Next up was Sheik Yerbouti, the first CD I ever bought and probably my favourite Zappa album.Įnter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. I would immediately go back/forward and investigate FZ’s career in more detail. ‘Envelopes’ is a brief but brilliant through-composed tribute to Conlon Nancarrow featuring close-interval, player-piano perversions, while ‘Teenage Prostitute’ is the R-rated version of ‘Valley Girl’, a hellish vision of Hollywood’s underbelly complete with ‘Peter Gunn’ riffs, intricate marimba and operatic vocals by Lisa Popeil. The title track is surely one of his career highlights, a unique, surrealistic 12-minute salvo featuring spoken-word, ‘scatting’, a great rock guitar solo over a grinding 9/8 vamp, a blizzard of avant-garde piano/percussion and even a quote from Stravinsky’s ‘Rite Of Spring’ (of course also a piece about ritual sacrifice). It should really be heard in its totality.
#SHIP ARRIVING TOO LATE TO SAVE A DROWNING WITCH TV#
It was a typically bold, spontaneous and very successful career move by FZ resulting in a timely hit single (peaking at #32 in the US).īut we then unfortunately segue into ‘I Come From Nowhere’, a fairly unlistenable track about the inanity of TV personalities with a ghastly vocal performance by Roy Estrada over an uninvolving, sub-Men At Work riff.īut side two of Ship demonstrates all that’s essential about ’80s Zappa. Ship Arriving Too Late To Save A Drowning Witch LP. ‘Valley Girl’ placed killer new-wave rock around daughter Moon’s hilarious vocal exclamations. Frank Zappa - Ship Arriving Too Late To Save A Drowning Witch - Used - U5859A. Opening track ‘No Not Now’, concerning the sexual dilemmas of a long-distance truck driver, is a six-minute disaster area that would surely test the patience of even the most diehard Zappa fan. Frank Zappas Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch is an album (featuring the song, Valley Girl co-written with Moon Unit Zappa) released on. Ship ditched the lush, multi-tracked sound of 1981’s You Are What You Is in favour of a no-reverb, claustrophobic mix featuring Chad Wackerman’s busy drums, blaring synths, in-your-face bass and loads of wacky guitar processing.
I was going to say that Ship was not the ideal album to start with, but actually with hindsight it probably was it’s maddening, brilliant, tawdry, overblown – basically a microcosm of Zappa’s ’80s output. Before Ship, I had only heard choice cuts courtesy of a friend’s career-spanning compilation. It was a cheapo Fame Records/EMI cassette edition. This is the first Zappa album I ever bought.
Barking Pumpkin Records, released 3rd May 1982īought: Virgin Megastore, Oxford Street, 1988 (directly after seeing Robert Fripp play instore…)
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