“The insincere assholes who run almost everybody’s country are plastic people. References to Sunset Boulevard, Pandora’s Box, CIA, and Laurel Canyon, all relate to the first youth riots in Los Angeles last year”Frank Zappa (936)

“‘The Duke of Prunes’ is a surrealistic love song. Euphemistic sexual imagery popular in country blues with which many of you might already be familiar, is transmuted in this particular piece from the basic “Fuck me, suck me, till my eyes roll back baby” to “prune me, cheese me, go-kart . . . ” or something like that. This song, is very strange.”Frank Zappa (936)

“The best clue to this song might lie in the fact that people who are inactive in a society . . . people who do not live up to their responsibilities are vegetables. I feel that these people, even if they are inactive, apathetic or unconcerned at this point can be motivated toward a more useful sort of existence. I believe that if you call any vegetable then it will respond to you.”Frank Zappa (936)

“‘Status Back Baby’ is a song about young acne America and their daily trials and tribulations. It is unfortunate that many young Americans really do worry about losing status at their high school. De Molay is a religious youth organization in the United States. A Pom Pom Girl is a young lady who cuts strips of crepe paper all week long after school to make an object known as a pom pom, which is a puffy ball composed of strips of crepe paper. After she has manufactured her own pom pom, she will go to the football game and jump high in the air with her pom pom in her hand shouting, as she does so, these immortal words: “We’ve got a team that’s on the beam, that’s relly hep to the jive. Come on tigers, let’s skin ’em alive.”Or, “Push ’em back, push ’em back. We like it, sissboombah.” Then they drink beer and get pregnant in the back of somebody’s car.”Frank Zappa (936)

“‘Uncle Bernie’s Farm’ is a song about ugly toys and the people who make them. Implied here is the possibility that the people who buy the ugly toys might be as ugly as the toys themselves.”Frank Zappa (936)

“‘Son of Suzy Creamcheese’ is a stirring saga of a young groupie. Her actions are all motivated by a desire to be “in” at all times. Hence the drug abuse (blowing her mind on too much Kool-aid: acid . . . Stealing her boyfriends’s stash: a hidden supply of drugs . . . and leaving Los Angeles for a protest march in Berkeley).”Frank Zappa (936)

“‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’ is a song about the people who run the government, the people who make the laws that keep you from living the kind of life you know you should lead. These unfortunate people manufacture inequitable laws and ordinances, perhaps unaware of the fact that the restrictions they place on the young people in a society are a result of their own hidden sexual frustrations. Dirty old men have no business running your country.”Frank Zappa (936)

“‘America Drinks and Goes Home’ is an unsubtle parody of adult conduct in neighborhood cocktail lounges in America. The humor is aimed at (1) the type of music your parents like to listen to, (2) the manner in which they like to have it performed (the insincerity of the night-club crooner in his closing address to the alcoholics at the bar), (3) the manner in which the audience persists in talking above the level of the music while it is being performed (which belies their disrespect as an art and for anyone involved in the performance of music).”Frank Zappa (936)

“The story about the girl who wouldn’t make it with Howie unless he sung her his hit record — it’s a true story! He told me about it when he first got in the group and I thought about it for almost a year before I finally wrote the song. I knew it just had to be immortalized.”Frank Zappa (937)

“Well, there’s a song in this album about dental floss. Dental floss is a type of flaxen string which is coated with wax and comes in a 500-yard spool in a little plastic box. You pull it out and tear a strip off and you pull it between your teeth to remove food particles.”Frank Zappa (938)

“Is a very strange boy-girl situation.”Frank Zappa (938)

“Is a song about television.”Frank Zappa (938)

“It was considered inflammatory at the time, but we’re talking explicit not implicit. That song does spell it out. You have to remember what the Watts riots were. They were the first major race riots in contemporary history. People just didn’t know how to deal with it. The television stations in Los Angeles were covering this thing like it was a real news spectacle. And the line [in the song – Ed] about the woman driver being machine-gunned from her seat, that really happened. It was a lady, and the news announced, “Yeah, this woman has been sawed in half by 50 caliber machine gun bullets by the National Guard.” That’s what the Watts riots were. It wasn’t quaint, it wasn’t cute, it was like “what in the world is going on here?” And it was only a few miles from where I lived.”Frank Zappa (939)

“‘Broadway The Hard Way’ was very very specific, because it was about the 1988 election and all the televangelist stuff. But that kind of specific stuff, although it gets stale very quickly in the short term, in the long term it may be an interesting historical document the same way ‘We’re Only In It For The Money’ is. Because at that time, in ’67/’68 when we did that, it seemed almost redundant to sing about flower power, because we were right in the middle of it – so who could give a fuck? But listen to it today, and it’s the only album from the period that raises an eyebrow about flower power and what hippies were all about.”Frank Zappa (935)