The 1966 album that started it all, decades before its time in terms of mixing, like nothing anyone had heard before.

My second FZ album, the hook being the extended Nanook epic.

The best of the 70s FZ jazz experimentation. This awakened a 17-year-old dork to what jazz could be.

The best of the YCDTOS series, with lots of fun covers, and some really great takes on old FZ standards, like the jazzy, solo-intense "Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance."

The single best Zappa tribute I've yet to encounter, a jazz-infused masterwork that is both highly reverent tribute and seriously original jazz reinterpretation and arrangement.

One of the top FZ tribute LPs, this one a capella covers of some of the most popular tunes.

The essential companion to the film. See it only after you've watched "200 Motels" first.

The video accompanying the classic release.

Music and images, from a bunch of folks really serious about their love of FZ.

The best FZ bio, really his autobiography. Most as up to date as you can get, dating from 1990, with a ton of really good insight into song titles, lyrics, and band myths, legends, and mythology. Make this your first FZ book.

The Mother (ha!) of all FZ observation, critique, and screamingly painstaking analysis. Very well constructed and highly presuasive FZ links to Freud, Goethe, the beginning of time, reality as we know it, etc., from a guy who clearly has done his homework, and enjoys the odd FZ album or two.

An FZ-centered bio, focusing mostly on him, to the exclusion of most of the MOIs and others with whom FZ worked closely.

A more revisionist bio, and definitely not as fawningly compliementary, but with some good observations from the other side of the aisle.

The Baby Snakes picture disc. It's a steal at this price, if you ask me. I got mine in 1980, and still have it.

Gotta love a book that has a Zappa quote thematically shaping the first chapter: "All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff."