Covering Zappa

I’m off to rehearse with the little band I play in shortly. We play a couple of Zappa covers; “Let’s Make The Water Turn Black”, “The Torture Never Stops” and “I’m The Slime”, to be exact.
If you were a musician (well maybe you are), which Zappa tune would you cover? What instrument? And for what reason?

15 thoughts on “Covering Zappa”

  1. Anyway the Wind Blows or one of the other Doo Wop tunes, as long as I could get to sing the high parts (and/or play the kazoo) or Dumb All Over or perhaps SOFA in the erzatz German or Inca Roads or or anything on OSFA. So hard to stop…….

  2. Echidna’s Arf, that’s a sweet song. I know it fine on the bass, i just need to fine a few good musicians that can play complex music with me.

    I need a drummer and a guitarist and/or a keyboardist.

  3. I’ve actually covered everyone of them in my stinky little room with my weird bit o’ guitar.. not all ‘o ’em so succesfully of course, but if I had a real band i’d like to do Watermelon with them… aaahhh.. :-)

  4. I’d cover Pygmy Twylyte, Apostrophe (the song, not the whole album!) and Little Umbrellas. I guess those would be my top three for now….ask me again in two hours, and it could all change.

  5. For something good to rock out on, might I suggest Wino Man or Magic Fingers? If you like a funky groove, you can jam to the vamp part in Pygmye Twylyte.

  6. The middle-late stuff. Stuff from Baby Snakes, Live in NY or Sheik Yerbouti. Guuud stuff. Throw in Dumb All Over and He’s So Gay for extra humorous effect, and some off the wall interpretation of Peaches.

  7. My Band prides itself on doing requests. We once (and only once) had a request for some Zappa. In France proved not too complicated – but the other guys had never heard the lyrics. When barely made it past me singing “They gotta mystery blowjob, turn your peter green”.
    SOFA

  8. oh, I suppose just the easy stuff to start off with, y’know; Inca Roads, RDNZL, Ship Arriving Too Late To Save A Drowning Witch,
    Sinister Footwear and then perhaps more complicated compositions like Louie Louie

  9. As a solo acoustic guitarist/vocalist-type, with chops far more limited than I’d like….my choices would be Trouble Comin’ Every Day, Harder Than Your Husband, Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance, How Could I Be Such A Fool and Heavenly Bank Account, all of which I can picture in that limited setting. Most of CWRATJ would work, when I think about it — but the aforementioned are on my to-learn/arrange list.

  10. Las Pesadillas played a “Dead Rock Stars”-themed Halloween show (the venue’s theme, not ours), with a compact medley of Let’s Make The Water Turn Black, What’s The Ugliest Part of Your Body? and Peaches en Regalia (introduced with the spoken intro from Go Cry On Somebody Else’s Shoulder). Not the most obscure cover tunes, but we had to whip it out in like a week.

  11. Dumb all over just because it’s fun to watch people’s reactions to the closing line “if we’re DUMB, then god is DUMB, and maybe even a little ugly on the side”. People have such a knee-jerk belief in the superstitious in this country that even most self proclaimed intellectuals get nervous whenever someone mocks ‘The Allmighty God’. [the first time I sang it was at a kegger in high school in arch-conservative Orlando, FL. 2 people got really pissed off and the party was quiet for a while after that]

  12. I would do a cover of Mo ‘n Herb’s Vacation, and the First Movement of Sinister Footwear, as they both have not been done by a “Rock” band. And because it would take a few or more years to rehearse them in order to play them “well”.

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