h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

With Frank's birthday almost upon us, I'd just like to say that I've been listening since the early seventies, and was lucky enough to see the maestro in 1978 (?), when he last toured Britain.

Who are the brain police?

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares,wins"

You Rang!?

Well, I didn't so much 'ring' as respond to your 'handle'. I take it you're a fan too?

Pattern-chaser

"If she was my daughter, I'd..."

"What would you do, Daddy?"

I refer to him as St.Frank.

I hope to have him tattooed on my arm some day.

Not really a 'fan', I mean, not rabid or anything. But, as with Spike Jones and His City Slickers, which I'm listening to right now, or Bela Bartok, or Bob Wills and his band, or Jimmy Lunceford, or ..., Frank is a daily part of my musical diet and he influenced my choice of instruments, my writing style and the weird things I bang out on the piano when I can fidn one. He's one of the few adults I ever had any faith in because he didn't trade his imagination for a load of horses**t.

tonsil you never before mentioned you played.
Are you the church organist then?
And you can e-mail me some of your midis anytime!
I assume you have written some good stuff.
Maybe we can collaborate on a broadway musical.
I have an idea called "RE:Union". Imagine it in lights with the stars and stripes design, the RE: being the stars in the upper left and the word Union furling in the wind as the stripes bit.
It takes place in Virginia ten years after the end of the Civil War.
It's like an all singing all dancing backstory to the Waltons
Yes I'm serious. Can you count in seven figure numbers?
For perhaps no other reason than America needs to re-find the word 'union'. It was once a proud American word which has too long been sullied by pinkos and commies.

~jwf~ Zap!

I thought you were a neuvo scot?
You never read my space, do you?
I own a guitar.

Am I having a flashback here or are you doing an Archie Bunker impression?

I have no midis. This computer is the only piece of electronic magic I have beyond a TV and a Microwave.

me not techie.

I've always wanted to do a musical based on the life of John Logie Baird called,"What do you do when the Bundespost wants you but the BBC don't?"

The US has always been a disjointed bunch of weirdos. Just ask the decendants of the Tories who had to find new real estate after the late unpleasantness. As for the commmies, if it weren't for America, they'd have no place to make movies.

I am Archie Bunker!
That damn Carrol OConnor stole my personality.
It's taken me years just to be able to talk about it.

Anyway, Virginia farmhouse, 1876.
A mixed assortment of ages and colours work together to finish constructing a barn.
The Post arrives.
A long lost son, serving with Custer, is coming home.
(Eek the Prodigal Son again?)
Word goes out to the scattered remnants of the family.
Another son, who had served with South and had been living as a drunk in New Orleans arrives.
There is a big RE:Union.

2 Acts/ 40 minutes each.
14 tunes. Blues, hillbilly, Sousa patriotic, western...

Are you still listening...?


jwf

Wasn't this the plot of an Elvis movie?

No. Just because I said hillbilly doesn't mean you can 'king' your way outa this one Smithers.
j

Three acts, three songs per act, professional musicians in the cast, and we need an ethnicity for the family. West Virginia might make more sense.

2 acts.
9 songs - mostly american folk and blues rip-offs and the main love theme and patriotic anthem hinted at in the first act
6 songs - reprise/variations on three of the best from act one, after opening with a 'new' folk standard, the final big love theme and the anthem like show title theme to go out on!

The crowd roars, the critics rave! We go to Jamaica and get drunk.

peace
jwf

ooops. Sorry I forgot you were on the wagon.
So I'll go to Jamaica and get drunk! You stay and do the talk show circuit and resist temptation.
peace
jwf

No way! I get in the same room with Katie Couric and she's mine!

I want some parts for blind and deaf people and one dancing dog.

Oh this play is character driven! The southern boy who has been down in new orleans drinking for ten years has a creole woman who pushes him around in makeshift wagon-like wheel chair. He's lost his legs trying to save Atlanta.
The one in the Union army, who came to love killing so much and went out west with Custer has an oriental girlfriend he bought in Reno.
The old farm is run by a motely mixture of old folks and kids and mixed race children who could be anybody's. They live for the day one of the brothers returns.
Even the dog, who is old enough to remember the war, is a mixed breed.
A group of black minstrels under the baton of a crotchedy old baptist minister (who may or may not be Stephen Foster) act as the Greek chorus throughout.
It's a winner. A tearjerker. How about whipping up some old bluesy folk tunes I can write some lyrics to? Then you'll start to get the idea of just how big this will be.
Let's start with opening number. Something like 'I Loves You Porgy' to set the sad scene of war's aftermath and the struggle to rebuild the farm without the sons who are all thought killed in the war. It rises to a triumphant barn raising, some hoedown dancing, a few moments of longing from the abandoned bride who loved both brothers
and closes act one after the post arrives with the letter from Reno.
Act two opens with the legless dreunk showing up instead.
~j~

Can I be the British love interest in your musical, a snobish English army officer who fired the cannon which took the legs of the Atlantan (is that the word?).

His big line is "damn you colonial traitors".

Good Lord Hobbes, lucky I found you before tonsil did. Duck man, run for cover lad! You're in the wrong war!
The Americans are very proud of the fact that their Civil War 1861-65 was entirely their own show. Millions died. Brother against brother! The Yanks against the Johnny Rebels.
There were no Brits, no frogs, no Canucks (okay a few of each but no significant numbers on either side). It was the All American War! And the future of America, and the future of the world, lies in an answer yet-to-be-found in a West Virginian farmhouse.
If you like cannon though and have an ear for music there's a bit of the 1812 overture that hasn't been plagiarised yet. Do you know the bit that goes ta-tun-tatta-tummda ta=ta tatooooodadum (etc)? We could use that for the show title theme, the anthem bit.
"The salt of the earth, the sweat of our brows,
the blood of our sons, the beef of our cows..."
No.. that still needs work. Sorry.


jwf (just reminding everyone this is the Frank Zappa Birthday Party thread and anything said here has about as much cred as Susy Creamcheese on a hot beach)

Ecccttttuuuuaaaalllllyyyyy, the 'wAr betWEEN TH E Stats' involved a lot of immigrants and foreign nationals. A lot of the urban and rural 'natives' didn't want to get involved.
There were Italian Brigades, Irish Brigades, Swedish Brigades, Welsh Brigades, Liverpudlian Brigades, German Brigades, Austrian Brigades,
and the French and Britiash and Prussian govts sent observers over to learn or laugh from the progress of modrun warfare.
In fact, fully two-thirds of the forces on either side involved ethnically consilidated units, so the War could be said to have generated a Foreign Legion for each side.
So, Hobbes could have been there in his guise as a cannondeer.
There were British and Russian officers who traveled to the US under their own expense and fought for the sheer joy of it. On either side.

as for the music and lyrics;
overture; Aaron Copland's 'Billy the Kid' played backwards.
5.72 minutes
Curtain up on Ramshackle walk-up. Cows in situ. Morning sun.
Smoke rising from small outdoor brick oven.
A small towheaded pigeon-toed totally disinterest boy walks through the screen door barefoot and plays with a small red hound as he shakes the hair from his eyes and sings:
(clarinet with old reed following voice)
I woke up this morning,
with sand in my eyes,
expecting to find
nothing of surprise.
I put on the same clothes
I had on yesterday
and I straightened
my bed with a yank
and I've come out to play.
Oh......
(clarinet with new reed and accordion with patched bellows join in)
This is the sam stinking
morrrr-ning
I've seen since I was a babe
I don't know
why I bother to
wake up,
if everything's going
to be the same!
(full orchestra with airhorn, klazon and calliope playing antipasto de casa unt cashew orinoco with a half twist)
Boy's splay-footed overweight underfed mother walks through remains of screen door wearing pavement horseshoes, with a smile on her face and a rag on her bag, piquant aureaolas placed gently in her hair and her mouth a insouciant reminder of the cotton-picking stunning little wench she was back in the days before the stork visitted her again and again and again)
She sings:
There is comfort
in sameness
There is safety
in numbness
and time and again
I've thanked the
lord for this bless-
ing he's given us.
(Tall old man with tri-colored beard and shredded card board wig
emerges from secon storey window with a bird in the hand)
(orchestra tunes back to two clarinets, an Austin Minor horn, and a pair of squeaky shoes on a freshly waxed floor)
he sings:
I don't know
I don't know
i don't know
why you sing when
you have nothing
to say.
If your head is so
empty
why don't you locate
the wind
and orientate
your ear holes that
way.
Let the wind whistle
through your cavity
not your throat.
Let the wind whistle
through your ignorance
you dolts!
(dancing stage hands thread across the stage wearing Nixon masks)

Pah! Phewt! You poo-poo-er of art! Ye iconoclast!
You doubt my vision for a "RE:Union"

So ..Here I cut and paste from another thread:

..this excerpt from Lincoln's inaugural address?
"We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion my have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as they surely will be, by the better angels of our nature."


SEE! "..swell the chorus of the Union ..by the better angels of our nature."

"RE:Union" - the first great musical of the new millenium!
It is a THING waiting to happen. A destiny! A fate! And yet you poo-poo my vision . Look again at the words of Lincoln and begin to see what the gods have offered us. Here is our 'mission', our 'calling' to glory and riches. The soul of the nation cries out to make us rich and famous. All we have to do is focus what we already know, upon standard forms, in common speech and familiar melodies of American folk.

I rests m'case.
~j~

To be followed, a guess by: RE:construction, the oxymoronic sequel.
"Momma?"
"Yes, dear?"
"I thought we was supposed to be free?"
"We are dear. Anyone can work us to death now without having to pay for us first."