Frank Zappa appeared as a musical guest on Saturday Night Live on December 11, 1976, performing "I'm The Slime," "The Purple Lagoon," and "Peaches en Regalia," along with appearing in a sketch called "Killer Trees." "Purple Lagoon."

Musicians: Terry Bozzio - drums
Frank Zappa - guitar
Ray White
Eddie Jobson — violin
Patrick O’Hearn — bass
Don Grolnick — keyboards
Alan Rubin — trumpet
Tom Malone — trombone
Ronnie Cuber — baritone sax
Lou Marini — tenor sax
Mauricio Smith — piccolo flute
Ruth Underwood — marimba & percussion

“Peaches en Regalia” first appeared on Frank Zappa’s 1969 solo album Hot Rats. It was also released as a single in 1970. “‘Peaches en Regalia’ started off as a set of chords that I worked, scribbled on a piece of paper, and these chords were played by a 4-piece group — this is the backing track,” Zappa told NPR in 1989.

“All the melodic material in it was written in the studio, just pretty much a line at a time, and then either I would play the extra part or [woodwind and keyboards player] Ian Underwood would overdub the extra part. So it was a, let’s call it, an organic composition. It wasn’t something where I would sit down and write it all out working with a score.”

Zappa described the making of Hot Rats in a 1973 interview: “Some people think Hot Rats was written entirely on pre-written notes. That’s not true. This is how the album Hot Rats was made. At first, the four-man rhythm section recorded the basic rhythm base on which the other parts were recorded, and most of them were born right in the studio.

“It took about ten hours to record the entire rhythm, and then only one, ‘Peaches En Regalia,’ took more than 100 hours. The work took a lot of time for the reason that no more than four people always played on the record of each thing at the same time, a lot of overlaps were made.”

On tour, Zappa often opened or closed the show with the song. “‘Peaches en Regalia’ is the only one I’ve never really been able to write words for,” Zappa explained in Bugle American in 1975. “I’ve tried, but I can’t come up with a set of lyrics that will work with it.

“If you saw that tune on a piece of paper and somebody handed it to you in a music class and said, ‘write lyrics to this,’ you’d be hard-pressed to do it. One syllable per eighth note. You can’t change the melody. That’s the game.”

“If you ask anybody what their favorite song is that I’ve done,” Zappa told American Songwriter, “most people would say ‘Peaches en Regalia’ or ‘Mud Shark.’ They have little or no concept of what some of the other more adventurous things would have been.”