Ruben & the Jets

So, this is the story -- familiar to all fans of Frank Zappa -- of Ruben Sano and his '53 Nash, and the band he left behind at 19 when his girlfriend said she'd leave him if he didn't quit the group. Right? Wrong. This is the story of Ruben Guevara and the real-life Ruben & the Jets. The latter was introduced as a nome de disque by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention for their 1968 album Cruising with Ruben & the Jets. At the time, life and art were regularly borrowing from each other in both directions all around Zappa and company. The Mothers of Invention album Freak Out! (1966) had served as part of the inspiration for the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), which Zappa and company, in turn, satirized -- along with the state of mind evoked by it -- on We're Only in It for the Money (1968). Later that same year, Zappa and company created the fictional "Ruben & the Jets" persona for purposes of doing an album, Cruising with Ruben & the Jets, that was both a loving tribute to and satire of '50s rock & roll, and especially of doo wop music. It was a record that worked either straight or as a parody (especially of doo wop lyrics, which Zappa loathed as much as he loved the music); and it included not only some of his pre-Mothers work, but a handful of songs off of Freak Out! reimagined in distinctly '50s terms, which helped give it an extra layer of appeal for the already initiated. It didn't sell in huge numbers (few of Zappa's records in those days did), but it influenced a lot of other artists, including -- again -- the Beatles, whose own back-to-the-roots project (originally called "Get Back" and finished as Let It Be), followed a few months later. And as a purely personal observation, it was the first Frank Zappa album that this writer...