“Willie the Pimp” – Frank Zappa (with Captain Beefheart)

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“Willie the Pimp” is one of my favorite Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart songs. From Zappa’s 1969 album “Hot Rats,” “Willie the Pimp” is a nasty, bluesy extended hard rock jam with wonderfully sleazy vocals by Beefheart. A standout track from a standout album.

“Hard Working Man” – Captain Beefheart / Ry Cooder / Jack Nitzche, from the film “Blue Collar” (1978) dir. Paul Schrader

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The theme song from Paul Schrader’s mentally brutal 1978 working class thriller “Blue Collar.” One of the great forgotten films of the 1970s, with Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, and Yaphet Kotto. As Kotto’s Smokey character famously asserts: “They pit the lifers against the new boys; the young against the old; the black against the white. Everything they do is to keep us in our place.”