Frank Zappa Thing-Fish CD

Personnel: Frank Zappa (guitar, Synclavier); Steve Vai, Ray White (guitar); Chuck Wild (piano); Tommy Mars (keyboards); Jay Anderson (acoustic bass); Arthur Barrow, Scott Thunes (bass); Chad Wackerman (drums); Ed Mann (percussion); Steve De Furia, David Ocker (programming).
Cast of THING-FISH: Ike Willis (Thing Fish); Terry Bozzio (Harry); Dale Bozzio (Rhonda); Napoleon Murphy Brock (Evil Prince); Bob Harris (Harry-As-A-Boy); Johnny "Guitar" Watson (Brown Moses); Ray White (Owl-Gonkwin-Jane Cowhoon).
Originally released as a 3 LP set.
Of all of Frank Zappa's discography, Thing-Fish must be his most controversial, misunderstood, overlooked album. Obviously, it is not a masterpiece, but reducing it to a compilation album with a racist plot distorts the reality. First released as a three-LP set (and reissued on two CDs), this album is the "original cast recording" of a never-produced Broadway show. Working-class joes have been mutated into potato-headed, duck-mouthed creatures by a government experiment gone wrong. They put up a Broadway musical in which reality and fiction become one for two members of the audience. The main character, Thing-Fish, is played by Ike Willis. His thick caricatured Negro accent is directly taken from Amos 'n' Andy's King Fish character. Zappa's intention was not to mock African Americans, but to ridicule the way they are depicted on Broadway, mainly a white male-dominated milieu. Harry and Rhonda, the two audience members drawn into the story by force, are played by Terry Bozzio and Dale Bozzio. Harry will realize he is gay, Rhonda will turn into a briefcase fetishist. Zappa exaggerates the yuppie trends of the mid-'80s (Harry is gay for "career purposes"; Rhonda embodies the ultra-feminist) and slips into the plot concerns about the spread of AIDS being the result of governmental scientific experiments. It's crazy, offensive, barely holding together, but it sure is entertaining. To accommodate the plot, Zappa wrote a couple of new songs and re-recorded a handful of tracks from Zoot Allures, You Are What You Is, Tinsel-Town Rebellion, and Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch with new lyrics. It is definitely for the seasoned fan (the conceptual continuity clues make an integral part of the experience), but more than rehashed material. ~ François Couture
Like his masterpiece JOE'S GARAGE, Zappa's THING-FISH is an epic rock opera on a grand scale. The comical narration by Ike Willis in the title role, with his own Amos-&-Andy-ish dialect, may seem like harmless buffoonery on the surface, but there is a dastardly evil undercurrent. The overall theme is the attempt by the establishment to systematically do away with certain undesirables in society. Instead, bizarre mutations called the mammy nuns are created and proceed to overtake mankind through the context of a Broadway show.
Along the way, Zappa's compositional and satirical genius is in full creative overdrive as he manipulates his many strange characters (including Terry and Dale Bozzio as ignorant theater goers) through the weird libretto. Although many of the musical pieces only work in the context of the story, a dramatic reworking of the classic "The Torture Never Stops," the driving "You Are What You Is" and the gospel-sounding "The Meek Shall Inherit Nothing" are stand-out performances. Disc two continues with strange robotic voices in "The Crab-Grass Baby," the rocking "No Not Now" and it's backwards-running counterpart "Won Ton On" as the grand finale.