Pop links: Zappa! Neko Case! Beatle vision! Frank Springer! More!

Hear a story about the new Frank Zappa collection Lumpy Money on NPR.

It combines music — released and unreleased — that Frank Zappa recorded in 1967. One session produced the Mothers of Invention album We're Only in It for the Money, the group's third release. The other was a surprise.

Zappa was a 26-year-old, self-taught composer with long hair and a funny goatee when he walked into a Capitol Records studio in Los Angeles and handed an orchestra charts for Lumpy Gravy.

"At one point, he turned to me when we were listening, just to playback," Gail Zappa says, "and he said, 'Did I write that?' It was so shocking."

It's almost as if Frank Zappa was writing avant-garde classical music in Top 40 segments, says Rolling Stone's David Fricke, who wrote the liner notes for the new set.

"It just blew my mind," he says.


This has always been my favorite period of Zappa's work.

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Also on NPR: A live performance by alt-country/pop singer Neko Case. She's great.

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Via On My Mind: This is a really nifty-looking Beatles art book/CD holder compiled by the great Bruce Spizer (who's penned a series of great tomes looking at the Fabs' vinyl releases). But will we really need it for storing our CDs once we plunk down big cash for the upcoming Beatles stereo and mono boxsets featuring remastered sound? (And when I say "we" here, I mean "me").



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From Plaid Stallions, the summer 1979 Ideal Toys catalog.



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Golden Age Comic Book Stories shares a few Atlas Western tales with art by Reed Crandall, Jack Davis, Bob Powell and others.



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Fred Hembeck pays tribute to late comics artist Frank Springer.

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