Many, many years ago when I was a spotty adolescent at Claremont High School in East Kilbride, David Mooney, with whom I only really became friendly towards the end of my schooldays and with whom I have completely lost touch, bought in an album the likes of which I had never heard before and I was hooked immediately. The album was Roxy and Elsewhere by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. To this day it is my favourite of all of the Zappa albums which have come through my hands – which is quite a lot although I am by no means a completist.
Frankly, my dear...
I later found out that I had heard Zappa and an earlier incarnation of the Mothers previously a couple of years earlier when Radio Luxembourg had played, uncredited, Live at the Filmore 1971 and I had struggled hard, nonplussed and disbelieving, to hear through the atmospheric distortion and intermittent signal fades the bizarre tales of mudsharks and groupies.
While I was a student I bought and still have a bunch more albums from his later bands. Some I liked a lot and some not so much but over the years I stopped listening to his music, not out of any conscious decision but just because time moved on and I just seemed to stop (more or less).
However of late I have been rediscovering his music anew; big time. Oddly enought the ’73 Roxy Band has been reconfirmed as my favourite and not just because Ruth Underwood was a premier league babe, but a heap of stuff that I missed or had forgotten has been giving me a lot of pleasure. I’ve mentioned recently Bongo Fury, which featured Captain Beefheart on some vocals and I have also heard one or two other tracks from that tour as they have cropped up on YouTube from bootlegs. Incidentally, if anyone happens to google this and has a copy of the second show from the Music Hall, Boston on 27 April 1975 (the one with the extended version of The Torture Never Stops) I would really like a copy….[updated 9 Feb – got one!]
All of the cliches about Frank are true – fantastic bands, arrangements which are as tight as a tight thing in a confined space, seriously intelligent and fun music interspersed with the hardest of hard rock and, over the top, a guitar hero of the first rank unleashing powerfully dextrous playing. And that’s before we get to the jazz noodlings, his orchestral and chamber compositions and his doo-wop.
I’m not really going anywhere with this in terms of critical appraisal or insight, I just felt a need to share!
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