This nine-minute extravaganza is essentially an extended guitar solo, much like Funkadelic’s extraordinary Maggot Brain. And just as good.

In truth, Frank Zappa was never much to my taste, either musically or as a person, but he could certainly play his instrument. And he was popular at my school with the cool older boys who liked Captain Beefheart.

There may even have been a brief period when I was quite taken with his album Hot Rats, from which I remember another Zappa instrumental called Peaches En Regalia.

And I was mildly amused by that song Valley Girl (with his daughter Moon Unit in the title role) and Don’t Eat The Yellow Snow; neither of which made me take him seriously as a musician.

Nevertheless, when I was in my teens I went to see him perform in Amsterdam with my late friend Ben, on our Hunter S Thompson-inspired road trip to Berlin; mainly because it was the only gig on during our short stay.

Earlier in the day we had bought some hash and, youthfully paranoid about being caught in the most famously liberal city in the world for soft drugs, driven far out of the city in my red Mini Cooper to smoke it in scenic surroundings beside some sort of dyke.

Thus prepared for the evening ahead, we made our way to some enormodome to see the gig. I’m not sure about the gig but the pot must have been good because all I actually remember of the rest of the evening is that Zappa wore a mauve jumpsuit. 

Intoxicated by the experience (or perhaps just the hash), I later bought this album, Joe’s Garage – though I don’t remember playing it more than once or twice. It’s apparently some sort of ‘opera’ and boasts some particularly infantile song titles like Fembot In A Wet T-Shirt and Why Does It Hurt When I Pee? 

Trivia fact: Zappa once explained, on a radio broadcast, that the complete title of this song is “Getting this band to play something that sounds like music is like trying to grow a watermelon in Easter hay”.