Summer Deep Dive: Frank Zappa's 'Willie The Pimp'

"Man In A Suit With a Bow Tie Neck. Wanna Buy A Grunt With a Third Party Check"

If you don’t know who Frank Zappa (1940-1993) is then I don’t think I want to be the one to tell you. The man, his music, and his legacy are complex and a full elaboration would require revealing lurid, surrealistic demi-mondes which I cannot, in good conscience, expose without warning to my beloved readers.

L-R (1) Singer/Songwriter Frank Zappa (1940-1993) performs at The Fox Theater in Atlanta Georgia. October 25, 1981 (2) Captain Beefheart (1941-2010).

Zappa was an iconoclast and musical innovator who used his art to expose the venality and duplicity of American society. His music delighted in the absurd, avart-garde, and profane.

The song tells the story of a low-level prostitution ring being run out of Coney Island’s Lido Hotel in the 1960s; “Willie The Pimp” narrates the action in a guttural vocal performance by Captain Beefheart (1941-2010), a fascinating character and avant-garde artist who worked on-and-off with Zappa for many years.

Zappa plays an eight minute guitar solo (1:20-9:23) which, as a fifteen year old wannabe guitar hero I spent fruitless hours trying to learn the play (and used my pizza maker money on a wah-wah …