Apostrophe (’) by Frank Zappa

Apostrophe ('), Frank Zappa's fifth solo album and eighteenth record overall, came out on his DiscReet label in 1974, in stereo and quadraphonic, with Zappa producing it himself as the follow-up to Over-Nite Sensation. Here's the man who launched the Mothers of Invention's satirical collage-rock back in the '60s finally cracking the charts, and doing it on his own terms: jazz-fusion chops, hard rock crunch and prog detours, all in service of jokes.

An edited cut of the opener, "Don't Eat the Yellow Snow", became the first of his three Billboard Top 100 hits, stalling at 86, and the album itself climbed to number 10 on the Billboard 200, the biggest commercial success he ever had. "Cosmik Debris" is the one that surfaced on a countdown decades later. Roxy & Elsewhere came next.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.