Live Zappa

slowed down "pygmy twylyte" is bliss

If you're listening on Spotify or another streamer, you probably haven't read the liner notes, so here's FZ's brief intro to this set:

This concert (does anybody remember the actual place or name of the recording engineer?) was fun, in spite of the fact that Napoleon Murphy Brock had pneumonia, and that Coy Featherstone, our lighting director, had been maced in the face by a guard at the Hotel Hesperia the night before.

The repertoire is basically the same as the Roxy album, however, the ultra-fast tempos on the more difficult tunes demonstrate what happens when a band has played the material for a year, and is so comfortable with it they could probably perform it blindfolded.

This band had a lot of skill (and miserable touring equipment – it was always breaking down, and full of hums and buzzes). In spite of this, it has remained one of the audience's favorite ensembles, and so, for those of you who crave what they used to do, we present a full concert with a little bit of everything – including stuff that you can't do on stage anymore.

lol that also provides context for one of the jokes in "room service"

That Helsinki concert is a long time favorite of mine. Kind of an amazingly crisp recording given the time and circumstances. The guitar solo from the One Size Fits All version of "Inca Roads" was taken from this concert. I'd say the concert overall is pretty much the pinnacle of his guitar playing.

i'm loving the läther material but i gotta say i may think sleep dirt on its own is the best frank zappa record, or at least it would be really hard to choose between it and one size fits all, but then again there are no lyrics on sleep dirt

Always surprised the live albums that came out featuring the '88 touring band (Make a Jazz Noise Here, Best Band You Never Heard in Your Life, Broadway the Hard Way, YCDTOSA 4/6) don't have more fans. I guess the lineup was one of the least flashy, had more of a big-band vibe than most other Zappa bands, less rock-oriented, but by far the tightest, and the recordings are the clearest of his career imo.

I nominated Make a Jazz Noise Here as essential in the second post in this thread...

... and I was shocked not to see it come up again when it's clearly his best live album!

I loved those '88 albums at the time, but don't listen to them much these days.

zappa in new york is great aside from the fact that it's lyrically signaling zappa's sex and toilet humor era, which... i'm gonna get at least as far as joe's garage or your are what you is, but i'm already very tired of the gay panic in "punky's whips" and the generally reprehensible vibe of "the illinois enema bandit" (the thing is that compositionally these songs both rule). glad they restored the original mix on the 2019 box set, because the digital reverb zappa added to it in the '80s sounds gross

i also listened to läther, which is fucking incredible

He was so good at fanfares (eg Regyptian Strut, theme from Run Home Slow, etc).

"greggery peccary" is sort of what i wish zappa were like lyrically all the time, just these go-nowhere contemptuous cartoon satires of the entertainment industry + making fun of hippies

i despise joe's garage, hateful piece of shit

otm

sounds right

ums btw if you've never heard sleep dirt you would probably enjoy it, the best tracks from the läther project arranged as a suite intended as a follow-up to hot rats. läther is, again, lyrics of the new york stuff and the sheik yerbouti tracks aside, great, but sleep dirt is in my experience the only of the compromised albums läther was divided into that really works on its own (studio tan is too much of the more mannered composed fusion stuff at once and orchestral favorites is too much of the modern classical cartoon stuff at once)

not heard of that, will check it out!


Zappa is very frustrating. tbh I kind of wish he wasn't so talented so I could just write him off, but his best stuff is really striking and unique

as a liberal snowflake i did not enjoy almost anything that happened on sheik yerbouti

god that "dupree's paradise" video upthread is so fuckin rad. jean-luc ponty shreds

yeah sleep dirt is great. you might want to avoid getting the version with vocals though.

However, with the CD release in 1991, Zappa added new overdubs to the recordings. Zappa asked singer Thana Harris to add vocals to three songs. Zappa had originally envisioned "Flambay", "Spider of Destiny", and "Time is Money" as part of his abandoned 1972 musical, Hunchentoot, and thus, these songs were originally intended to be sung.

yeah i'm not going anywhere near that. i'm v thankful for (most) of the 2012 reissues of the zappa catalog, they really removed the main obstacle to exploring zappa: how much he loved to ruin his own music

(i say most bc i had to look up specific box sets to find the original mixes of freak out!, uncle meat, cruising with ruben and the jets, and zappa in new york, so, like, it's still not easy)

lmao that when joe gets out of prison the world has been converted into a WELFARE STATE oh no!!!!!!

For some reason Bongo Fury has totally passed me by, will give that one a listen

ok my main problem with shut up 'n play yer guitar is there's too much guitar

Yeah, even though I’m a fan of his guitar playing by and large, I don’t find him interesting enough to sustain that kind of listening. I did just put on YCDTOSA 2 tonight, and although I still think some songs are played too fast, overall the first disc is really impressive.

I was still in my first flush of FZ adoration when Shut Up n Play Yer Guitar came out (I bought it in its original mail-order incarnation as 3 individual LPs) but I can imagine it being wearing. The followup set of solos, Guitar, is the one that tries my patience.

I just got tix to see Dweezil play highlights from Roxy and Elsewhere and Apostrophe, it’s the 50th anniversary of both. I’ve never seen him, and those are two of my favorite Zappa albums. I’m excited.

Any Zappa alum in the current Dweezil band?

The advertising didn’t say.

Listening to first disc of ‘Shut Up and Play yer Guitar’ last week, it occurred to me if Autechre was a prog rawk band it would probably sound something like this. There is not a straight beat on that whole record.

I was also watching one of those videos on the tube going over Zappa’s chord progressions and the time signature madness in some of those tunes, is pretty wild.