Frank
Zappa
The
Dub Room Special! (DVD-V)
(Eagle
Vision)
A
cold and rainy night, a bad cold: What better occasion to finally unwrap
the cellophane off a DVD-V that I bought a long time ago (here’s the
receipt – it says: 03/11/O5!) and that I had never had the time to watch?
The Dub Room Special! had already been released on VHS in the early
80s. It shows Frank Zappa on stage in two different (some would say:
"equally brilliant") occasions. It’s not the Roxy & Elsewhere
video that Zappa fans everywhere have been eagerly waiting for for some
time already, but it’s quite good all the same (also from a technical
point of view: an excellent recorded sound, excellent video quality);
it can also work like a charm for the uninitiated. And so, thinking
those nice thoughts, I went to bed.
Rude
awakening: Here is Robert Christgau on The Village Voice, writing quite
favourably about… Shakira! (I immediately take a mental note about
checking what Christgau has written about Zappa in his Consumer’s Guide.)
Well, it’s been some time since I first began noticing that time had
started going backwards – sometimes it happens that a younger friend
of mine, after listening to some "difficult music" like the
one recorded by Frank Zappa, asks me if it’s really true that "once
upon a time" Zappa played stadiums. Which could be also true –
here you just have to change the name of the country and the size of
the stadium (and please, take also into account the "radio access"
factor) – for quite a nice part of the music from those times.
Frank
Zappa was sometimes considered "too difficult and off-putting"
on one side, too ready to accept the limitations of the (lack of) taste
of the masses on the other. I remember reading an interview where a
member of Henry Cow defined Zappa’s recorded output after Uncle Meat
as being "commercial and uninteresting" (I wonder how former
members of Henry Cow consider today their output after Western Culture).
Well, there was once a place on the face of the earth where every new
magazine eager to present itself as being "serious and uncommercial"
had to put a picture of Frank Zappa on the cover of their issue #1.
Who could be that (wo)man, today? (It’s obviously a mistake on my part,
but the token Robert Wyatt article I see every once in a while looks
to me like it’s intended for those who have lost all contact with what’s
new and are desperately looking for a rubber ring in a stormy sea.)
After
the Flo & Eddie period came to an end, after releasing two albums
(perennial classics) such as Waka/Jawaka and The Grand Wazoo, Frank
Zappa went back on the road with the line-up from the Over-Nite Sensation
album. And even if that line-up (do you remember their names? Jean-Luc
Ponty! Ian Underwood! Ruth Underwood! George Duke! Bruce Fowler! Tom
Fowler! Ralph Humphry!) was a hard one to beat, the more compact version
(a sextet) that went on tour in 1974 was in its own way just as good
(check Vol. II of the You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore series, called
The Helsinki Concert).
A
good part of The Dub Room Special! is dedicated to the TV Special recorded
in August, 1974 in the studios of LA TV station called KCET TV. (Owners
of the nice album titled One Size Fits All will recognize the versions
of Inca Roads and Florentine Pogen appearing on the DVD-V.) Chester
Thompson’s drums are solid and versatile, Ruth Underwood’s percussion
instruments are fast and precise, Tom Fowler’s bass works as an anchor,
there are some beautiful keyboards by George Duke, fantastic vocals
(and sax, and flute, and stage presence) by Napoleon Murphy Brock. There’s
a lot of blues (Cosmik Debris, Stink Foot) and r’n’b, an "unplayable"
composition (Approximate), some instrumentals of an earlier vintage
(Uncle Meat/Dog Breath), a very good musical rapport and a lot of pleasure
derived from playing.
The
other concert material comes from a live Halloween night in 1981. Musicians
here are mostly quite young, their personalities not yet as strong as
those from the 1974 line-up. What we have here is a prodigious polymetric
machine that can play anything and that can offer a reliable background
to their leader. We have a very good Chad Wackerman on drums, and nice
percussion colours by Ed Mann (who also sings those vocal parts on Flakes
that had originally been sung by Adrian Belew). There’s metal by Steve
Vai and blues by Ray While, who’s also a good singer, as per his usual
(on Easy Meat and elsewhere). There are also orchestral keyboards by
Tommy Mars (check the Easy Meat interlude) and those with a more supportive
role by Bobby Martin, whose "iron tonsils" fire up Stevie’s
Spanking. Then we have Zappa, with his nice facial mimic (Cocaine Decisions)
and fine solos.
We
also have a documentary special about the surprise success of the single
Valley Girl, the nightmares from the clay animation by Bruce Bickford
and some other stuff (there’s also a brief excerpt from the historical
"Palermo Riot" from 1982 – an event that yours truly had the
pleasure to experience first-hand!).
Beppe
Colli
© Beppe Colli 2006
CloudsandClocks.net | Jan. 15, 2006