Songs in the key of my life: The Mothers of Invention - Uncle Meat

For a long time in my teens and beyond I was a huge Frank Zappa fan, still am today, but at one time most friends and acquaintances would see me as that Zappa guy. Only recently I visited a used record store and the guy behind the counter came right up to me to ask a specific Zappa question, although I didn't know he was!
My luck was that I had a very bad start with Frank Zappa. Inspired by Raoul Hoffmann's book Zoom Boom on innovative rock music that was a great help to me finding inspirational music I bought the soundtrack 200 Motels. Besides having heard some (sensational) titles by Zappa on radio this was the first album I actually purchased. It was quite a shock and gave me nightmares for at least 3 days. I hated it and even tried to sell it, in vain, of course. I still don't cherish the album that much, but I worked myself through the album piece by piece, bit by bit, until I understood it musically. To make a long story short, I was not done with Zappa yet.
So I got the Uncle Meat album, another recommendation from a book, Siegfried Schmidt-Joos' and Barry Graves' Rock-Lexikon, one of my first 'bibles' on music. It was on their list of the 100 rock albums essential to a collection (till 1976, that is), and I was immediately taken in. This was to me an ingenious collage of all kinds of music, very much in the style of the creepy pop-art cover. There are so many surprises, so much humor (musically and lyrically), wonderful melodies set in almost as throw-aways and powerful atonal passages, it's overwhelming. I still love to listen through it, at best in complete (it's a double album). At the time my family took a vacation in a small mountain town in Austria, and without a record player I quickly copied the 2 records on cassette for the trip. All through that rainy foggy horror week in the Alps I spent every free minute to listen to Uncle Meat, I even learnt to play the Uncle Meat theme on piano, although I couldn't really play piano. Most of the main melodies pop up in my head every once and while even today, especially the main theme and King Kong.
Interestingly, Zappa used a lot of the music from here and integrated it into his The Yellow Shark composition which was performed with a classical orchestra here in Germany. I can only recommed that album as well.