117. FRANK ZAPPA: Call Any Vegetable

A detailed analysis of the above Frank Zappa composition, including notated musical examples.

Call Any Vegetable

LYRICS




...Real good for ya

Notice how the music starts before Frank has the final for ya out of his mouth! Beautiful soprano sax part! Again, FZ uses the brutal-edit technique to perfection here. The music stops

...I don't know...I've always found that if they...

and then cuts right back into the main theme. Again, a stop for the yodeling. New section:

a prune isn't really a vegetable...

in 3/4. Notated below to show the absolutely childlike simplicity of many of FZ's backgrounds!

No one will know

First harpsichord occurrence in TCWOFZ? Possibly. Listen to how the harpsichord and sax weave a steady 1/8th-note pattern together which flows so beautifully in the background.

Music right after

Something to hide

We go into 4/4 with 12 1/8th-note triplet beats per bar for four bars. Then to 6/4 with Frankie stealing the towels again, but not from Stravinsky, for once! This time he borrows from the English composer, Gustav Holst's "Jupiter," from The Planets.

It is impossible to listen to end of this section (which serves as an introduction to "Invocation & Ritual Dance Of The Young Pumpkin") without thinking of a later version of this composition: "Call Any Vegetable" from Just Another Band From L.A. This original version is excellent, but in the later version, as we will detail, FZ writes in a much more carefully-controlled accelerando at the end, which produces an astonishing effect as a new tempo is created for the subsequent guitar solo.

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