me and the drummer jamming at three o'clock in the morning. That track was the basis for the song. It was a riff that started off at a soundcheck about a year before, and I had been piddling with it for a long time. One night, we finally did it, saved the tape, and little by little we added all of this other stuff to it, and we got 'Valley Girl'." Scott Thunes's bass line was spontaneous and played through a Vox amp, and was the final addition to the song, which originally "didn't even have a bass part; it was [originally] just guitar and drums". The pseudo-title track, "Drowning Witch", begins with lyrics based around the theme of the cover art, and segues into an instrumental section of typical (for Zappa) complexity and intricacy, featuring musical quotations from The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky and the Dragnet TV theme composed by Walter Schumann and Miklós Rózsa. In Guitar Player, Zappa commented that the album version included 15 edits between live performances from different cities. "Envelopes" was originally written in 1968 – with a prototype recording made that Zappa later recalled as being made the same year, but was in fact recorded in 1970 and eventually included in the posthumous CD box set The Mothers 1970 – and is constructed around a harmony based on seven and eight note chords that "generate their own counterpoint as an automatic result of the voice leading". Zappa's band for the fall 1981 and summer 1982 tours, which he would continue to feature on the next few albums and the You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore series, included Ray White on rhythm guitar and vocals, Steve Vai on guitar, Tommy Mars on keyboards, Bobby Martin on keyboards, saxophone and vocals, Ed Mann on percussion, Scott Thunes on bass and Chad Wackerman on drums. For studio sessions, he also used past band members including vocalists Ike Willis, Bob Harris and Roy Estrada and bassists Arthur Barrow and Patrick O'Hearn. The album "was mixed on JBL 4311 speakers" with MicMix Dynaflanger and Aphex compressors, consequently giving a "played up" prominence to its songs' bass lines. Release history The original LP release contained a note that reads "This album has been engineered to sound correct on JBL 4311 speakers or an equivalent. Best results will be achieved if you set your pre-amp tone controls to the