The Mothers of Invention - 'Tis the Season to Be Jelly (LP, 1991)

This is a bootleg of a Mothers show in Sweden from 1967, and one of the more common ones you're bound to see. Not sure when it was originally bootlegged, but it's been around for a long time in one form or another.

In 1991, Zappa, tired of all these random bootleg recordings floating around (without any compensation on his end), collected the most common ones and released them through Rhino as the Beat the Boots box. (They were also released on CD.) The copy I have is from that era, and it must have been released on its own (not in the box set), because I can't believe anyone in their right mind would break up the box. Beat the Boots is on my list of Zappa LPs to buy, but it's quite expensive if you can find a decent copy with everything intact. So, I've been putting it off. As of right now, I have two of the LPs from the box, but I want the whole damn thing in its complete form. Someday.

So, like I said, this show is from Sweden in 1967. The date is often disputed, but it's commonly listed as September 30. It's a great (and most likely incomplete) show, with the Mothers doing a nice variety of stuff. The first side features a waltz version of "You Didn't Try to Call Me," along with a fairly straightforward take on "Big Leg Emma." There's also short bits of such rock classics as "Baby Love," "Blue Suede Shoes," and "Hound Dog," along with a few other random pop songs.

The second side is comprised of two songs: A seventeen-minute version of "King Kong," and a strangely faithful-to-the-album version of "It Can't Happen Here," or at least initially. After the lyrics cut out, the band goes into noise-improv mode and it gets all sorts of weird. "King Kong" is pretty good, but the band sounds a bit directionless in certain spots. The same goes for the rest of the album. I'm not trying to say this isn't good. Any bootleg of the Mothers from this era is worth listening to. It's just that the recording's not particularly great, and the performance probably wasn't one of their better ones.

I still play this record every once in a while, but I can't say it's one of my favorites. Great cover though, huh?

Can't find any audio, but here's a weird version of "Let's Make the Water Turn Black" from 1967.

The Mothers of Invention - We Are The Mothers and This Is What We Sound Like! (LP, 1985)

This is a weird one.

I found this LP in a local record store, probably five years ago, and paid eight bucks for it. I had never seen it before, and assumed it was a bootleg. But when I looked at the vinyl, I saw that it had a Bizarre label on it. This record didn't look like it was that old (the cover was glossy and the whole thing was in just too good of shape), but the Bizarre label hadn't put anything out since 1973. However, the label, while having the correct Bizarre font and the logo, didn't have much other information. On top of that, the back cover featured artwork that was much in the same style as the inner sleeves of Joe's Garage, which wasn't released until 1979. My curiosity grew.

The music made things even more confusing. This isn't some poorly-recorded show, slapped onto wax to turn a quick profit. These are genuine Mothers outtakes that I had never heard before, along with snippets of the band talking. There were a few tracks that I recognized ("Igor's Boogie" and "Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance"), but they were not the versions on the albums. However, "Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance" sounded suspiciously like the version I'd heard on The Lost Episodes, a compilation released in 1996.

At the time that I bought this record, I had a terrible time finding any information about it on the internet. I saw copies on eBay every once in a while, but nobody seemed to be paying any attention to them. That made me think, again, that this was in no way legit. (At least as far as the release went. The music was/is undeniably the original Mothers.)

Recently, I finally figured out what the heck this thing is. I got most of my information from this page, which you're free to read if you really want to nerd out. It is indeed a bootleg, but it has an interesting story. I guess it was supposed to be released in 1969, and they got to the point of making an acetate test pressing, but then it didn't happen for some reason. But one of the Mothers had the copy of the acetate, and let someone copy it for money. It was originally released (bootlegged) as Necessity Is... and Rustic Protrusion. This LP is a bootleg of those bootlegs, released (from what I can tell) around 1985.

Turns out a bunch of this stuff was on The Lost Episodes; I just don't listen to that album much and didn't put it together. Most of the other tracks have found subsequent release on other posthumous Zappa collections, but a few still haven't, as far as I know. They're nothing special (and I think one of them - "Hey Nelda" - might even be a Ray Collins solo track), but they're cool to have. This record is cool to have. It would have been super cool to have before The Lost Episodes came out. But it's still a nice one for the ol' collection.

Can't find any audio for this one, but here's some incredible footage of The Mothers of Invention in 1967.

The Mothers of Invention - Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention (LP, 1975)

Sometimes referred to as Transparency, this is yet another Mothers compilation put together by Verve, without any input from Zappa. I'm fairly certain this was the last one to come out, because by this point, even the second version of the Mothers had disbanded. (Though Zappa would still sporadically use the name for a while. More on that when we get to the Z's.)

Like the other ones, there's not a whole lot worth mentioning here unless you're an obsessive nerd, so let's get into it. First off, this LP contains both "Big Leg Emma" and "Why Don't You Do Me Right" (often also seen as "Why Don'tcha Do Me Right?"), two songs that were released as a single in 1967, but wouldn't see an official album release until 1995, when they would inexplicably be plopped right in the middle of Absolutely Free. (If you own Absolutely Free and it's in your iTunes, do yourself a favor and move those songs to the end. It fucks up the flow of the album as it was intended to be heard.) So, those would have been cool to have at this point if you didn't have a copy of the original 7".

There's also a cut called "Excerpt from Lumpy Gravy - The Abnuceals Emuukha Electric Symphony Orchestra & Chorus," which is the chunk of Lumpy Gravy that includes "Dog Breath," if I'm not mistaken. So that's a unique edit, which is interesting.

Other than that, there's 19 other tracks, and by my count, 12 of them are from We're Only in It for the Money. Of course, they're from the highly censored version of the LP, so they sound weird to me. They'd sound weird to you if you're used to listening to the CD version of the album. So, "flower power sucks" and "I'll love the police as they kick the shit out of me on the street" are missing, but a line about the Velvet Underground that is not (if I recall correctly) on recent reissues is in there. Odd.

Yet another comp that Zappa snobs turn up their noses at, and yet another one that I own the shit out of. If nothing else, it's fun for the mini-bio on the back where they refer to Jimmy Carl Black as "Jim Black."

"Why Don't You Do Me Right"

The Mothers - Just Another Band from L.A. (LP, 1972)

Recorded a few months after the Fillmore East - June 1971 LP, this is the other big Flo & Eddie-era live album released by The Mothers, and due to an unfortunate injury sustained by Zappa shortly thereafter, it would be the last. But it's a great one to go out on.

If you didn't like the Fillmore LP, you probably won't like this one. But if you did, you'll love this oddball grouping of five tracks. The groupie stories are gone, and they've been replaced with a random variety of songs. The entire first side of the LP is devoted to "Billy the Mountain," the 25-minute rock-opera-ish giant that I still don't quite understand. I think I used to, but it's been a while. My roommate in college loved the song, but he didn't even fuck around with this version. He went straight for the unedited, thirty-minute-plus version from 1993's Playground Psychotics. (Don't worry - we're getting to that.) I've heard "Billy the Mountain" a hundred times, but it's been a decade since I really gave it a go.

But I still like it. It's stop-and-go, with short bits of song interspersed with the dialogue from Flo & Eddie. And when the band is allowed to let loose a little bit, the grooves can get going. So that's nice.

The second side of the record starts with an updated, more rocking version of "Call Any Vegetable," which adds some new sections and ends up being an almost completely different song. Pretty damn fun. After that, it's the falsetto majesty of "Eddie, Are You Kidding?," which I always thought had something to do with Eddie of Flo & Eddie, but I guess it's about some guy who was on TV at the time. Regardless, it's a nice little pop number, and one of the shorter songs on the record.

"Magdalena" is a peppy, slightly dirty number that starts off sort of shitty but ends up going through a series of twists and turns and ends up being pretty entertaining. "Dog Breath," which appears in different versions on a bunch of Zappa records, winds things up here. And it remains one of my favorite Mothers songs. The version here is different than all the others, and Flo & Eddie just nail it. It's great.

Put this record together with the Fillmore LP, and you've got yourself a solid representation of what The Mothers were all about during the first few years of the 70's. And if you can tell the difference between Flo & Eddie's voices, consider yourself a true aficionado.

"Call Any Vegetable"

Stallion Alert at the Movies: The True Story of Frank Zappa's 200 Motels (1988)

You've watched the film version of 200 Motels at least ten times, and you've spent hours, headphones-clad, listening to the original motion picture soundtrack. What's left for a 200 Motels junkie like yourself? Why, the making-of documentary, of course. Yes, that's right. You heard right. An hour-long documentary on the trials and tribulations of one of the weirdest films ever to be released.

Zappa put this little movie together himself, and I have to say: it might be more entertaining than the actual film it documents. There's behind-the-scenes footage, interviews with members of the band, some bonus live performances, and best of all, some of Zappa's own home movies from 1970. Yep, FZ just kickin' around his house with his wife and a few of his kids. It's pretty awesome.

Narration is done on-screen, with Zappa providing informational asides through written bits superimposed over whatever's happening. Usually these give insight into how the person talking fucked up the movie or otherwise prevented things from being easy in one way or another. There is also a current (at the time) interview with Zappa where he provides further information on the technical aspects of the film and the hoops they had to jump through to get it made.

It's not a traditional documentary, but at an hour long, it makes for a great companion piece to the film. The biggest bummer of 200 Motels is revealed here, which is even more troubling when you consider how much more awesome this documentary could have been: The producers of the movie, after it was done, took all the film used to shoot the movie and erased it. So all the scenes that didn't make the final cut, and all the random shit that got shot over the week of filming was lost forever. And they recouped four grand on a movie they were paying over $675,000 to make.

Pretty weak. But Zappa found the guy who made his own documentary about the making of the film (for a news station or something), got a hold of his footage, and re-edited it and made his own movie out of it. And that's basically what this is. It's impossible to find (and of course hasn't been released on DVD), but if you have any desire to see it, you can watch about the first forty minutes of it
here
here
here
and here.

The Mothers - 200 Motels (2xLP, 1971)

The soundtrack to 200 Motels is almost as confusing as the movie. The songs don't follow the order in which they appear in the film, the incidental music (the orchestral stuff) is mixed in with the rock stuff, and some of it includes dialogue from the film, which sounds like it was recorded directly from the film itself.

So, the recording quality varies throughout the album, which is a little distracting, and any plot devices that were used in the film are pretty much lost on the soundtrack. In some ways, it makes a perfect companion to the film. You can't follow it, there are slow parts throughout, and unless you're really paying attention (and know some stuff going into it), you most likely won't be able to make any sense of it.

This is easily The Mothers album I have heard the least, so I can't say a whole lot about the intricacies of it, but there are some great Flo & Eddie-led jams on here. Like the movie, and like the Fillmore LP, the songs are mostly based on life on the road, specifically about groupies and sex. The lyrics are sometimes dirty, often juvenile, and some focus on back-and-forth exchanges between Flo & Eddie, who play caricatures of themselves and others. If this sounds like a busy collection of songs, it is. It's a long, haphazard group of tracks, but overall, a good album.

The orchestral tunes are what they are: well-recorded pieces of Zappa's music, performed by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. If that's your thing, you'll love the stuff in that format presented here. The Mothers stuff often sounds like slightly better-than-average bootleg recordings, which doesn't deter too much from the overall effect of the songs. In fact, it mostly works, considering the subject of the songs. Cuts like "Mystery Roach" and "Shove it Right In" are some of the more rocking songs The Mothers of this era would produce, and "She Painted Her Face" contains a really powerful melody.

There could be a little more rock here, in my opinion, but if you have the patience to plow through the entirety of this thing, you'll get some serious satisfaction out of it. And if you can find a decent copy of the LP, it's a great-looking one. Gatefold cover, and if you're lucky, the original booklet that was included with original pressings. It's sort of a weird 200 Motels storybook. Of course, it doesn't make much sense, either, but the pictures are nice.

"Mystery Roach"

Stallion Alert at the Movies: 200 Motels (1971)

Like Uncle Meat, I hadn't seen 200 Motels in years. And also like Uncle Meat, 200 Motels was tough to track down because it hasn't been released on DVD, and not quite as bad as I remember it being.

Before I had seen either of these movies (for the first time, many years ago), I had some slightly exaggerated expectations for both of them. It was The Mothers; how bad could it be? Plenty bad, of course. But re-watching both of them, I already knew basically what I was in for, so I just relaxed and took them for what they have since come to represent: The Mothers captured on film during their still-kind-of-early days. Which is cool, regardless of things like "story" or "plot." I also watched them by myself this time around so I didn't have to apologize to anyone for subjecting them to these flicks.

As I said during the recap of Fillmore East - June 1971, Zappa was, throughout this short era, entirely consumed with life on the road. Specifically, what a semi-struggling rock & roll band has to go through on a day-to-day basis. If you take the time to try and figure out what 200 Motels is about, this is probably what you'll roughly come up with. But, it's tough to glean a whole lot more than that from the acid-y random segments (ironic, considering Zappa's staunch anti-drug stance and hatred of psychedelic culture) and loosely scripted vignettes of air-headed groupies and frustrated rockers.

I have to be honest: it's really hard to explain a film like 200 Motels, especially without explaining how each character (usually a member of the band, in this case, and usually reliant on the viewer's knowledge of who they are in relation to The Mothers) relates not only to the equally inexplicable plot, but to the nonsensical happenings around them. This movie watches like a dream, literally. The only difference being that there's some really good music in certain sections. Of course, Zappa's barely in it. It's mostly Flo & Eddie, and a little bit (but not nearly enough) of Don Preston.

The final scene is fantastic, with both the movie and the music building up to a huge ending. But really, it's just the fact that this thing got made that ends up being the most impressive thing about it. Nobody seems to know what they're doing, they never leave the one room they're in, and nothing really happens. Yet Ringo Starr and Keith Moon are both in it. It's just incredibly fucking bizarre. And if you're a fan of this era of Zappa, you should see it. Just to say you saw it.

I'm planning on watching it every decade or so.

200 Motels trailer