DVD Review: Frank Zappa and the Mothers — The Lost Broadcast
For an artist who seemingly documented nearly ever moment
of his live and studio performance – and, not unlike John
Lennon and Yoko
Ono, considered the entirety of it as a single body of work – the early work
of Frank
Zappa‘s Mothers (of
Invention) was, surprisingly, not as extensively captured and saved as one might
hope. So the official release of a nearly eighty-minute black-and-white film of
The Mothers’ rehearsal prior to their 1968 television performance on Bremen,
Germany’s Beat
Club is welcome.
And
it’s welcome first and foremost as an historical document. With no audience
present, the camera multiple operators followed the band members – Zappa plus Ian
Underwood (alto saxophone), Bunk
Gardner (tenor sax, clarinet, flute), James
“Motorhead” Sherwood (baritone sax and tambourine), Roy
Estrada (bass and vocals), Don
Preston (keyboards), Art
Tripp III (drums and percussion), and Jimmy
Carl “the Indian of the group” Black on drums – as they set up, tune up,
goof around, and eventually make music.
It’s
a good ten-plus minutes into the film before anything approximating a band
playing music takes place. The music here roughly dates from the Uncle
Meat period, so viewers are treated to readings of “King Kong,” “A Pound for
a Brown on the Bus,” “Sleeping in a Jar” and the title track from Uncle
Meat. And as always with most every lineup of The Mothers or Zappa’s later
band, these readings differ from the officially release versions.
The
quick-cut editing of the Beat
Club film (or video) editors is dizzying, and bears greater resemblance to
the ADD-addled manner in which 21st music
video editors work, but in the context of the Mothers’ music, it all makes a
kind of sense: the music is disorienting, so why shouldn’t the visuals reflect
that?
Twenty
or so minutes in, the band engage in a I-IV-V rock’n’roll jam that could be
“Rock Around the Clock” or any of a thousand other early rock jams. Various band
members and young ladies engage in some dancing, and everybody seems to be
having a hell of a lot of fun. The sax work is particularly tasty, as the
saxophone on Zappa’s albums rarely got this, er, conventional.
The
audio does drop in and out here and there (a notice warning of this is placed at
the film’s start) but it’s not distracting enough to deter those inclined toward
an hour-plus of The Mothers in rehearsal. Engineers are clearly testing and
setting levels, and fiddling with the posterization and green-screen effect that
were a trademark of Beat
Club. The closer it gets to the end, the better the audio quality gets.
Speaking
of trademark characteristics, Zappa’s patented hand signals to his players are
in prominent use here, and it’s possible to get abn idea of just how effective
they were in guiding the seemingly free-form music into shape.
Some
abstract dialogue between Zappa, Motorhead, and Don Preston is reminiscent of
the weird spoken moments on Lumpy
Gravy and the booger-themed ruminations on The
Lost Episodes. Near the end of the rehearsal, The Mothers turn in a
surprisingly straight instrumental reading of “Let’s Make the Water Turn Black”
from We’re
Only in it for the Money. For those who appreciate the more outré end of
Zappa’s work, there’s a rare and spirited run-through of “Prelude to the
Afternoon of a Sexually Aroused Gas Mask,” complete with actual gas mask. The
assembled crew and technicians are heard off-camera applauding. At the time,
it’s likely that no one had any idea of the historic nature of what they were
witnessing.
Somewhat
unexpectedly, if one selects the original broadcast from the DVD menu, what
appears is the film you’ve already viewed, picked up forty-odd minutes after its
start; in retrospect it’s clear the approach the German TV crew took to
documenting the performance: roll cameras, move around to get good and dynamic
angles on everything, and then splice off the beginning and ending to create a
finished product. In the end, the spontaneity and
do-it-and-on-to-the-next-project aesthetic of that approach fits the music
perfectly.
CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM FRANK ZAPPA AT GONZO
Frank Zappa is considered to be one of the most influential rock musicians of the late twentieth century. Between the start of his career in the late fifties and his death in 1993 he recorded and rele..
On September 19, 1985, Frank Zappa testified before the United States Senate Commerce, Technology, and Transportation committee, attacking the Parents Music Resource Center or PMRC, a music organizati..
No comments:
Post a Comment