Frank Zappa's first solo album is set for an expanded 50th-anniversary reissue. The new six-disc edition of Hot Rats includes unreleased basic tracks, rare and unedited mixes, work mixes and other ...

When he resurfaced not long afterward with Hot Rats, his second solo album, he sounded little like the bizarre innovator who had skewered the mainstream and counterculture alike with the Mothers. Yet ...

In the summer of 1969, 19-year-old Bill Gubbins aspired to interview his musical hero, Frank Zappa, then touring with The Mothers of Invention in Warrensville Heights, Ohio. What Gubbins didn’t know ...

America in 1969 was nearly as weird as it is today. A seemingly endless war in Southeast Asia, the horrific assassinations of political progressives and creepy Richard Nixon’s presidency cast shadows ...

Unless you were around and musically aware in 1969 when this, Frank Zappa’s first official solo album, was unleashed, it’s hard to understand how revolutionary it was. Fifty years later, little has ...

You might well conclude that in 1969 the mere presence of Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart could turn the trees purple. Pedants will insist their records of that year looked the way they did because ...

Welcome to The Vinyl Voyager. My weekly diary of what music on vinyl, in its purest form, means to me. Track-by-track, note-by-note: Here’s what influences me and keeps me moving forward in a world ...