Frank Zappa: You Can't Do That On Sage Anymore Vol. 2: The Helsinki Concert (Rykodisc)
Purchased used at Preserving Records, New Kensington
Holy heck I have a lot of CDs. I don't even have as many as some people I know. As I've announced no fewer than two times on this blog in the past I'm again trying to pick up and organize around my space. I'm a chronic slob to the surprise of probably nobody. I brought home some discs I had at school (it wasn't serving any purpose having them there) and I'm looking for new ways to find a space for them. Duquesne had sliding drawers that were really convenient, and I'm wondering about that.
And in spite all of this, I intend to release two more CDs soon, at least in limited numbers. I still like to have a physical product. And also, I bought two double CD packages on my first visit to Preserving in New Kensington: the Nurse With Wound album mentioned yesterday, and this Zappa package.
Why add to the stack? I am trying to be more selective about these purchases.
I've been a big fan of the original Mothers of Invention since high school. It's still my favorite of Frank's work. I like the sometimes greasy, grungy quality of the music, which can be attributed to both the bandleader and the players. It's an interesting crew.
This isn't that band. The original Mothers were disbanded by 1970 to be replaced by the...I'm trying to remember the nickname, the Broadway Band? The one with Flo and Eddie, AKA Howie and Mark from The Turtles. That band came to a screeching halt when a fan attacked and seriously injured Frank in December of 1971.
After a couple of years of more jazz-influenced studio projects, this group with some variations emerged in the mid-1970s. The bandleader being a workaholic to put other workaholics to shame, you can sometimes define certain period in his career by a matter of a couple of years. (That and his short life span, his health no doubt exacerbated by chronic heavy smoking.) Napoleon Murphy Brock on reeds and vocals, George Duke on keyboards and vocals, Ruth Underwood on percussion, Tom Fowler on bass, Chester Thompson on drums. There'd be some variations on this core band from 1973-1975; this recording dates to Sept. 22, 1974.
Many of Zappa's albums, especially later in the 1970s on, are drawn from live recordings which were thoroughly edited and overdubbed. Frank rehearsed his increasingly bionic bands to the extent that that might as well use live recordings instead of heading to the studio. His mobile recording studio was legendary.
One of Frank's more interesting ideas was "xenochrony." Take a guitar solo from one recording, in a different key, tempo, possibly even meter, and layer it onto the rhythm section of a different piece. I like this in principle, though what I read from Barry Miles' biography was that Frank would still edit the solos thoroughly rather than just letting them play out. The approach was less experimental than it sounds.
There's none of that here. He announces in the liner notes: ABSOLUTELY NO OVER-DUBS. You're getting a complete, unvarnished concert from a well-oiled road band.
GOOD. He needed to do that more, in my opinion. Are there are edits here? I guess I'll never know. He stops one song twice on stage and it's left in.
My opinion is that this was the last band Frank had with general personality. There were certain musicians in late groups that had charisma and personality too, Terry Bozzio and Adrian Belew coming to mind. But there's some sense of play on stage here, particularly on the part of George Duke. If an "oom-pah-pah" pattern fits something in the moment, here's right there with it.
There's a good case for considering Ruth Underwood the best musician even in Frank's bands. There's probably an equal case for both Ruth and her former husband Ian Underwood. Ruth blazes through Frank's ridiculous marimba lines, flawlessly to my ears. And what's not to like about a band with a strong emphasis on marimba?
Frank's desire for complete perfection led him in part to the Synclavier, an unfortunately antiquated piece of equipment now. It doesn't run on a MIDI standard, so if there's any Synclavier work he did that's unreleased, it's probably lost to the world now. To my ears currently, those works sound sterile, mechanical. It dates them. This live band could breathe and it's so much more interesting.
When I was in high school, growing up in eastern Pennsylvania, there was a record store in Doylestown, PA that always had a huge collection of bootleg live LPs. Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and especially Frank Zappa. They were always a bit expensive and you just didn't know what you were going to get, so I never bit. While I can't necessarily condone those releases, perhaps they were doing a service by presenting those bands as they actually sounded. Who knows how many amazing individual concert recordings are stored in the Zappa archive? I say release more in their complete, imperfect form.
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