A melody that refused a lyric
A drum fill kicks the door, bright and almost comic, and then a tune arrives already fully dressed, stacked in bright colours, as if a cartoon court had hired a jazz band.
Peaches en Regalia opens Hot Rats, Frank Zappa’s largely instrumental album, released in October 1969. He recorded it that summer at T.T.G. Studios in Hollywood and at Whitney Studios in Glendale, producing it himself. The basic rhythm was a small band. The splendour is overdub. Ian Underwood plays a small orchestra of reeds and keyboards, part by part. Shuggie Otis, still a teenager, plays bass. Zappa later said this one track ate more than a hundred hours, because no more than four people played at once and the rest was built in layers. The melody is cheerful in a way his reputation does not always allow. It marches, it winks, it never explains the title. Live, for years, the same drum fill raised the curtain or closed the night.
He tried to put words on it and failed, which annoyed him, because failure of that kind was rare. One syllable to each eighth note, he said, and you cannot change the tune. That is the game, and he lost it on purpose by leaving the piece alone. On Fillmore East, June 1971 the melody returns with wordless voices. In 1981, as Peaches III, it wears synthesizers. The 1969 recording is the one that still sounds like a confection with a steel frame. Nothing about it is casual. The joke is how light it feels.
Peaches en Regalia is the only one I’ve never really been able to write words for. I’ve tried, but I can’t come up with a set of lyrics which will work with it.
(Frank Zappa, International Times, 1977)
Guitarists have treated it as a test, and big bands have treated it as a chart, and both are right. The tune is sturdy enough to survive a faithful reading and strange enough to punish a sloppy one. Zappa kept it in the set across decades when almost everything else rotated. Audiences who feared the satire could enter here. There is no punchline to flinch from, only a melody that grins. Underwood’s overdubs are the grin’s teeth, precise, a little wild, never messy.
What remains is a piece of pure writing that happens to have no words. The title sounds like a dessert and a coronation, and the music agrees to both. Zappa, who distrusted prettiness unless he had built it himself, built this one until it could stand without him talking. The drum fill is still the fastest way into his world for anyone who thinks that world is only jokes. Stay for the saxophones. They are the argument, and they are having a wonderful time.
