Take a Bite Out of 'Burnt Weeny Sandwich'

The Thousand Year Charm Offensive of Frank Zappa, Part II

Editor’s Note: Check out the ongoing discussions about music at GOTD and associate editor Mike Kilgore’s daily music series:

1. What's in your wallet... er... music library?

2. Who Is Generation X's Greatest Black Musician? Here's My Vote

3. Generation X's Greatest Black Musician? Rihanna, In My Humble Opinion.

4. Rihanna is an Xer-Leaning Millennial! Try Again, Mike!

5. I Didn't Do My Due Diligence, or How I Have to Pick a Favorite Black Gen X Musician For Real This Time.

6. Why Rap & Country Are So Challenging and Why I Much Prefer Tupac Shakur to Will Smith

7. Music. The GotD Frontier

8. As a Gen-Xer, the 1980s is My Favorite Musical Decade

9. These 2 Hypnotic Sitar Albums Saved Me Last Night as the PTSD Demons Struck Back

10. The Thousand Year Charm Offensive of Frank Zappa

11. 6 Songs That Give Me a Burst of Great Memories

Check out “Mike’s Music Morning,” born from these debates.

1. The Inaugural "Mike's Music Morning" post

2. How Many Licks Does it Take to Get to the Center of My Music Collection?

3. Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends.

4. What music evokes an emotional response for you? What song really twangs your heartstrangs?

5. What Reminds You of Mardi Gras? For Me, it's Always Music and Food

6. Would you like a little slink with your Wednesday?

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Back in the eighties, I was teaching a friend and fellow musician to fly. He’d come over and we’d ride down to a small airport in Alliance, Ohio. Having a captive audience, I’d politely insist that he listen to one of Frank Zappa’s tunes before we left my house. My friend had no interest in Zappa, but he wanted to learn to fly. So, at eight in the morning, he dropped his acerbic side and listened to one of my all-time favorites, “The Little House I Used to Live In” from the album Burnt Weeny Sandwich.  

I discovered Zappa in my late teens and quickly became a big fan. My prep was my dad’s records of Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman. The big band sound--horns galore and lots of humor in the trombone and clarinet lines--would also be a favorite Zappa instrumentation. Elvis played a big role as well, and I always regarded both men as fearless. In one of my dad’s silent home movies, I’m gyrating around the backyard playing a badminton racket like it was a guitar, serenading my young aunt. Not a bad performance for a nine-year old!

Zappa wrote everything from doo wop to classical, often accompanied by laugh out loud lyrics. Sometimes the musical passages have numerous sonic pratfalls reminiscent of 1950s sci-fi movies or comedy soundtracks. And there was his guitar playing--savage and fluid, riffing in the last measures of a solo, less as a crescendo, and more as a new path aimed at some future composition.

The tune I subjected my friend to had classical movements and all the American elements of rhythm and blues steamed rolled into a singular adventure, like going to the moon with Jules Verne. The album features electric-violinist Don “Sugarcane” Harris, who rips the fabric of the stratosphere with his dug-in blues lines and ferocious double stops.

Less than a decade later, after torturing my friend on that sunny morning, Zappa passed away from prostate cancer leaving behind a legacy of over 60 albums, countless live performances, and utilizing many great musicians from the jazz and rock and roll world: Jean Luc Ponty, George Duke, Steve Vai, and Sinatra guitarist, Al Viola, to name only a few.

Check out Burnt Weeny Sandwich, which is mostly instrumental except for two doo wop songs covered by Zappa: “WPLJ” (White Port and Lemon Juice) and “Valarie.”

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