One Size Fits All

1. Inca Roads

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• See also ARF: Notes & Comments.

FZ, interviewed by Rob Fixmer, Bugle American, December 17, 1975

In "Inca Roads" were you making fun of (author of Chariot of the Gods) Von Däniken?

Of course, of course. No seriously, I'll tell you what "Inca Roads" was about. It was an instrumental melody which existed for three years before I tried to write words to it. The melody covers more than two octaves. It's very difficult to sing, and I wrote words to it one day. That's what the actual history of that song is all about. I thought it was quite an accomplishment. And it was written before Von Däniken.

I didn't know that, but unfortunately it didn't come out until after the Von Däniken book.

Yes, but it had already been corrupted by the time that it came out. It was totally corrupted from the words which had originally been written which was way before all this stuff was considered commercial.

FZ, interviewed by Paul Zollo (1987), American Songwriter, June 30, 2020

Sometimes I start with a complicated instrumental line and just for the hell of it see whether I can write words to it. "Inca Roads" is one of the songs that came out that way. It was originally done as a kind of fusion instrumental. I said, "If somebody has to sing this, and it is fiendishly hard to sing, what would be the words that fit on it as it came out?"

Bulgarian Bagpipe

FZ, interviewed by Steve Rosen, Guitar Player, January 1977

I also do some stuff where I use the pick on the fingerboard, pressing down and hitting the string at the same time. It gets kind of a Bulgarian bagpipe sound. An example of that is on the end of the solo in "Inca Roads" and also on "Po-Jama People."

Quotations

Arthur Barrow, alt.fan.frank-zappa, October 27, 1999

And of course everyone knows that part of Approx is in Inca Roads "Why don't you sharpen it..." section, for example.

Mike, February 10, 2014

"Inca Roads" contains a quote from "Strictly Genteel."

Lino González, August 19, 2010

In the first part of the song, when the instrumental interlude appears around at 1:45 of the song, the musical intented to be very Peruvian oriented, the sound of the synthesizer like a fluted they used called QUENA and the rhythm section is something similar to the rhythm they've made called CARNAVALITO.

Marte, July 14, 2022

En un tramo de Inca Roads, FZ cita directamente el motivo principal de la canción "El Humahuaqueño", un carnavalito (género musical de la región andina de Argentina).

Google Translate:

In a section of Inca Roads, FZ directly quotes the main motif of the song "El Humahuaqueño", a carnival (musical genre of the Andean region of Argentina).

Why don't you sharpen it then?
[...] Mother Mary and Jozuf!

FZ, interviewed by Den Simms & Rob Samler, Society Pages, September 1991

RS: How 'bout "Why don't you sharpen it, then?"

FZ: We used to have a carpenter that worked around here. He talked to himself. He would argue with himself, (laughter) and you'd see him out in the yard, and he'd be sayin' things like, "Where's that screwdriver? Screwdriver don't work. Why don't you sharpen it, then?" (laughter) And he also used to hit his thumb every once in a while, and scream, "Mother Mary 'n Jozuf!" (laughter)

Guacamole Queen
At the Armadillo in Austin Texas, her aura

• See notes on Armadillo World Headquarters on Bongo Fury (1975).

Booger-Bear

Did a booger-bear
Come from somewhere out there

Den Simms, Eric Buxton & Rob Samler, "They're Doing the Interview of the Century—Part 3," Society Pages (US), September 1990

FZ: A Booger Bear is an extremely ugly anything, and a Booger is short for Booger Bear, in the parlance of that '73 band.

George Duke, MCO Studio, Hilversum, Holland, October 29, 2009

Somewhere along the line—I don't know whether Frank talked about it—we instituted what what's called eventually The Booger Bear Award. Now, the way that developed is— I don't know if I should do this. No, I shouldn't. No. Ok. We'll do that in private. Well, there's respectable people here, you know.

Well, anyway, what it meant, the Booger Bear meant, it was a kind of a homely woman. Homely, not, you know, not a good looking girl, in a word. And so there used to be these groupies, you know, at the show. Some of the guys were, you know, involved with that kind of thing. And they made up this mask that kind of look like a cross between a gorilla and—you know those shrunken heads they have in Africa, they look like—with hair, and the whole bit, you know. And they put one of these on the door, so whoever had the Booger Bear they had that on their door. It became a topic of conversation on the bus because everybody would come out and look and see who had the Booger Bear Award, you know?

And that went off for a while and everybody laughed, Frank laughed, everybody was having fun with it, until Frank got it. That was the end of the Booger Bear Award. 'Cause Frank said, "Why did I get it? Who put that on my door?" Everybody was like mute, the whole band was giggling. You know, Frank was serious, he was pissed.

It's as simple as that.

Edits

OSFA	TDRS!	YCDTOSA 2
00:00-00:33	00:00-00:33
	00:33-00:37
00:33-02:00	00:37-02:04
	02:04-05:31
02:00-03:51		02:05-03:55
		03:55-04:27
03:51-04:15		04:27-04:50
		04:50-05:24
04:15-04:37		05:24-05:46
		05:46-06:05...
04:37-08:45	05:31-09:39

 

2. Can't Afford No Shoes

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• See also ARF: Notes & Comments.

FZ, liner notes, 1975

James "Bird Legs" Youman—bass (on Can't Afford No Shoes).

Fretless Guitar

• See notes for "The Torture Never Stops" on Zoot Allures (1976).

 

3. Sofa No. 1

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Tom Fowler, interviewed by Evil Prince, T'Mershi Duween, March 2000

They did "Sofa" in Colorado, I know that.

 

4. Po-Jama People

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• See also ARF: Notes & Comments.

FZ, interviewed in Stereo, April 1976 [English translation by Tan Mitsugu]

I once had a group with technically superb musicians only, but it was the most boring tour I ever had. Although they were pretty good musicians, I had no fun hanging around with them. The only thing they wanted to do was to play chess (laugh).

FZ, interviewed by Paul Colbert, Musicians Only, January 26, 1980

I have had bands where everyone has been a reader. The most boring band I had was like that and ultimately led to the song "[Po-Jama] People" which is written about that particular band which had people like Ruth (Underwood), George (Duke) and Ponty. You go on the road and you have these people living their life to play [Yahtzee] on the bus, and chess and engaging in intellectual juiceless pursuits. I like to have guys in the band who want to go out there and want to get laid.

• See also notes on Empire Pool, Wembley, London, UK, September 14, 1973.

Bulgarian Bagpipe

• See notes on "Inca Roads."

 

5. Florentine Pogen

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• See also ARF: Notes & Comments.

She was the daughter of a wealthy
Florentine Pogen

FZ, interviewed for KNON FM, Dallas, TX, August 18, 1989

Okay, "Florentine Pogen." How could the "she" in "Florentine Pogen" be the daughter of a cookie?

How could you be the daughter of a cookie?

Yeah.

Well, why that has to be a cookie?

It doesn't have to be but there is a Florentine Pogen, it's a cookie.

Of course there is a Florentine Pogen cookie but—

But who, but who is yours, who is your Florentine Pogen?

But the mu— the multiple intention there is that Florentine also means a person who is from a town in Italy called Florence, okay? And who knows, who knows what the word "pogen" really is, you know? What I mean, does it really mean "cookie"? Does it mean somebody who poges? So she could be the daughter of a wealthy person from Florence who poges.

Chester's go-rilla
She go oink
Chester's go-rilla
She go quack
Chester's go-rilla
She go moo
Chester's go-rilla
She go

Napoleon Murphy Brock, interviewed by Andrew Greenaway, April 29, 2002

You saw the gorilla that came up behind Chester? [...] When Chester was playing, you saw the gorilla that came up with the clock and a comb? Well that was Marty Perellis in the gorilla outfit. And no one knew—even Frank—that he was gonna do that. He would do that impromptu to blow our minds. And as you saw, Chester was quite surprised—and the rest of us were too . . . I looked back, "A gorilla?" . . . but I got to the point were I was learning to expect just about anything from this organisation.

Jonathan Mover, "Phil Collins & Chester Thompson Turning It On Again," Drumhead, January-February 2008

JM: And Chester's gorilla . . . explanation please?

CT: (Laughs) It's just one of those inside fluke things that happened in the middle of rehearsal. The lyric was, "She's a gorilla, she goes . . .," and then Ruth Underwood would always play the duck call. No matter what animal it was, she would play the duck call. One day in rehearsal it came out as "Chester's gorilla" instead of "She's a gorilla," and it stuck.

One day we rented a TV studio and we taped what eventually became Dub Room Special. Our tour manager, Marty Perellis, put on a gorilla suit and then sneaked up behind me while we were doing that song. This was back in the days of the big afro, and I had my comb in my back pocket. He pulled out my comb and started playing with my hair. I turned around and saw this gorilla, but I had to keep playing. And there's this one moment on the video when I'm in sheer terror. But you can't stop playing . . . so I didn't stop.

 

6. Evelyn, A Modified Dog

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• See also ARF: Notes & Comments.

Neil Slaven, Electric Don Quixote—The Definitive Story Of Frank Zappa, 2003, p. 212

The same combination [as "A Little Green Rosetta"] also recorded "Evelyn, A Modified Dog," the latest instance of canine conceptual continuity.

FZ, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, April 23, 1975

Well the thing about dogs is, it's happening on a very rarefied conceptual level, as you'll see there's references to dog throughout the work, and the reference to the dog has nothing to do with the dog, or the concept of a dog is just like, you can think of it as a, you know when Rembrandt did those paintings to make them all look the same he'd mix brown with every colour, you know, to get that thing, so I said, "That's a funny idea, I'll stick a little piece of a dog in every record." And so on the next album, the concept of the dog has been brought down to the word "Arf" in two songs, and another song called "Evelyn, A Modified Dog," which is included in there, and you know, it's just a little bit all the way along.

 

7. San Ber'dino

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• See also ARF: Notes & Comments.

Fretless Guitar

• See notes for "The Torture Never Stops" on Zoot Allures (1976).

They give him thirty days in San Ber'dino
Well there's forty-four men
Stashed away in Tank "C"
An' there's only one shower

FZ, interviewed by Bill Forman, BAM Magazine, January 16, 1987

What jail were you in?

San Bernardino County Jail.

Were you in your own cell?

Oh no, I was in there with three other guys. It's four guys to a cell, Tank C.

What were they in for?

One guy was awaiting extradition on a jaywalking ticket from Beverly Hills, if you can believe that. He'd been in jail for two weeks, waiting to be extradited from San Bernardino to Beverly Hills on a jaywalking ticket, swear to God.

America with a K. Who else?

Well there was a guy in there they called Slick, who was an enormous black guy who was in jail for stealing copper.

Copper?!

Yeah. Let me tell you how he was going to steal the copper. See, out in San Bernardino they have this place that is a used metal place, like they buy any kind of metal, they smelt it down. It's like a junk dealer. And what a lot of the hobos out there would do, is go to a box car with a screwdriver and they would unscrew the brake shoes from the box car, which happened to be pure copper, and they would go and sell copper brake shoes to this place and pick up a couple of bucks and go buy some wine.

So apparently the guy had already done that a couple of times. But he figures, well, what do they make wire out of? Why, it's copper! And where is the biggest wire that you can find? Why the phone company's got it—a whole big roll of this shit. And he and a guy had broken into this compound where they store those huge rolls of copper wire, and the idea was—there was a chain link fence around this place, and they were gonna put an axle through the roll, and tie-some rope to that, and pull it, and roll the roll over the chain link fence and roll it away, burn the insulation off the wire, and then sell the wire. That was the plan. The guy got over the fence and got caught by a dog and his buddy ran away. And so he was in there for stealing copper.

But what about those brake shoes? That means that the brakes don't work . . .

That's right.

Does that lead to trouble?

Um hmm, that leads to a major train wreck.

He doesn't know of any train wrecks that he personally caused?

Well, he certainly wasn't talking about 'em. There was a couple of other guys whose names I don't remember. But these guys would eat anything. And I'm telling you, you've gotta have a cast iron stomach to survive the food in the San Bernardino County Jail. When in jail, and when someone says tonight we're having chop suey, run the other way! That is some dangerous shit. And these guys would eat everyone's chop suey. I sat there and watched them. People would take their trays over and just pile—you only had a certain amount of time to eat this stuff—and they would just dump their trays in these guys' trays. They must have had tapeworm or something. And they would just wheel and deal on this chop suey.

One morning they gave me a bowl of Cream Of Wheat, and in handing it through the cell, the bowl dropped. It was like a little aluminum bowl and the Cream Of Wheat had hardened into the bowl and it flopped over. And I saw the bottom of the Cream Of Wheat, and there was a cockroach about as big as my thumb embedded in the Cream Of Wheat. So I pulled it out—I didn't eat the Cream Of Wheat—but I pulled it out and I wrote a letter and included the roach in it, you know, with a little review of the food in the jail. The jail censor caught the letter, and brought it back and threatened me with solitary confinement for the rest of my stay if I ever tried anything else like that. They just didn't want the rest of the world to know how good the cuisine was.

FZ with Peter Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, 1989, p. 59-60

The ten days I spent in Tank C at the San Bernardino County Jail were very educational. Unless you've been to jail, you can't imagine what it's actually like. This wasn't like the jail in Lancaster where they gave you pancakes in the morning. This was ugly jail.

There was an enormous black guy in there called "Slicks" (because his lips looked like those big smooth racing tires called 'cheater slicks'). He was in for stealing copper. Copper?

Vagrants used to go to the San Bernardino rail yards and pry the copper brake shoes off boxcars and sell them as scrap metal at a junkyard down the street. Slicks figured that if the junk dealers would pay pretty good for little lumps of copper, they'd pay real good for a really big hunk. So he planned to break into the local telephone company compound, where huge rolls of telephone cable were stored.

The place had a chain-link fence around it. Slicks planned to climb over the fence, put a pole through one of the rolls—like an axle—throw a rope over the fence, hook it up to the 'axle,' pull on the rope and let the giant roll crush down the fence. Then, he was going to take it out into the desert, burn the insulation off the wire and sell the copper.

He got as far as climbing over the fence and into the compound before the dogs got him. Is this The Crime Of The Century, or what?

There was a Mexican kid in there, about nineteen years old, who had been locked up for three weeks, awaiting extradition to Beverly Hills on a jaywalking ticket.

The guards left the lights on all night to keep us from sleeping. It was about 104 degrees in there during the day.

We were supplied with one razor blade per day, and one small shower stall at the end of the cell block for forty-four men. The scum on the shower basin was about four inches thick. I didn't shave or take a shower the whole time I was there.

The food was not terrific. One morning I found a giant cockroach in the bottom of my cream o' wheat. I put it in an envelope with a letter to Motorhead's mother. The jail censor found it, and the warden threatened me with solitary if I ever tried anything like that again.

There were two guys they called the Chow Hounds who would literally eat anything. They would wait until everybody took the first bite of food and found it repulsive, then they would hold their trays out while the other inmates dumped their 'chop suey' onto them, forming miniature haystacks of . . . who the fuck knew what it was.

We were given one half hour to eat before the trays were recollected. The Chow Hounds's trays were always clean.

This gave me a real good whiff of California law, California lawyers, and an inside look at the California penal industry in action. I haven't seen anything since then to change my opinion of how poorly the system works.

• See also notes about the Cucamonga bust, March 26, 1965.

ZULCH is the auto works
I'm tellin' you
That's where they take
All the cars that they hurt

Zulch Auto Works ad

ZULCH AUTO WORKS

From the bottom up, Zulch Auto Works is the best place to take your car in San Bernardino for complete automobile reconstruction. This company is equipped and staffed to handle even the most major automobile repair and rebuilding problems, including body and frame realignment and painting, radiator work, wheel aligning and axle straightening, Radio-dispatched trucks are on call 24-hours a day for immediate service anywhere in the San Bernardino area.

274 North "I' Street
Phone TUxxx

 

8. Andy

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• See ARF: Notes & Comments.

 

9. Sofa No. 2

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• See also ARF: Notes & Comments.

FZ, liner notes, 1975

German Translation—Lu Paschotta

FZ, interviewed by Don Menn & Matt Groening, "The Mother Of All Interviews, Act II," Zappa!, 1992, p. 63

We learned it phonetically. The translation was done by a girl who used to be our babysitter. She was from Munich, and apparently not a very good translator. People look at what it means in English, and then listen to the German words, and they've told me that the translation is laughable. And then they tell me what it really should be in German, and it's unsingable.

[...] That particular tour, I tried to convince Mark and Howard that it was a good idea to learn these things phonetically, because most American groups, if they go and play in another country, make no attempt to communicate in the native language, and I thought it would be a worthwhile gesture and probably a groundbreaking thing to do. In fact, in Germany, it was groundbreaking, because I had reports afterward that people in Germany who were musicians who wanted to do rock and roll had never considered that their language would work for rock. I didn't realize that they weren't doing rock stuff in German. If they did rock, they would be doing bad phonetic English rock lyrics.

FZ, interviewed by Rob Fixmer, Bugle American, December 17, 1975

Would you condescend to explain the thing, or is that asking too much?

No, certainly. First of all, the cover is what that song is all about, and its part of the conceptual continuity of the story of "Billy the Mountain." But you had no way of knowing that.

No, I didn't, and neither did anyone else.

But these things are revealed later.

Where?

See, that's the way continuity runs. Well, say three albums from now you'll find out that all that stuff fits together, and while you're sitting there in your little room going "Wow, this one's for shit!" you'll suddenly say "Hey, wait a minute." But that's only for people who actually go back and listen.

[...] Now whether it had anything to do with the cover art or with "Billy the Mountain," I think that that particular song is a wonderful song. Let me tell you the story of that song.

First of all, it was written in English. Then it was translated into German. I got a transcript of the phonetic pronunciation of the German lyrics, and the music was written around the German pronunciation. It's the first time I've ever tried to do that. It was considered to be quite an achievement in the German press, because many German groups won't sing in German because they don't think they can do rock and roll in German. We went over there on a tour with Mark and Howard and went on performing that as part of our show. They were surprised that an American group would want to make up a song—and we actually had a whole section of our show that was done in—German.

Is that the part that you did on the Dick Cavett Show? It was never on a record as far as I know.

That's right. And that is it.