Welcome to the first in the 'Prog's Greatest Albums' series which we are also doing as a podcast on YouTube and all the best known podcasting channels. In this, the first of the series we look at Frank Zappa's second solo album Hot Rats.

Hot Rats by Frank Zappa is arguably the first serious Zappa album that was created to be played, promoted and played LIVE. All his previous albums including those from The Mothers Of Invention, were a little weird, quirky difficult for the mainstream music lover to get into but more importantly, difficult to play live.. Hot Rats was more accessible and easier to perform live. 

It was also the first Frank Zappa album I ever owned. It was of course the second wholly Frank Zappa solo album, the first being 'Uncle Meat' released earlier in the year (April 1969) while Hot Rats came out in the October. 

Uncle Meat sounds very much like a 'Mothers' but Hot Rats was different, straight forward and more in line to what people were listening to at the time such as Led Zep, The Stones, The Stooges, Sly And The Family Stone, Yes, The Allman Brothers, The Who, Blood Sweat And Tears, Pink Floyd, Santana..

The only hang over from the 'Mothers' was Multi-instrumentalist Ian Underwood. He was credited with piano, organus maximus, flute, clarinets and saxes. (The organus maximus was not a Farfisa, or even a Hammond. It was the pipe organ at Whitney Studios in Glendale. Nigey Lennon describes it on page 116 of Being Frank. - "At Whitney there was a fairly decent pipe organ. The studio was owned by the Mormon church, and maybe they were hoping that someday they'd be able to rent it to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Instead, they got distinctly unholy clients like Frank Zappa")