Blast From The Past

A classic Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention clip from an English broadcast in 1968. I believe the musicians are Frank Zappa (guitar), Roy Estrada (vocals and bass), Don Preston (keyboards), Ian Underwood, Bunk Gardner, and Motorhead Sherman (saxophones), and Jimmy Carl Black (drums), but I may be wrong.

The vocals. At first, it sounds like Estrada is deliberately attempting to sabotage the song by singing in at least one register too high, but as the song progresses you realize that it's the perfect pitch - there's really no other way that it could be sung. On a second or third listen, you realize that he's nailed it.

There's really not too much more that I can say about this video that Zappa himself doesn't say at the end. To quote: "We're involved in sort of a low-key war against apathy. I don't know how you're doing on apathy over there but we got a lot of it, boys and girls. A lot of what we do is designed to annoy people to the point where they might just for a second question enough of their environment to do something about it. As long as they don't feel their environment and they don't worry about it, they're not going to do anything to change it."

"Something's got to be done before America scarfs up the world and shits on it."

That was 41 years ago, friends.