Thursday, June 01, 2006

If you've never sinned before

From March 1963, here’s Baby Ray & The Ferns only single. I think it’s a great record. “How’s Your Bird?” was the A-side of the record, the name of the song was a Steve Allen catchphrase. I doubt Allen ever heard the record, he hated rock & roll.

The flipside is the winner here though. “The World’s Greatest Sinner” is a great song. Frank Zappa fans will probably howl in outrage but in my opinion, Frank Zappa never did anything better than this record. Most of the Zappa fans I know are old hippies with little or no sense of humor so if you’re a Zappa fan and you like this song anyway, I apologize. Zappa wrote the song as well as all the other music for Timothy Carey’s The World’s Greatest Sinner movie, I don’t know if this song is in the film or not. Who’s seen it?

Ray Collins was Baby Ray, he was also in the Mothers of Invention. Frank Zappa was the Ferns, he played all of the instruments except piano, a man named Paul Buff was the piano playing Fern. Collins told Frank that “How’s Your Bird” would be a good name for a song so Zappa wrote the song. Zappa produced the sessions as well. Frank was busy, it wouldn't surprise me if he made lunch for everybody too.

2 Comments:

Blogger theoldroadhog said...

Kip you won't believe it but I smoked some weed and had fun listening to The Mothers with some cute women, so...now I like them. I never liked that World's Greatest Sinner song though.

Most everything else you've been posting has been great.

I put one up today, something I've been listening to a bit lately.

5/6/06 5:25 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Zappa actually appeared on the Steve Allen TV show as a composer and performer on the musical instrument the bicycle (no shit) and plugs the movie World's Greatest Sinner as well as the How's Your Bird 45. Also does an aleotoric number with the studio band...

5/6/06 9:35 PM  

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