How Frank Zappa Embraced the Mainstream with Apostrophe (‘)
Looking back on the American composer’s most commercially successful LP
Satirist, guitarist, composer, humorist and Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Frank Zappa (class of ’95, inducted by Lou Reed) was many things to many people.
His best-known and best-selling album – 1974’s Apostrophe (’) – celebrates its 50th anniversary this month. For many casual music fans, all they know of the rock legend is the humorous hit single “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow” from Apostrophe (’), which would become the artist’s albatross, a novelty song that plagued his career for almost a decade until the surprise success of “Valley Girl,” a 1982 duet with his teenage daughter Moon Unit that hit the Top 30 and became an MTV favorite.
Prolific to a fault, Zappa’s career spanned four decades and spawned better than 60 studio and live albums up to his death in December 1993 from cancer. Even then, the avant-garde rocker and studio wizard had planned for a lengthy and ambitious posthumous career, as another 60+ albums (and counting) have been released by his estate since Mr. Zappa joined the Choir Invisible. During his lengthy career, first as bandleader of the absurdist satirical music-makers the Mothers of Invention, then as a solo artist, Zappa tilted at windmills, steadfastly challenging the status quo (musically and socially), dabbling in genres as diverse as rock, pop, jazz, soul and classical music while also pioneering his own uniquely-personal style of musique concrète.
Zappa valued virtuosity in his accompanying musicians and he also brought his singular creative vision to music video, movies, studio production, and even album artwork. An early indie-rock innovator (establishing his own imprints out of necessity as Zappa seems to have fallen out with every major label he was ever signed to), Zappa basically dissolved the Mothers after back-to-back career setbacks – the loss of $50,000 in equipment in a fire at the Casino de Montreux in Switzerland, an event documented by the Deep Purple song “Smoke On the Water,” and his subsequent assault by a crazed concert-goer that sidelined the guitarist with serious injuries that prevented his touring for months.
Laid up in the studio and working from a wheelchair, Zappa recorded a pair of 1972 solo albums – Waka/Jawaka and The Grand Wazoo – which explored his fascination with jazz-rock fusion, working with a large supporting cast of musicians. Changing direction, Zappa recorded both 1973’s Over-Nite Sensation and much of the following year’s Apostrophe (’) at the same time, utilizing a smaller cast of musicians that included keyboardist George Duke, guitarist Tony Duran, longtime percussionist Ruth Underwood, violinist Don “Sugarcane” Harris, bassist ‘Erroneous’ (a/k/a Alex Dmochowski), and a full horn section. While side one of Apostrophe (’) was comprised of new recording, side two includes tracks from several 1972 sessions with overdubs recorded in 1973 and ’74, and spliced in by producer Frank.
VIDEO: Frank Zappa “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow”
“Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow” kicks off Apostrophe (’), a light-hearted ditty that helped drive punters to the record store in droves. At a hair over two-minutes in length, it’s one of Zappa’s shortest, full-fledged and fully realized songs, nearly perfect in its construction and as an introduction to a longer musical suite. From the howling arctic winds that dissolve into Zappa’s taut, now-familiar guitar riff, his vox kick in with The Maestro’s absurdist tale of a young Eskimo lad named Nanook and the sage advice provided by his mother.
There’s an antagonist in the story, of course – the Fur Trapper yielding a lead-filled snowshoe – who finds his comeuppance in the form of the deadly ‘yellow’ snow crystals as the song segues nearly seamlessly into “Nanook Rubs It,” which is more typically ‘Zappa-esque’ than its predecessor, with odd percussion, harmony vocals, frenetic keyboard exercises, and shards of jagged fretwork punctuating Zappa’s deadpan lyrical delivery. After name-checking the “mud shark” in popular mythology (Google “mud shark” and “Led Zeppelin” and see what you find…), the lyrics descend into a nadir of sophomoric humor and minimalist instrumentation.
The third part of the story-suite is the jaunty “St. Alfonzo’s Pancake Breakfast,” an avant-garde mid-tempo rocker with complex instrumentation and an infectious melody. Zappa’s lyrics speak of some sort of margarine theft and abuse of pork products before an odd vibraphone passage (performed by the underrated Ruth Underwood) leads straightaway into the unrelenting, breakneck conclusion to the story with “Father O’Blivion,” which showcases the assembled band’s immense musical skills, throws a little liturgic Latin into the word salad, and closes big with a doo-wop styled finish and fade out.
Honestly, even as a somewhat erudite teenager well-steeped in Zappa’s surrealist soundscapes, I could never figure out how “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow” became a minor hit single with frequent radio airplay (AM and FM!). According to the liner notes (by writer Dan Quellette) to the 1995 “best of” compilation Strictly Commercial, a DJ at an FM station in Pittsburgh edited “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow” and “Nanook Rubs It” to a length he could play on his program. Hearing of this, Zappa edited his own version – drawing upon the entire suite – condensing ten minutes of music down to roughly three-and-a-half, which was still stretching the limits for radio airplay in those days. The single only hit #86 on the Billboard charts, but it helped push the album itself to a Top Ten chart position and Gold™ Record sales status.
The B-side of the “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow” single was “Cosmik Debris,” a razor-toting blues-rocker with Zappa’s somber, almost whispered vocals and soulful backing vox; sonic fringe comprised of George Duke’s keyboard noodling and Napoleon Murphy Brock’s brassy sax work; not to mention Zappa’s devastating flamethrower guitar licks. A sly, satirical take on 1960s-era mysticism and the sort of ‘spiritual’ gurus that were still rampant in the early years of the ‘70s, “Cosmik Debris” provided an up-tempo and nearly mainstream AOR-styled finish to side one of Apostrophe (’).
Opening side two with the manic, jazz-inflected, fast-paced “Excentrifugal Forz” (which includes a drum track originally recorded in 1969 for the Hot Rats LP), Zappa eases the listener into the more cerebral and musically-dense title track, which is more in line with the spirit of The Grand Wazoo. The result of a 1972 studio jam between Zappa, bassist Jack Bruce and drummer Jim Gordon, “Apostrophe’” is nearly six minutes of whiplash time signature changes, instrumental improvisation and musical madness that provides a pulse-pounding good time. Although Bruce is credited as playing on and co-writing the track, he averred that he only played cello on the song’s intro, telling the Polish music magazine Tylko in a 1992 interview that Zappa told him “listen, I would like you to play a sound, like this… whaaaaaang!!!” So I did what he asked me to do. Whaaaaaang!!! That was all. That was my input to Frank Zappa’s most popular record!”
A sequel, of sorts, to the Mothers of Invention song “Trouble Every Day,” the satirical “Uncle Remus” was written by Zappa and Duke and features plenty of the keyboardist’s inspired piano play beneath a light melody and Zappa’s scalpel-sharp guitar solos. A commentary on racism and the civil rights movement, it’s an issue that Zappa – who had typically led multi-racial bands since the 1960s – would revisit time and time again over the decades. The song is a cautious blend of mainstream rock, blues, soul, and Gospel with Zappa’s hard-hitting lyrics mocking the empty promise made to people of color in our country, singing “just keep yer nose to the grindstone, they say will that redeem us…”
Apostrophe (’) closes with another absurdist jaunt, “Stink-Foot” starting out as a cautionary tale about rank footwear before swerving into a canine conversation that yields the surreal lyrical gem (and inspiration for the album title) “the crux of the biscuit is the apostrophe.” The music rumbles beneath Zappa’s vocals like boiling lava, various instruments adding their own signature to the cacophonic mix; anchored by Z’s imaginative and otherworldly guitar pull, you can hear chiming keyboards, cymbals being brushed, a steady bass line, and other unique sonic renderings.
Reviews of Apostrophe (’) at the time of its release were largely positive, with Rolling Stone magazine’s Gordon Fletcher writing “having proven his stellar musicianship on a series of instrumental-based solo albums, Frank Zappa is now returning to the musical satire on which his formidable reputation was built. Apostrophe turns out to be so brilliantly successful, though, that it seems as though he’s never left this field…truly a mother of an album.” Other critics pointed caustically to the sophomoric and often scatological humor found in many of his songs, something that Zappa addressed in his 1989 biography, The Real Frank Zappa Book. “I don’t have any pretentions about being a poet,” he wrote, “my lyrics are there for entertainment purposes only – not to be taken internally (emphasis his). Some of them are truly stupid, some are slightly less stupid and few of them are sort of funny.”
The unlikely success of Apostrophe (’) helped pull Over-Nite Sensation to similar Gold™ Record sales status and certainly helped Zappa’s subsequent records – the double-live Roxy & Elsewhere (released in late 1974 and credited to Zappa/Mothers) and 1975’s One Size Fits All (credited to Zappa and the Mothers of Invention) – to both achieve Top 30 chart positions. The album has been reissued numerous times through the years, including by Rykodisc on CD in 1986 as a “two-fer,” combined with Over-Nite Sensation on a single disc and, most recently, in 2014, on vinyl again.
Apostrophe (’) has yet to receive the sort of deluxe box set treatment afforded many of its predecessors – including a recently reissued five-disc version of Over-Nite Sensation. But with the album celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2024, can a fan-friendly, collector-satisfying, expanded version of what is Zappa’s most popular and enduring album be far behind? We can only anticipate what sort of musical treats such a set would provide…
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