Frank Zappa: New York & Elsewhere, 1980, Excerpts


In this 1980 Austrian TV Documentary, interviews with Frank Zappa are interspersed with concert footage from New York’s Mudd Club on May 8th, 1980 (“Mudd Club” and “Chunga’s Revenge“) and Upper Darby Township’s Tower Theatre on May 10th, 1980 (“Beauty Knows No Pain“) as well as an interview (of sorts) with hardcore fans (including Al Malkin) backstage at the Mudd Club. Despite poor video quality and bad overdubbing – it is still a great artifact of Zappa‘s 1980 tour and New York’s infamous Mudd Club which opened in October of 1978, quickly became a fixture in downtown Manhattan’s underground music and counterculture scene, until its closure in 1982.

Immaculate Voodoo Butter Mix – Part V: Encores

While compiling the prior four installments of this mix – I was intrigued by the sheer energy, vitality, and variation Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention brought to each of their show’s encores. Traditionally, Zappa‘s contemporaries might toss out an occasional song or two to satisfy their audience at the conclusion of a concert. In contrast, Zappa‘s encores would sometimes morph into mini-concerts onto themselves – the maestro and the band often returning for two, sometimes three encores. Something truly incredible to hear, especially when compounded one show after another, one tour after another, one incarnation of the band after another.

Listening to these encores – some a little over ten to twelve minutes in length, others almost a full hour – it’s obvious that Frank Zappa and the Mothers had a special connection with their audiences as well as to the music, itself.

A wonderful way to end the Immaculate Voodoo Butter Mix, n’est pas?

Click here to listen to the mixtape.

Sit back, get comfortable, slip those headphones-to-oblivion back on your head, and prepare yourself for a colossus of a final installment.


Note: for those who require a detail listing of individual tracks, go to KUR’s Frank Zappa Gig List and plug in the date and venue for each encore.

Mothers of Invention on Vinyl

An audio treat for those Zappa and Mothers of Invention freaks who have only heard this music via digital CDs, and a bit of nostalgia for freaks like myself, who first got turned onto the incredibly warm analogue sound of the MOI that you will never get with remastered CDs. Take a listen to the following examples – “Nine Types of Industrial Pollution” and “The Dog Breath Variations” from 1969’s ‘Uncle Meat’, and “Who Are the Brain Police (1966 MONO)” from ‘Freak Out’ – and be your own judge:
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Richard Burke Photography – Frank Zappa

In the 1970s, Richard Burke had a small photography studio in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Recently, Burke rediscovered old negatives and has been scanning them. Most of them have never been seen. Images of Zappa, Jean-Luc Ponty, Sal Marquez and others (of course, we can forgive Burke for getting the dates and years wrong [it’s May 6th, 1973, at the Syria Mosque, Richard, not 1974] – he doesn’t have KUR’s database to fall back on).
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Immaculate Voodoo Butter Mix – Part IV

It’s that time of the month, fellow KUR-Meisters, when I dip into my personal, not-so-mythic, vault of Zappa field recordings to compile the latest KUR mix: the “Immaculate Voodoo Butter Mix – Part IV“. What is Part IV? Part IV is 200 tracks from the maestro’s last two touring bands, ’84 and ’88, beginning with a Rehearsal session from December 23rd, 1987. Why 200 tracks? 200 allows for the best performances of each respective tour to shine through…

Click here to listen to the mixtape. Enjoy!

Note: In the tradition of leaving the best for last, the fifth and final installment of the Immaculate Voodoo Butter Mix will arrive on July 15th, 2010.

Best FZ Covers – Sandro Oliva’s “Watermelon In Easter Hay”

Sandro Oliva – former member of The Grandmothers, and one of my favourite guitarists – has been torturing Italian eardrums with his own band, The Blue Pampurio’s, since 1974.

Sandro Oliva‘s cover of FZ’s “Watermelon In Easter Hay” (one of the very best covers of that particular song I’ve heard, I might add) from the above clip is from the 2005 4CD private release, “NEVER COVERED” (for family and friends).

Long before making “NEVER COVERED” I recorded “LOVES OF MY LIFE”, a collection of FZ songs sang in Italian, along with a few instrumentals.

This is one of them.

The project has never been put out for copyright reasons, but I still have fun listening to “BROWN SHOES DON’T MAKE IT”, “JOE’S GARAGE/PEE”, “HELP I’M A ROCK”, “GO CRY..”, “CAMARILLO BRILLO” and “TURNING AGAIN”, the Italian Way!

I’m sure Frank would have appreciated it.

Unfortunally he got ill and after that more shit happened, so that I never asked the ZFT permission for releasing the italian translations.

Oh, well… maybe now that I’m not a Grandmother anymore…

But no, never mind.

I’m too busy with MY OWN MUSIC!!

~Sandro

Sandro Oliva – Guitar, Bass, Electric Sitar, Keyboards, Percussion, Sequencing.

The Grande Mothers Re:Invented – Viva Brazil, 2010

KUR recently received an email from The Grande Mothers Re:Invented thanking “the fans, the promoters, the crews, and everyone behind the scenes who support their performances, making these concerts and tours possible.”

THE POWER OF THE FANS

The GMSRI receive many letters from fans, many of them asking: “When are the GMSRI coming to “fill in your choice of city,state, country here.”

The standard reply is: “They would love to perform there, they just need the following logistics taken care of – airfare, ground transportation, promotion, instruments etc., etc., etc.”
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One Size Fits All – Best Album Art

With the recent news of an upcoming Zappa release, my thoughts turned to releases of days gone by – in particular, 1975’s ‘One Size Fits All’ and its magnificent album artwork. Zappa fans who only know of FZ’s albums through CDs, missed an era when his album covers were almost as anticipated as was his music. View the album artwork in the video above, along with the album’s first track, “Inca Roads”, or download the artwork here.

Thanks to gvmota.

Frank Zappa’s Grand Wazoo EP, 1972

When Barry first emailed the link to the above excerpt from the bootleg EP of Frank Zappa and the Grand Wazoo Band‘s (mistakenly printed as Frank Zappa and the Petit Wazoo Orchestra on the front cover by the bootlegger) September 15th, 1972 performance at Deutschlandhalle in Berlin, West Germany, I was immediately thrust back in time to when I first purchased this very bootleg EP.
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Call Any Vegetable – 1970 versus 2006

One of the fantastic advantages of the advent of current technologies such as YouTube and the Internet, is it allows one to compare and contrast particular songs – in this case, Frank Zappa‘s “Call Any Vegetable” – with particular groups and bands of completely different eras: FZ‘s 2nd MOI band’s vaudeville-style with that of Dweezil’s Zappa Plays Zappa. Merely just a cover? Or an improvement on the original? Zappa Plays Zappa‘s clip is from their DVD/CD released in 2006 of two shows filmed and recorded in Portland, OR and Seattle, WA, respectively. While the two Vaudeville Mothers clips (the complete audio) and the edited version, both from the “Fillmore West, San Francisco, CA, 6 Nov 1970” show. Personally, I’ll always have a bias toward the earlier versions. Still, Napoleon Murphy Brock does one hell of a rendition.
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