What was Frank Zappa’s highest charting song?
Frank Zappa never claimed to be the biggest fan of the album charts.
I mean, from one listen to his music, this wasn’t someone that loved the idea of having hits, and every one of his albums were almost like a different opportunity to screw with the expectations of what a rock musician was supposed to be. If any of his tunes were to have a slight chance at getting on the radio, it would have been a miracle, but stranger things have happened in the music world when someone has the right idea.
Granted, Zappa was always a passing fascination in the world of albums in the late 1960s. Freak Out is among the greatest double album experiences of the time, but throughout the rest of his career, fans shouldn’t have been surprised when he put their brains in a blender. An album like Hot Rats contains some of the most tasteful jazzy rock and roll ever created, but if the furthest anyone went with “experimental” music was The Beatles, they were in for a hell of a ride when Captain Beefheart turned up on one of his albums.
In fact, let’s take one of his most intricate compositions, ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’. The entire construction of the tune is absolutely insane and incredibly inventive for the time, but the lyrics about being promiscuous with an underage girl pretty much guaranteed that it was never going to get on the radio.
But Zappa seemed to relish in being outside of the mainstream. He never wanted to be a manufactured pop star, and half of his records were all about making fun of the commercialism every one of his contemporaries were following. We’re Only It For the Money might be a classic from the 1960s, but rarely has any album from the Woodstock generation been more cynical about the idea of the peace-and-love movement.
So for a long time, ‘Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow’ seemed like the biggest hit he was ever going to have, and it’s not like number 86 on the charts was any major achievement or anything. But now that the 1980s gave way to an even more dumb movement with the ‘Valley Girl’ stereotype, Zappa figured he would have some fun and came up with the song of the same name with his daughter, Moon Unit Zappa.
And even for someone with a strong tolerance for 1980s stereotypes, there’s a chance that Moon’s vocals on the track are going to be a little bit much. There’s a 90% chance that anyone living anywhere close to California circa 1983 had either met a woman with this voice, but it was clear that people either didn’t get the joke or took it as a celebration of the ‘valley girl’, giving him his only top 40 hit at number 32 on the charts.
Then again, it’s not like Zappa was trying to write a hit or anything. A lot of his critiques of society like this were more about being cheeky, but it’s nice to take the wins where you can get them. After all, there was no reason for him not to roll with it when people thought it was cute, but judging by his track record, it wasn’t like Zappa was ever going to be returning to this sound ever again.
‘Valley Girl’ was clearly a one-off, but the fact that it was able to make a considerable dent in the charts proved that Zappa had a general idea of how to make a hit if he wanted to. Even if it went down in history as one of the single most annoying performances to appear on the charts during that decade, it is oddly wholesome that one of the most cynical artists in the world actually had a touching father/daughter moment in his discography.
