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Product Details
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| 1. Penguin In Bondage |
| 2. Pygmy Twylyte |
| 3. Dummy Up |
| 4. Village Of The Sun |
| 5. Echidna's Arf (Of You) |
| 6. Don't You Ever Wash That Thing? |
| 7. Cheepnis |
| 8. Son Of Orange County |
| 9. More Trouble Every Day |
| 10. Bebop Tango (Of The Old Jazzmen's Church) |
Zappa is comfortable and at ease with his audience on this album; he delivers a couple of relaxed monologues about, e.g., monster movies, and his guitar work is always both brilliant and accessible. His musical arrangements are funky and tasteful; his lyrical satire is in top form, has left behind the snide contemptuousness of some of his early stuff, and hasn't yet taken on the bitter, curmudgeonly edge that came to characterize some of his later work. In short, he comes across as what he was: a genius guitarist and composer who was enjoying himself onstage with both the audience and the band.
There are some serious Zappa classic on this album -- notably "Cheepnis," his hilarious but appreciative parody of low-budget monster movies (". . . the monster, which the peasants in this area call FRUNOBULAX . . . "); a redux version of FREAK OUT's "Trouble Every Day," rendered this time out as a slow and bluesy number with an achingly brilliant guitar solo; and the very, very long "Be-Bop Tango (Of The Old Jazzmen's Church)," which occupied an entire album side on the original LP and features both Zappa's signature "audience participation" and some terrific keyboard-and-vocal work from George Duke ("This is BEEEEEEEEEEEEE-bop, even though you think it doesn't sound like that . . . ") -- plus some others I won't list here.
Classic stuff. In short, Zappa at his finest, and a must for FZ fans and neophytes alike.
Roxy and Elsewhere restored much needed faith. I had seen some of this material played live in concert, heard something about a PBS special he was working on, forked out my hard-earned neo-teenage cash for a double live album, and was dancing on the ceiling from the first listening. I'd never heard such a great live recording, and the energy from the performance brought a much-needed element missing from the bottom-heavy, too-clean production of the two previous albums.
"Penguin in Bondage" is a hilarious view of sexual deviance, made somehow more so due to the restraints of having the performance recorded for television broadcasts; since he could not resort to outright raunch, the lyrics are peppered with strange, suggestive images (ie: kleenex on a coat-hang wire), and the song becomes a surrealistic goof on the whole 70s S&M phenomena. Zappa later pays homage to creature features of the 50s and 60s in "Cheepnis", a love letter to all those who ever sat out late night movies on TV just to look for costume zippers, 2x4s on fake cave sets, and visible nylon strings on giant insects.
A highlight of the album kicks off with an affectionate (yes, Frank COULD be affectionate) recollection of life in Palmdale, "Village of the Sun", famous for its turkey farms. Without missing a beat the band segues into a phenomenal instrumental of shifting rhythms, textures, keys, sounding by turns jazzy and cartoonish, even quite beautiful (Bruce Fowler's tromboning can ellicit chills), and through it all Zappa maintains the theatrical aspect as well ("ladies and gentlemen .... WATCH RUTH!"). Not only are his musicians expected to play complex, very difficult music ..... they also had to make it look fun.
This is exemplified in the final piece, "Be-Bop Tango", whose live performance borders on the athletic. In between the two tightly-structured sections his musical crew is given license to improvise, free-form, around a series of secret hand signals before coming back together to bring the piece to an abrupt finish. At one point during the proceedings, Zappa explains "Jazz isn't dead; it just smells funny."
In the five or so years that were to follow this album's release, Frank Zappa would go on to create the most extraordinary music of that decade, some of which was not to be heard until nearly twenty years later (see Laether). Apostrophe' snagged him a gold album, but it was this later release which really clues the listener in to the direction he was going. He was not finished pushing the limits yet. ... .
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