Rating: **** Excellent DEAD rock star in interesting new recording shock! `This album is not available to the public,’ sneers a voice on Tiger Roach [Don Van Vliet’s voice]. `Even if it were, you wouldn’t want to listen to it.’ Unlike most of the other dead rock stars currently releasing new material, Zappa knew he was heading for his last encore and worked on this album of out-takes, studio tomfoolery and unreleased tracks in the years before he died in 1993. The result is a stimulating addition to the bulging FZ catalogue and one of the best introductions to his music. Highlights include his 1979Read More →

Rating: **** Excellent DEAD rock star in interesting new recording shock! `This album is not available to the public,’ sneers a voice on Tiger Roach [Don Van Vliet’s voice]. `Even if it were, you wouldn’t want to listen to it.’ Unlike most of the other dead rock stars currently releasing new material, Zappa knew he was heading for his last encore and worked on this album of out-takes, studio tomfoolery and unreleased tracks in the years before he died in 1993. The result is a stimulating addition to the bulging FZ catalogue and one of the best introductions to his music. Highlights include his 1979Read More →

Legend has it that before he reinvented rock music, Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart, sold vacuum cleaners for a living, wandering the scattered trailer communities of the Mojave Desert in search of potential customers. Once, a trailer door opened and Aldous Huxley, author and LSD pioneer, appeared before Vliet’s disbelieving eyes. Stunned, Beefheart pointed at the vacuum cleaner and uttered the immortal words, “This machine sucks” before disappearing into the desert to pursue his true vocation. The 78 “songs’, – and I use the word in its loosest sense – on Grow Fins are testament to both the singular quality of that vocation, and,Read More →