Sunday, September 28, 2008

Zappa plays Pippi Longstocking on new CD

Is the upcoming Frank Zappa CD maybe a collection of solos where he quotes childrens songs? The short snippet on www.zappa.com includes the first bars of a Pippi Longstocking song.
In the 50 second snippet from the new CD Joe's Menage Frank actually plays the first four bars of a song that appears in one of the films on Pippi. Visit http://www.zappa.com/ and listen. Check out the 17th to 20th bars.
Swedish author Astrid Lindgren wrote her first book about Pippi Longstocking in the 1940's. There were also films made in the late 60's and in this particular scene Pippi sings an ode to the first snow "Åh, vad jag tycker om att det snöar..."
This is probably just by pure coincidence, although Frank may have been familiar with Swedish tunes. He had played several shows in Sweden since 1967 and in a radio interview from 1988 Frank said that his brother Bobby actually lived in Sweden for a while: "I'm keeping my eye on the Swedes."
What about the reference to "Danish" then? Well, that almost makes sense too. When author Astrid Lindgren was about to give birth to her first child, she travelled to Copenhagen, (since she was not married and Sweden might have been a little more conservative on such matters back in the 1920's).
What else is there to say? Take me to the Falcum!
//S.H.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Perhaps they can get Bruce Bickford to revamp the Story Train ride at Junibacken.

Anonymous said...

Couldn't find any such link. That's a big site with lots of stuff. How about showing us where the link is?

Pippi rules forever!

Nebukadnessar Stephenson and Sigurd Huckle said...

Well, the link would lead you to the opening of the zappa.com page, which used to include the first 30 seconds of that solo. Now they have changed it to something else. If interested, we urge you to obtain the CD.
//The Duprees