Frank Zappa goes Hawaiian

I'm trying to identify a nine-note melody that Frank Zappa quoted in several of his concerts. It may be a Hawaiian song, since his earliest known use of it was in the context of Hawaiian music--after FZ announced "Hawaiian music" and while Ray Collins was singing the Hawaiian Eye theme song. Here's a brief clip from 1968 .

And here's a clip from 1980, where the nine-note phrase is preceded by something that may or may not be more of the same song. .

Can anyone identify this song? Thanks for any help you can provide. I've been listening to vintage Hawaiian music all week and haven't spotted it.

(FZ was also known to quote Sweet Leilani, Hawaiian War Chant, and a Hawaiian Punch commercial starring Donny & Marie Osmond.)

That is in many Hapa Haole tunes.

The most ready version I can think of is the end of the choruses of Lovely Hula Hands and the words I think are...

"....kalima nani e."

It's on a lot more songs than that.

Anyway - if you're a Zappa fan, you need to be at Zappaween in St. Pete every year. There is always a member or two of Frank's band and they play a ton of obscure stuff. (Bogus Pomp is the name of the group.)

A standard Hula turnaround lick, nondescript but played in most mid tempo hulas and songs.
The knack of authentic Hawaiian Guitar hinges around the variations of this lick and the capability to vary it. As here :- Click Here

[ Edited by: basilh 2009-04-19 13:36 ]

Thank you both. The turnarounds in those two songs sound very similar but not identical to the one FZ used to play. I'm now more confident that FZ got the phrase from some Hawaiian song.

When I was picking out the Lovely Hula Hands turnaround on piano, my wife noted its similarity to Cheek To Cheek (by Irving "Holiday Inn" Berlin), namely the "Oh, I love to climb a mountain" section. Neither Lovely Hula Hands nor Cheek To Cheek contains the first two notes of FZ's phrase.

I've never been to Florida, but I did manage to hear Bogus Pomp in Buffalo, New York, a few years back.

[ Edited by: drdork 2009-04-19 20:45 ]

Drdork, the whole point of the |Hula Lick' is variation. I'm a Hawaiian musicologist and am leader of the longest existing Hawaiian band in Europe (The Waikiki Islanders formed in 1937)
Take it from me the bit you're referring to is just a variation of the lick that everyone who plays Hawaiian Guitar is familiar with. That's why it seems familiar to you, it's just about everywhere in most Hawaiian Tunes. It generally occurs between verses and chorus's.
As a test, how many variations of that lick did you hear in the example that I posted (That's a track from an album of mine entitled "My Guitars and I")

Basilh, belated thanks for your explanation. I noticed a dozen occurrences of the hula lick in your clip (though I didn't check if each one was a unique variation).

Needless to say, Frank Zappa was not a Hawaiian guitarist. He didn't use the lick as you describe. He didn't play it between verses and choruses of a Hawaiian song. And he played it pretty much the same every time (transposing it into an appropriate key).

In particular, he always started it with the third and then the root of the I chord, two notes that seem distinctly optional in Hawaiian usage of the lick. For example, they didn't occur in the two versions of Lovely Hula Hands that I checked.

If FZ learned the lick off a record, it's conceivable that we might be able to determine what that record was. It would have to have a variation of the lick that matched the way FZ subsequently played it.

On the other hand, the Mothers had a ten-day engagement at Da Swamp in Waikiki in April 1966. Perhaps FZ learned the lick in person from a Hawaiian musician at that time.

[ Edited by: drdork 2009-04-25 04:31 ]

..methinks perhaps this forum is getting the OVERANALYSIS that pervades a considerable amount of TC...FZ had a certain ..say..APPRECIATION for silly bits of game show, cartoon & popular music forms which he bent to his own twisted whims. Plus he had a band that could play ANYTHING POSSIBLE and would interject vaguely recognizable licks in appropriate or INAPPROPRIATE spots during his more AHEM serious music compostions..all in the spirit of FUN..he has said in interviews he loved the Sweet Leilani & Lovely Hula Hands melodies and threw them in from time to time to keep the civilians GUESSING...he was only really serious about his love of music and the fact that most popular music is CRAP..still holding true today.