"The Last Interview" is reprint from Cutting Edge, August 1993.

Source: Vitaly Zaremba

On pages 30-31, magazine editor, journalist and Whistle Test presenter Mark Ellen, tells about his favorite albums:

Trout Mask Replica was the most terrifying, dislocating thing I'd ever heard. I loved the folklore of the record, these guys standing on a psychedelic hillside, but people older than me had made the mental leap and could understand Captain Beefheart. I did try very hard to understand it – I knew how fashionable it was. It required an adjustment to go from the British concept of a hippie to these guys – they were ‘heads’, countercultural activists. Beefheart wasn’t really a musician – he heard these complicated things in his head and dragooned these young impressionable minions to perform them. That's amazing. He's not a bandleader like Frank Zappa.

I think part of the reason Hot Rats has stood the test of time is that apart from Willie The Pimp, it instrumental. Vocal music can date quicker. This isn’t improvisation in the way Cream did it. Here the horn players are reading charts, and Zappa never repeats himself. Every part is logical, expressive. It ’s just as good as Coltrane or Cannonball Adderley. It’s really original.

Main article, "The 100 Greatest Prog Albums" featured Hot Rats as #74. On page 43 Ray Shulman (of Gentle Giant) about his no.1 album Hot Rats:

It came out in 1969, the year we were planning Gentle Giant. It was the combination of great musicianship, smart arrangements and the lack of pomposity that hooked me. Where early European prog albums, such as [King Crimson's] In The Court Of The Crimson King, were classically based, even though a big influence on early Gentle Giant, it was the jazz setting of Hot Rats that appealed the most. Still a great album.

Source: Javier Marcote 

#18, p 48

WE SAY: Both prolific and peripathetic, Frank Zappa was always impossible to catgorise. From the early 1960s to his death in 1993, his career constantly moved between musical styles. Zappa was comfortable in classical, jazz, and rock circles, adding his own brand of remarkable musical mazes.

YOU SAY: "For me, no artist sums up a progressive approach to music more than Frank. He blazed a trail that still stands the test of time with his incredibly diverse catalog. Some of the most famous and talented musicians on the planet have played in the many incarnations of his bands and speak humbly about the experience." – James Moore

As psychedelia's summer of love froze over, its ideals, sounds and experimentalism was charging a new vanguard, ready to conquer an even larger fan base. A landscape of progressive rock and pop was aboutto stretch out as far as the eye could see. 

Source: Javier Marcote 

Source: Fulvio Fiore 

As Dweezil Zappa dives deep into the DNA of his father Frank’s classic album Hot Rats, he tells Prog about the nightmarish challenge of playing the record on guitar, why he won’t play the comedy songs, and the fight for the right to perform the Zappa catalogue.