Frank Zappa
Peaches En Regalia

THE REVIEW

I would start by quoting some passages from "Abbecedario delle cose mostruose," a ragged medieval bestiary written in macaronic Latin by Aloysius Grunt, a scholar of imaginary zoology and Duke of Plums.

Aloysius, noble yet wild, lived in perpetual seclusion, alien to any contact with those beings, humans, whom he despised more than anything else. Solitude soon led him to extravagant interests and even more extravagant ideas.

He was convinced that there was no salvation in the normal order of things and that only the unheard-of, the unknown, and the monstrous would give meaning to the world. For this reason, all the repellent beasts that then populated the fears of men represented for him the only hope of redemption.

Especially, although he had never seen one, he was obsessed with dragons, offspring of all possible putridness and lords of stagnant waters. In the bestiary, you can read phrases like "The fire that comes out of their mouths is but a laugh" "What I would give to see them even once happily grazing in their total absence of grace!!!"

But let's get to the passage that concerns us closely:

"You can't imagine how joyous it is for dragons to feast on a good soup of warm mice. After gulping down three or four bowls of it, their terrifying expression changes to seraphic, becoming just like that of a gigantic infant just detached from an equally gigantic breast. But it doesn't end here, as this expression is only the prelude to an even more bizarre occurrence: the flying lizards, in fact, suddenly start to dance to the notes of the most bizarre music ever heard, which emanates from their own stomachs. Don't think of thundering belches, but rather of graceful internal noises."

Aloisyus, with great imaginative effort, tries to describe that music and does so with words that almost seem to allude to certain Zappa-like quirks.

"An airy and bonhomous melody blown into the sky by a kind of laughing gas while everything seems to go from pillar to post and from post to pillar."

Damn, it seems he's describing "Peaches en Regalia"!!!! What was Uncle Frank doing in Europe around the year one thousand?

But perhaps Aloysius Grunt is just one of the thousand incarnations of the Zappa spirit, irrespective of whether it's retroactive, backdated, or whatever the hell you call it.

And the Zappa spirit, a kind of opposite of the sublime more sublime than the sublime itself, is one of those things that make the world a better place.

After all, as the poet says, "it is a fart that announces paradise." Certainly not Chopin...

Trallallà...