“Stinkfoot Orchestra” plays Zappa at Spaghetti Western tonight (4/17)

Jef Harmatz Jef Harmatz Send an email April 17, 2026

Stinkfoot Orchestra returns to the Morongo Basin to play the music of Frank Zappa. At their performance in Morongo Valley on Friday night (April 17) they’ll feature Zappa’s front man from the 1970’s, Napoleon Murphy Brock. Music fans will know Brock from his five year run with Zappa as singer, keyboardist, saxophonist, and flautist. He toured with Zappa and worked on classic records like “One Size Fits All,” “Apostrophe,” and one of my favorite live records, “Roxy and Elsewhere.”

I spoke with Brock about his time with the Zappa, and what you can expect from Friday’s show.

“Well, any band has a sideman, and then some bands have what they call a frontman. The frontman is usually the leader of the band. In this case, it would be Frank Zappa, but in this, in my case, he wanted me to interpret his music and front the band because of the nature of the music that he was composing and that we were playing.

“I was his only frontman from 1973 until 1977. And those years that are most popular because of the content of the music. It was a period of time where he composed some of his best music. The young people are hearing it and they’re going like, wow, where did this come from? And they’re embracing it as if it was just recorded yesterday or performed yesterday. There’s been a resurgence in the popularity of this music.People embrace it, knowing that it has more intelligence, it has more fun, it has more compositional content than anything that you hear today.

“Stinkfoot Orchestra is an 18-piece orchestra that plays the music exclusively of the genius composer, Frank Zappa. 

 “They’re playing the most difficult compositions and the most popular compositions, and those compositions that they’re playing, which is, in my opinion, in the opinion of most people who know his music well, was the best music that he produced. It’s theater. It’s theater, basically. It’s theater music. It’s like a Broadway play with music that has satire. It has love. It has fun. Like Duke Ellington said, ‘There’s two types of music. Bad music and good music.”

If you want to hear the good music of Stinkfoot Orchestra, they are playing Friday night at Spaghetti Western, on the highway in Morongo Valley.

The all ages show begins at 9:00 pm. Tickets are $30.

Jef Harmatz Jef Harmatz Send an email April 17, 2026
Jef Harmatz

Jef Harmatz

Jef Harmatz is the co-host of Z107.7’s “Morning Show with Cody and Jef” and Z107.7’s News Director. He has worked as a journalist, cartoonist, chef, and delivery driver. He is known nationally for his writing and comics in publications like TimeOut, Popula, Roadtrippers, Solrad and Spiralbound, and for his album covers for Third Eye Blind and Sir Sly. He is known locally for his pop-up barbecue restaurant Hot Dog Panic. He remains unknown in the field of beekeeping, because he is too afraid of being stung to try it. When not on the radio, he draws comics and self-publishes little books. He lives with his partner and his dog Sunday in Yucca Valley, where he cooks them both elaborate meals.