Help I’m A Rock

Bringing more rock to your ROCKTOBER, got two songs for you today – a Frank Zappa song, and a Frank Zappa cover! First, the Frank Zappa song…

“HELP I’M A ROCK”, Frank Zappa [ buy Freak Out! ]

This particular song isn’t one of my favorite Zappa tunes. Actually, I don’t really care for it that much at all – it’s a bit too repetitive and dadaesque to appeal to me. I can only take so much of Frank saying “Help, I’m a rock!” before it loses it’s novelty.

That said, the other songs on the album Freak Out! are MUCH MUCH better! “Go Cry On Somebody Else’s Shoulder” is done in the style of old 50’s doo-wop tunes, and the other few favorites of mine on this album are “Motherly Love”, “Wowie Zowie”, and “Trouble Every Day”… they make up for the 8-minute something-seconds worth of “help, I’m a rock” chants!

I found this next song one day when I was on a Zappa downloading kick, trying to find some more of his instrumental songs (the album “Shut Up And Play Your Guitar” was good, but I prefer instrumentals in the style of “Peaches En Regalia”, for example) – I came across this next song and for about a year or so I really thought that it was a live version performed by Frank and the Mothers… that is until I ran it through the program I Eat Brainz which scanned songs and compared them with the MusicBrainz database to correct the ID3 tags of the files. It was only then that I found out who really performed the song. I was close, though – it wasn’t the Mothers, but instead it was former Mother Steve Vai along with Joe Satriani and Eric Johnson ripping into this cover. Really good, and yet another song that makes me want to bust out the ol’ air guitar! Heck, forget about the air guitar, I’ve been known to say that thanks to this song, I want to try to learn to play guitar JUST to play this – and ONLY this – song!

“MY GUITAR WANTS TO KILL YOUR MAMA”, G3: Joe Satriani, Eric Johnson, Steve Vai [ buy G3: Live In Concert ]