Executive Meddling: Zappa has encountered heavy amounts of this throughout his career:
Lumpy Gravy was originally released in 1967 as a 22-minute orchestral album by Capitol Records. MGM sued Capitol claiming that Zappa was not allowed to record for them because he was signed to Verve Records, even though his contract stated that he was allowed to work on outside projects in which he did not perform, and all of the music on the album was performed by an orchestra. This Executive Meddling didn't turn out too bad, though, because Zappa ended up reediting the original album into a longer and more avant-garde album released by Verve in 1968, containing dadaist improvised spoken word pieces and archival excerpts from older surf, jazz and blues recordings, turning it into one of Zappa's most acclaimed albums.
We're Only In It For The Money had several bits edited out on its original release. Then the label pulled the album and released an even more edited version. Zappa heard the heavily censored release when he was receiving an award for that album, and consequently refused the award because it was now the censor's album, not his.
In the '70s, Zappa prepared an album called Läther and delivered it to Warner Bros. It consisted of 4 LPs of material which included orchestral pieces, studio recordings in various styles, live rock songs and Lumpy Gravy-esque dadaist spoken word pieces. Warner refused to release the box set, and insisted that his contract owed the label four more albums. Zappa cut three single albums and a live double album from the original recordings: Zappa In New York, Studio Tan, Sleep Dirt and Orchestral Favorites, which would fulfill his contract. The label initially agreed to release this, putting out Zappa In New York with Zappa's prepared artwork, but removed the song "Punky's Whips", in which Terry Bozzio described a fictional sexual encounter with Punky Meadows of the glam rock band Angel, and insisted that Zappa still owed them four more albums, leading Zappa to sue Warner Bros. for breach of contract, and Warner Bros. to issue the rest of the albums with artwork by Gary Panter that he did not approve, and in fact, hated, once he saw the covers. These events spurred Zappa's "Warner Bros. Sucks" campaign and several critical references to the label throughout his career. Ironically, Warner later distributed posthumous Zappa releases by Rykodisc and later the Zappa Family Trust.
Even more egregious about Warner's unauthorized issuing of Studio Tan, Sleep Dirt and Orchestral Favorites is that in addition to the fact that Zappa prepared no artwork or even liner notes for the albums (meaning that the original albums were devoid of any crediting towards the original musicians), Zappa had not completed mixing on the original albums.
The title track to Apostrophe is a jam with Zappa on guitar, Jack Bruce on bass and Jim Gordon on drums.
Adrian Belew of future King Crimson fame played guitar and even sang on some of the tracks on Sheik Yerbouti.
Tina Turner and the Ikettes provide guest vocals on "I'm The Slime" and "Montana". Tina was so impressed by "Montana" that she asked to contribute vocals and invited Ike to listen to it. Ike listened for a minute, yelled "What the hell is this shit?" and left the studio.
Mark "Flo" Volman and Howard "Eddie" Kaylan were the lead singers of the Turtles before hooking up with Zappa in 1970-'71.
One of Us: Zappa was a big fan of sci-fi movies, and wrote a song about them, called "Cheepnis", extolling the virtue of So Bad It's Good examples of the genre.
What Could Have Been: He was pretty much past his peak dexterity as a guitarist and had to call Steve Vai in for help near the end...But he could have gone on a damned sight longer as a composer.
Sheesh...be thankful that he lived as long as he did - an on-stage accident at the Rainbow Theatre in London in 1971 could easily have killed him, and even though it didn't, his injuries were so serious that they kept him in a wheelchair and off the road for six months.
Sub-example: Between Zappa's tour with his "Grand Wazoo" big band and his return to a small rock/jazz group, there was a 3 month period at the end of 1972 where Zappa toured with a much smaller brass combo known as the Petit Wazoo. Zappa fans love the Petit Wazoo, are hungry for any material from that era, and frequently lament it only lasted for 24 concerts.
Sub-sub-example: One album has been composed of material from the Petit Wazoo era under the title Imaginary Diseases.
One can only guess what Zappa's late '70's output had sounded like if Bianca Odin didn't succumb to continually abrasive audiences and stuck with the band past 1976.
Legend has it that Zappa was approached by George Lucas to compose the music for Star Wars. Zappa turned it down and John Williams got the job instead.
Good god can you imagine a David Lynch directed Star Wars with a Zappa soundtrack? The world wouldn't be able to handle that much avant garde.
In his last days, he quit the guitar and seemed to not be considering returning to rock music. Instead, he spent quite a bit of time with musicians of different 'folk' traditions-- the Tuvan Throat Singers, Huur-Huun-Tuur, and the Irish Chieftains. It seemed like World Music was the next genre he was really going to experiment with-- some examples of this can be heard on his last album.