Don't Eat the Yellow Snow
| "Don't Eat the Yellow Snow" | ||||
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| Single by Frank Zappa | ||||
| from the album Apostrophe (') | ||||
| B-side | "Cosmik Debris" | |||
| Released | August, 1974 | |||
| Length |
3:26 (Single version) 10:53 (Original suite) 2:07 ("Don't Eat the Yellow Snow") 4:38 ("Nanook Rubs It") 1:50 ("St. Alfonzo's Pancake Breakfast") 2:18 ("Father O'Blivion") |
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| Label | DiscReet Records | |||
| Songwriter(s) | Frank Zappa | |||
| Producer(s) | Frank Zappa | |||
| Frank Zappa singles chronology | ||||
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The "Don't Eat the Yellow Snow Suite" is made up of the first four tracks of Frank Zappa's album Apostrophe ('): "Don't Eat the Yellow Snow", "Nanook Rubs It", "St. Alfonzo's Pancake Breakfast", and "Father O'Blivion". Each song in the suite is loosely connected, although the songs are not all connected by one overall story/theme. The suite was only played in full from 1973 to 1974 and 1978 to 1980. "Saint Alfonzo's Pancake Breakfast" contains Zappa's percussionist Ruth Underwood on marimba who added a very distinct sound to many of his songs in the early 1970s.
"Don't Eat The Yellow Snow" is a song about a man who dreams that he was an Eskimo named Nanook. His mother warns him "Watch out where the huskies go, and don't you eat that yellow snow." The song directly transitions into "Nanook Rubs It." The song is about Nanook encountering a fur trapper "strictly from commercial" who is whipping Nanook's "favorite baby seal" with a "lead-filled snow shoe." Eventually Nanook gets so mad he rubs husky "wee wee" into the fur trapper's eyes, blinding him. According to the lyrics, this is supposed to replace "The Mud Shark" (a song from the live album Fillmore East – June 1971) in Zappa mythology. Zappa then sings in the fur trapper's perspective. The fur trapper then makes his way to the parish of St. Alfonzo, introducing the next song "St. Alfonzo's Pancake Breakfast."
From this point forward, the suite almost completely abandons the previous storyline (the fur trapper's blindness is never explicitly healed). In this song a man attending St. Alfonzo's Pancake Breakfast engages in such appalling deportment as stealing margarine pats from the tables, urinating on the bingo cards, and instigating an affair with an attractive married female churchgoer whose husband is in the Marine Corps and who is into sadomasochism. The final song in the suite, "Father O'Blivion", is about a priest, Father Vivian O'Blivion, who makes the pancakes for the St. Alfonzo fund-raiser. Randomly the song becomes about a leprechaun who's masturbating in a sock. The leprechaun feels that St. Alfonzo would be proud of him for doing so. Then he utters the Latin phrase "Dominus vobiscum, Et cum spiritu tuo (meaning "The Lord be with you, and with your spirit."). Won't you eat my sleazy pancakes just for Saintly Alfonzo." There are many possible reasons why the pancakes are "sleazy"; Zappa leaves them to the listener's interpretation. The suite can only loosely be said to follow a story and is treated as one piece only because of the musical transitions, the way each song introduces the next, and how later songs reference previous songs.
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