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CUCAMONGA YEARS

 Grunion Run (Zappa)

Notes and Comments
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From: http://www.citysearch.signonsandiego.com/E/E/SANCA/0000/04/34/
  What they are: Grunion are small sardine-shaped silvery fish that ride the waves in Del Mar City Beach, La Jolla Shores, Mission Beach and Silver Strand Beach up onto the sand to procreate, making for a veritable sea of squirming 4-8 inch fish out of water. The deal is: The female grunion buries herself in the sand to lay her eggs and the male wraps himself around her to fertilize them -- a female's eggs might be fertilized by up to eight males in one night. Then they wait for a wave to take them back out to sea.
From: Mike & Beth Bitts (bitts@pptnet.com)
  A couple of years ago I was browsing thru the Jonathon Richman section at a Tower store, and I swear I saw a track on an album titled 'Grunion Run'. Does anyone know if it's a cover of Zappa's tune, or what??
From: Patrick Neve (splat@darkwing.uoregon.edu)
  I've seen that too. It's on an album called "I, Jonathan." Amazon.com has a realaudio sample of it and although it, too is a surf instrumental I think they are different songs. Richman's song has the classic tribal surf drumbeat and just two major chords a step away.. like F to G and back again. Frank's tune is a I-IV-V with a shuffle drumbeat. I was thinking that maybe there was an unconcscious link, like Jonathan had heard the FZ single at one time and the title had unconciously resurfaced, but after a cursory web search it seems like it's not such an unlikely concept. For instance: "Grunion are small sardine-shaped silvery fish that ride the waves in Del Mar City Beach,..." etc. Well there's the surf connection. There must be more mentions of grunion runs in surf mythology. I found an album called "Chumming" by a fishy group called the Halibuts, and they too have a surf instrumental called "Grunion Run". You can hear a RealAudio sample of this at: http://cdu2.cduniverse.com/
  While this sounds like a different song than the other two Grunion Runs, it sounds closer in form to Zappa's than Richmans, and the melody could be percieved as a mutated form of Frank's guitar line.. I dunno about this one, you be the judge. I find it hard to believe that there are three different and unrelated surf instrumentals all called Grunion Run but right now I can't find anything in the surfing lexicon or mythology to connect them.
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