The time has come for me complete my A to Z reviews and talk about another of my seventies heroes Frank Zappa.

What ? Not that drug crazed weirdo guitarist with the smutty songs ?

Frank Vincent Zappa was many things but he never used or endorsed drugs. A man who names his children Moon Unit, Dweezil, Ahmet and Diva might be considered a tad eccentric but each to their own.

Young Frank was writing chamber music as a fourteen year old influenced by Stravinsky, Webern and Varese. Quite impressive as he was self taught.

At seventeen he got into rhythm and blues and do-wop and took up the guitar.

By the time he was twenty one he joined a rock band on the understanding that he would write the music. The original Frank Zappa And The Mothers Of Invention went from Dada disruptive to bawdy slapstick and after five years and seven albums Zappa fired his band.

As later fellow alumni Steve Vai stated he and his fellow musicians were just the “tools of the composer”. Frank needed excellent musicians to showcase his demanding music. As band leader he was a strict and relentless task master.

I was about seventeen when I first encountered Inca Roads from the album One Size Fits All. To say it blew my mind then as it still does today is an understatement.

I’ll let Frank introduce it.

“Now, some of you might have read a book called Chariots of the Gods? by Erich Von Däniken, and there’s a little thing in there, it’s a picture of this area in the Andes called the plains of Nazca, ladies and gentlemen. And, uh, there’s these carvings on the top of the rock that you don’t know what they’re supposed to be for. It doesn’t look like it would have been a road, because it doesn’t go anywhere, and there’s a bunch of ’em, and some people think, well maybe it was a landing field. But the carvings are very, very old and they’re very, very big, you know, indicating that the people who made them were highly, uh, well, they were, heh heh . . . They really had their ____ together for the things that carved in the rock. And it’s possible that if they were landing fields, that the things that landed on them were NOT OF THIS EARTH. And so we have a song, which features the lovely voice of Mr. George Duke, and the name of this song is “Inca Roads.” Take it away, George”

It starts off with a simple enough groove happening on the bass and marimba with swirling synth sounds. Marimba, there’s an instrument you don’t hear much of in rock ‘n roll. George Duke comes in with the melody which jumps about all over the shop interspersed with odd time signature changes and spoken word. Then it’s break neck marimba passages before it mellows a bit with a Zappa guitar solo. Don’t get too comfortable, there are synth solos over a 7/8 pattern and then, and then………………

Time to lie down with a damp flannel on my fevered brow. You know how I get.

………………it’s nine minutes of melodic and rhythmic bliss in my opinion played by musicians of the highest calibre.“On Ruth, on Ruth, that’s Ruth!” ends the song acknowledging the wonderful mallet work of Ruth Underwood.

Throughout the song the lyrics become more and more nonsensical. As one critic noted

 ” The non-serious nature of these lyrics and even the music itself seem to be mocking other progressive rock bands and their possibly forced divine depth.”

Look, I know it’s hardly top 20 material even for 1975 but I happen to think it’s a masterpiece and gives a glimpse of the amazing creativity of the man.

Frank Zappa was articulate and educated. A razor sharp intellect and visionary. A political commentator and satirist.

Composing and playing music to him was “a game where you have a piece of time and you get to decorate it”

Sadly that piece of time for him and us was way too short.

His final piece of music making was conducting the Ensemble Modern playing some of his orchestral works at the Frankfurt Festival in 1992 as the featured composer.

He died at his home the following year of prostate cancer at the age of fifty two

Enjoy the video, sing along and don’t get too freaked out by the animation. Nobody was on drugs !

(Post by John Allan from Bridgetown, Western Australia – May 2026)