Zappa boxes?

... right?

... better?

... better?

... better or worse than Yellow Shark?

"Shut Up & Play Yer Guitar"
Apostrophe
Overnight Sensation
Hot Rats
Roxy & Elsewhere
Skeik Yerbouti
One Size Fits All

... this is why I was asking about the above boxes. Some of Läther turned up on Live In NY and Sheik Yerbouti and other stuff I've heard throughout the years. I do not have and am not really familiar with Sleep Dirt, Studio Tan and Orchestral Favorites... so is Läther the best version of this stuff?

I know I like the instrumental jazz/rock stuff, I just don't own much of it. Never heard Waka Jawaka and can't remember much of Grand Wazoo, but Hot Rats is great.

And Civilization Phaze III just has me curious as hell... but what I read about "piano people" dialogue seems a turn off.

While we're on the topic, Man From Utopia has me at least a little curious, also, but the dialogue stuff I read about really bugs me. Skip it and put the good stuff on a single disc!

To be perfectly fair, Freak Out, I think is an artistically brilliant statement probably lost on most listeners, but the music just annoys me.

The stuff I don't like is the 30 second noise bursts and put-on dialogue between the decent music. It just seems like a put-on or a cop-out somehow.

The sound sucks majorly. So much of FZ did was live, anyway, that they're hardly necessary. "You Can't Do That Onstage Anymore" furnishes a lot. "The Best Band You Never Heard in Your Life," "Just Another Band from LA," "Bongo Fury," etc., etc.

"Man from Utopia" has "The Dangerous Kitchen" which is one of FZ's finest moments. But it's that spoken word art kind of thing, so...

The stuff I don't like is the 30 second noise bursts and put-on dialogue between the decent music. It just seems like a put-on or a cop-out somehow.

Then you'd really hate "Uncle Meat."

Threesome 2 - the instrumental avant jazz / rock stuff remastered. The only one of these you really need is Hot Rats

Läther - the album as Zappa originally meant to be heard, but which Warner Brothers wouldn't release because they (quite rightly imo) believed that it would be far too much for most people to be able to listen to at a single sitting, so they eventually released it as 4 different albums. It would probably have been better if they'd just edited it down to one or two albums but I don’t think Frank would let them..

Civilizatin Phaze III - never bothered with it because I too found Yellow Shark rather lame.

The Beat The Boots sets are (by definition I suppose) a mixed bag but the really early stuff ('Tis The Season To Be Jelly and The Ark) in particular is quite interesting.

Frank recorded some great stuff but sadly all of it requires sieving, increasingly so as his career progressed. There's all the potential for an extremely good Zappa boxset, but sadly it hasn't been compiled / released yet.

So you're including yourself in the "most listeners" category?

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(Three good ones from the first "Beat the Boots" box: Tis the Season to be Jelly [Sweden 1967], The Ark [Boston '68] and Piquantique [Australia '73, during a brief period with Jean Luc Ponty in the live band])

No, I get the artistically brilliant statement. I just don't LIKE it. Do you know what "artistically brilliant statement" I'm referring to? Because I don't just mean in a general sort of "musically visionary" kind of way...

The great songs or some other Ben Watson-esque BS?

Section 1 ("Ritual Dance of the Child-Killer") is a destruction of the innocence that allows people to accept a prefabricated reality (the "Brain Police"), while the avant-garde Section 2 ("Nullis Prettii") translates "No Commercial Potential," a slogan Zappa wore as his badge of honor.