auditioned for Zappa's band on Halloween 1974 and flunked. He could not get through 'Willie the Pimp.'

The book exists because Butcher's mother kept every letter her daughter wrote home from Laurel Canyon for forty years.

She was typing menus and scripts at ten shillings an hour in a Dover Street bureau when the agency sent her to take dictation in Frank Zappa's London hotel room. August 1967.

Her first wages from the Zappa household came to $70. She spent them taking a friend to dinner at Schwab's.

Life magazine paid Zappa $2,500 for five thousand words on the 1950s, and gave him two weeks to write it.

Frank rang to say he had the $2,500 Life cheque plus a $27,500 part-royalty cheque from MGM. 'Now we can get things moving,' he said.

The Mothers of Invention were on $250 a week while their tours sold out everywhere they played.

Zappa disbanded the Mothers because he could not keep paying $250 a week while they sat around, and had been taking out loans to cover expenses.

At the meeting that ended the Mothers, Herbie Cohen handed out a statement showing a $20,000 deficit after all the gear was sold, and told each man he owed Frank a share of it.

Ten days after the Kent State shootings, Zappa paid $7,000 to a team of copyists so he could hear his own music played by the LA orchestra under Zubin Mehta.

Cal Schenkel was paid $300 a cover and worked out of a rented abandoned dentist's clinic above a hot dog shop on Melrose.

'After music, my great interest in life is lust,' Zappa told her. 'If I didn't spend my life composing and playing music, I'd be into lust at every opportunity.'

At twenty-two Zappa talked his way onto The Steve Allen Show by offering to play a bicycle wheel, purely to publicise a film score he had written.

He told Steve Allen's studio orchestra that when he raised five fingers they should make the worst noise they could think of. They did.

Zappa never visited anybody. He turned up at Butcher's cottage once in June 1970 and still recalled the whole scene in detail when she interviewed him eighteen years later.

Butcher summarised Kate Millett's argument that romantic love is a grant men bestow on women to keep power, while perched on the edge of a bath, to Frank Zappa.

The log cabin was said to have belonged to cowboy star Tom Mix, with his horse buried somewhere in the garden. The house burned down on Halloween 1981.

Membership of the United Mutations fan club cost three dollars, and came with a questionnaire asking who God is.

Eric Clapton introduced Zappa to Cynthia Plaster Caster in Chicago. Zappa carried three of her diaries home for Butcher to type, then drove out for legal advice on whether they could be published.

Cynthia kept the diaries in code so her mother would not understand them. 'Rig' meant penis. 'Plating,' 'banking' and 'charva' covered the rest.

Butcher typed nine hundred pages of The Groupie Papers, then cut them to three hundred and fifty in two months, handing the edit over on 2 February 1970.

Her middle name was not a gag. 'Unit' marked her arrival turning Frank and Gail into a family unit.

Gail was a twenty-year-old secretary at the Whisky a Go Go. She met Frank at LAX, ran into him again at a bank, and he asked her out while waiting for the teller.

'Valley Girl' started as a letter Moon wrote her father asking to work together. He read it, then woke her on a school night and said they were recording a song.

In the vocal booth he fed her lines. 'Say more about the cat box.' 'Talk about bagging your face.' 'Try to work in gag me with a spoon.' 'Throw in a tubular.'

After the take there was a hug, and then she was back upstairs in bed wishing they could keep recording and that the hug had lasted forever.

The first time her father ever telephoned her was the year she turned twenty. He was calling to set her up with someone.

Frank introduced her to David Carson while Carson was starting Ray Gun, and told him to print her art and hire her as a journalist.

Frank took Moon and Dweezil to the PMRC hearings in Congress, partly as evidence that children raised in a First Amendment household do not turn out degenerate.

Zappa's own warning label read: 'This album contains material which a truly free society would neither fear nor suppress.' He put it on his classical records too.

By her account three people publicly fought the PMRC: her father, John Denver, and Dee Snider of Twisted Sister.

On a talk show she told the story of being handcuffed to Dweezil in a bathroom with a tape recorder so they could hear how annoying they were. At the commercial break the host said, 'That's child abuse.'

At nineteen she was sent to New York as Dweezil's legal guardian so that his MTV job could go ahead.

She was hired as a language consultant on the Fast Times at Ridgemont High TV series, to keep the teenage dialogue authentic.

A month before the diagnosis her father was preparing to run for president and serving as Václav Havel's cultural ambassador. Then stage four, at forty-eight.

She was a blood match for her father and donated for his transfusions.

Their weekly ritual was Lynda Barry. She clipped Ernie Pook's Comeek out of LA Weekly and brought it to him like a treaty to be signed between him and Death.

Booked on Howard Stern at twenty-five to say her father was fine, she got told to show more skin. Then Frank phoned in and agreed his kids should stop taking his money. 'There's got to be an end to it sometime, Howard.'

When she tried to make peace with him before he died, he said, 'I am too sick to do this, Moon.'

Gail had him write each child a letter. In shaky black ink, hers said: 'I love you, Moon.'

The moment the warmth left him, her mother and three siblings formed a tight circle. She watched them from outside it and kissed his fingers.

Zappa and Herbie Cohen founded Bizarre Records in March 1969 and had it distributed by Reprise, Frank Sinatra's label.

Watson's theory on why Zappa was bigger in Europe: for non-English speakers the lyrics stop getting in the way of the music.

Weasels Ripped My Flesh was originally a sampler for a planned twelve-record set called The History And Collected Improvisations Of The Mothers Of Invention.

The title track of Weasels Ripped My Flesh is two minutes and seven seconds of feedback. It took the arrival of Sonic Youth for rock listeners to catch up.

Neon Park painted the Weasels sleeve. Lowell George liked it enough to insist on using him for every Little Feat cover.

'Holiday In Berlin' was written for the German students who stormed the stage in October 1968 demanding an anti-capitalist statement. Their leaders wanted Zappa to tell the crowd to burn down a nearby American forces base.

Zappa's organ solo on 'The Little House I Used To Live In' reaches back to pipe-band rudiments he learned at twelve, in Keith McKillop's percussion class in 1952.

Jean-Luc Ponty's 'Music For Electric Violin And Low Budget Orchestra' got its title after Pacific Records refused Zappa's request for a 97-piece orchestra.

Over-Nite Sensation sat on the US charts for most of a year and peaked at 32, Zappa's best to that point. It was released in quadrophonic.

'Montana' exists because Zappa glanced at a box of dental floss and decided he needed to write songs that were more specific.

Zappa on singer Ricky Lancelotti: he carried a .45 and had a cassette of himself imitating 100 cartoon voices in 60 seconds.

Watson read Zappa his own Plato and King Lear reading of Apostrophe in October 1993, weeks before Zappa died. Zappa said nothing about the theory, then nodded hard at the idea that artists reach themes beyond what they consciously know.

'Black Napkins' is named after the tableware at a promoter's Thanksgiving dinner in Japan. It was recorded in Osaka on 3 February 1976 and is the only live performance on Zoot Allures.

Patrick O'Hearn and Eddie Jobson both appear on the Zoot Allures cover. Neither one plays a note on the record.

Zappa had to fight his own engineers to stack tracks by musicians who were not listening to each other. On Joe's Garage he gave the technique a name: xenochrony, alien time.

To show Warner Brothers what he thought of them, Zappa broadcast the whole two-and-a-half-hour Läther on the radio and told listeners to tape it off the air.

Zappa invented the entire Joe's Garage storyline over one weekend. His description of the process: 'it's like doing crossword puzzles.'

Ike Willis talked his way onto Zappa's stage crew at Washington University in St Louis on 2 October 1977. Zappa found out he could sing and auditioned him on the spot.

The entire vocal track of 'Ya Hozna' is backward-masked. It came out while TV evangelists were claiming backward-masking proved Judas Priest had signed a pact with the Devil.

'Be In My Video' mocks MTV, so Zappa cut it in 4/4 in the key of C major to make the disdain structural.