I still remember the day in 1991 when I saw the Frank Zappa album The Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life in a pharmacy/sundry store in Ann Arbor. CDs were still fairly new, and everything came in long box form. I had not kept up with Zappa for a few years at that point, but when I casually looked at the song listing on this new CD I saw that he covered "Stairway to Heaven" and I absolutely had to hear that. I bought the CD and that began my second and permanent period of Zappa fandom. The cover, by the way, is phenomenal. The cover begins more or less straightforward, with the addition of several short snorts and sniggles (what Zappa called "putting the eyebrows on" a song). The famous Jimmy Page guitar solo, however, is replaced by a note for note big band horn arrangement that is pure brilliance. On the 1988 tour Zappa had three vocalists, so had the luxury of using Ike Willis for the main part of the song and switching to Bobby Martin for the latter, higher register vocals. A second official version of this cover came out in 2022 on the posthumous album Zappa 88: The Last U.S. Show. This version is pretty similar except that Zappa plays a guitar solo before the horn solo. The version on TBBYNHIYL is one of the best covers in the history of recorded music.
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