Montana is an empty state of howling void, a yawning abyss that is the spatial equivalent of white noise. It is the fourth-largest state in the US, and yet is less populated than Rhode Island, the smallest US state, at over one million for Rhode Island and only about 960 thousand for Montana. It only gets three electoral votes, and every election year the rest of the country just considers quietly not even bothering them, since certainly the most common motivation for living in Montana must be that you want to be left alone. It says something about this state that its most famous resident is the Unabomber.

Also, film director David Lynch is from Montana. You wanted an explanation for Eraserhead, now you've got one.

Anyway, there was a meme going around in 1973 amongst the California elite: they would all move to Montana and buy land there because it is so cheap, and everybody would open some kind of silly business there and become bazillionaires. That's what prompted Frank Zappa's "Montana," released as a single along with "I'm The Slime."

Frank Zappa will go down in history as the one musician whom everybody dismisses until they discover the full catalog of his work, and then they get lit on fire with zealotry and go forever after singing his praises. The reason Zappa gets such short shrift in popular culture is that he was funny. No, really funny; every song of his, even if it had no lyrics, had a joke. When conducting, one of his custom gestures was to mime Groucho Marx - this was a signal to the band that they should "put the eyebrows on it," playing the music as if it were a parody of itself, with greatly exaggerated punctuation. Does this sound obscure? Welcome to Frank Zappa!

Zappa really shouldn't be seen as a musician who made funny songs. Rather, Zappa was a satirist whose medium just happened to be music. He even named one of his albums Does Humor Belong in Music?

So that's the big picture. Zooming back in to this particular song, it takes what is first a ridiculous premise and makes it into an elaborate, high-fantasy story. The pictures the lyrics paint get increasingly silly, and then break into this spirited guitar solo by Zappa himself, followed by what sounds like a pack of Smurfs under the influence of a mixture of nitrous oxide and helium singing the manic middle section, and then some more verses and the closing coda, which fades away into a repetition of shout-outs and holla-backs.

The middle section is sung by Tina and the Ikettes. No kidding! They apparently dropped by the studio and heard the rough cut and demanded to be a part of it on the spot. Tina's husband Ike later heard it and sneered at it, because Ike was a mean wife-beating ogre who saw no joy in life. As for the holla-back at the end (Yippie-Ay-Yo-Ty-Yay!), you thought that was Weird Al Yankovic, didn't you? Nope, Kin Vassy. Gotcha!

This became one of the best-loved songs amongst Zappa's fans, making it almost mandatory to play at every live concert. For a bonus bout of silliness, check out "Whipping Post," a live version with alternate lyrics that appears on You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 2. A fan stood up, requested a song with this name, Zappa stalled for a minute, then simply had the band start playing "Montana," while improvising new lyrics on the spot. The crowd went wild.