Comments
Foggy G, "The Songs That Were Played," We're Only In It For The Touring
1976 Oct-Nov: Essentially performed as on ZINY, and referred to on this tour as "Mars Needs Women", or even "Mars Needs Yo Mama".
1977 Jan-Feb: Essentially performed as on ZINY, accounting for obvious differences in instrumentation.
The "Grünfinger" Mystery:
Patrick Neve
There's a short little midi called "Grunfinger" at the Cheepnis site.. what is it? (it's number 94, and credited to Hermann Schindler. Hermann! Where are you?)
AJ Wilkes
Didn't it come from the same source as Guitar Waltz—a Guitar Player article???
"Bossk (R)"
Hermann Schindler, who made the MIDI, explained it like this:
The very short "Gruenfinger" appeared as Frank's tribute to the first number of a Viennese monthly magazine, then called "Basta". Back in 1979 or 1980 it tried to become sort of a subcultural alternative paper with contributions from Andre Heller, Otto Gruenmandl and Peter Turrini, but evolved into a splatter/junk/something for trendy shitheads, who like to drive Jeeps and Rovers in the city, utilize Playboy stickers, handy phones and goldchains.
(Quoted from a text file named SCHINDLE.TXT, which accompanied the "Grnfinger" MIDI and five others when they were first uploaded to Saint Alphonzo's Pancake Homepage)
Hermann Schindler
As you can clearly see on the JPG, GRUENFINGER was originally written for Guitar Magazin. How it found its way into BASTA? Beats me! I suppose there was a relayed connection from Vienna to Peter Wolf via Thomas Nordegg.
I cant imagine that Zappa was asked for a contribution for Basta and gave away a composition clearly marked as "for Guitar Player", so maybe he was asked and they were content with this copy. Or they simply asked for permission to reprint it and obviously that required the hint of GP-Magazin to stay...
Basta tried to ornate itself with celebs like FZ (and Joseph Beys, Hans Hollein (an international renowned Viennese architect), Hans-Juergen Syberberg and Andre Heller) in that first edition, which is shown by several drawings by the above mentioned persons in the second JPG. Basta claimed to be some sort of ZENTRAL ORGAN for the cultural avant guarde, a circumstance Zappa commented ironically with the addition "SOMETHING."
He is also the only one to alter the words of the given task: all others only drawed the words ZENTRAL ORGAN in their respective styles, he added the word "ACHTUNG", meaning "CAUTION" or "BEWARE".
Mark Hawling
Grunfinger is actually just part of Manx Needs Women. It is the same as the second part of the music that was printed in Guitar Player magazine, which is the 7/16 and 5/16 section, but without the repeats.
So essentially it is the riff that is released on Zappa in New York that appears 43 seconds into Manx Needs Women.