VINYL - Frank Zappa's "You Didn't Try to Call Me"

Many thanks to the brilliant Walter Hawn for the heads up about this new-to-me track. It has everything I love Frank Zappa for -- bizarre and quirky lyrics, complex instrumentation that still manages to sound like good old stripped-down rock'n'roll, and just a hint of sentimentality.

Zappa comes off as a condescending jerk sometimes, but all is always forgiven for the way he tickles my brain and my earholes. I speak in the present tense, for he is with us always in the grooves of vinyl and memories of the first time we heard something like Lumpy Gravy and demanded to know: "What the Snape was that?"

Back in my extra-contrarian twenties, when I was a state Libertarian Party official in Massachusetts, I kept lobbying the rest of the crew to get bumper stickers made up that read "Frank Zappa: He may be dead, but he'd still make a better president than you."