Frank Zappa - Fillmore East
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Music CD Cover
Artist: Frank ZappaEdition: Music CD
Audio: English (Original Language)
Format: Explicit Lyrics, Live
CD Release Date: 2010-01-25
Music Label: Zappa Records
Soundtracks:
- Little House I Used to Live In
- The Mud Shark
- What Kind of Girl Do You Think We Are?
- Bwana Dik
- Latex Solar Beef
- Willie the Pimp
- Do You Like My New Car?
- Happy Together
- Lonesome Electric Turkey
- Peaches en Regalia
- Tears Began to Fall
Free Music Notes for Fillmore East
Free Music Review: Possibly the best Zappa / Mothers album. Buy It!
Hit: 5 Stars
`The Mothers Fillmore East - June 1971' starring Frank Zappa, selected `Mothers', Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman of `The Turtles', and blues drummer extraordinare, Ansley Dunbar is certainly one of Zappa / The Mothers of Invention's best albums, especially when you look at the glut of re-released and re-re-released material from Zappa. It may even rank (pun intended) as one of the best live rock performances on CD. I was lucky enough to see Zappa and the Mothers Live in 1969 and this recorded performance is much, much better.
Zappa's live performance is less about music than it is about crude, satiric storytelling, enhanced with music. Even better, the storytelling has a great sense of truth about it. It is totally believable that, some time before this album was made, Mother Don Preston runs into the touring group Vanilla Fudge who tells him the story of `The Mud Shark'.
Among the many things accomplished by this album was the resurrection of the careers of Turtles Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan. This and other appearances with Zappa (I believe they are in `Uncle Meat') made enough of an impression that I saw them touring with as a Turtles nostalgia act in the mid-1980s.
Not only do our two lads do vocals, they are also principle characters in some of the autobiographical songs such as `What Kind of Girl do you Think We Are?' The highlight of their performance comes when they do the Turtles one major hit, `Happy Together'.
One thing which makes this a great live album is the fact that all the tracks effortlessly flow from one to the next with practically no interruption. You practically have to look at the track counter to see that you have gone from `Bwana DIK' (sic) to `Latex Solar Beef', which, by the way, has almost all the chops of a better Pete Townsend minidrama. I can almost imagine the spin put onto this album by the `Rolling Stone' and `Crawdaddy' of 1971, claiming as much coup for Zappa on this work as has been heaped on Townsend for `Tommy'. Well, maybe that's taking it just a bit too far, as `Tommy' is an epic story of mystical loss and recovery while `The Mud Shark' is simply a collection of songs and stories about unbridled rock star libido.
In comparison to some of Zappa's more distinctly instrumental albums such as `Hot Rats' or the very late `The Yellow Shark', it may be easy to minimize the value of the instrumental performances on this album. While they mostly create bridges between the storytelling, they are not to be dismissed. `Willie The Pimp Part One' nicely elides between `Latex Solar Beef' and `Do You Like My New Car'. With all the vocals and storytelling, Zappa doesn't have much room for some of his more arcane musical inventions. This is, after all, Fillmore East, although he does squeeze one in with `Lonesome Electric Turkey' just before his classic `Peaches En Regalia'.
While this album may not be quite as transcendent as `The Who Live at Leeds', it is richly textured with just about every flavor of bizarre performance popularized by Zappa and the Mothers up to that point. The final selling point is that I wish I had seen this performance rather than the rote exercize I saw in Baltimore.
Very Highly Recommended!
Fillmore East Poster
Fillmore East by Frank ZappaThis product is manufactured on demand using CD-R recordable media. Amazon.com's standard return policy will apply.
After disbanding the original Mothers of Invention following a short tour of Canada during the summer of 1969, Zappa hired musicians for his studio work before forming a new Mothers in August 1970. The new band was augmented by bassist Jim Pons and vocalists Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan, all of whom Zappa recruited from the Turtles, that hit-making teen-sensation unit that had reached the top of the pop charts with such hits as "Happy Together" and "Elenore." Legend has it that Zappa had tried to enlist former Monkee Micky Dolenz on drums at the same time, but Dolenz declined the offer. The new lineup made several albums with Zappa, beginning with Chunga's Revenge (owing to legal problems, Volman and Kaylan were originally billed as "Phlorescent Leech and Eddie," which led to the duo's being called Flo & Eddie henceforth), but the Fillmore East recording remains its vanguard. Zappa was still obsessed with the ridiculous phenomenon of pop stars, and now he had two genuine articles in his band. Thus, in between live renditions of some of his soon-to-be instrumental classics, Zappa, Volman, and Kaylan delighted the Manhattan audience with rude and crude skits about pop stars and groupies. The whole shebang is then climaxed with Flo & Eddie doing a letter-perfect rendition of the Turtles' "Happy Together" before ironically concluding with Zappa's own "Tears Begin to Fall," the kind of pop ditty Zappa was poking fun at throughout this performance. Although it now all sounds rather tame in the era of rap and porn rock, it was attacked as crass at the time of its release. Nevertheless, this doesn't stop it from being frequently hilarious. Following the performance, the Mothers were joined onstage by John Lennon and Yoko Ono for a set that's captured on the live disc that eventually accompanied Lennon's Some Time in New York City. What a night! --Bill Holdship
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