I snagged my copy through an online distributer in Kitchener, Ontario.īut enough about the history, let’s get to the album itself. A few actually did and now you can find sanctioned copies for sale on eBay, indie record stores and online. When announced, fans could pay a vast sum for the license to make and distribute their own copies of this album. Now, 40 years later, the Frank Zappa estate has released a curious item: Roxy by Proxy, a CD with a little more than an hour of unreleased material from these shows. ![]() For decades, it’s been seen as one of the big treasures in the Frank Zappa vault. Some short clips have come out over the years, offering a tantalizing glimpse at what could’ve been. ![]() It’s one of Frank Zappa’s best: his band rips through tricky compositions with agility, breaks into an improvised skit during “Dummy Up” and has a couple of his most memorable songs: his ode to cheesy zero-budget Sci-Fi “Cheepnis” and “Village of the Sun,” a nostalgic (and surprisingly irony-free) look back at his early years as a musician.īut no movie came out. The album mixed material from these shows with music recorded a few months later, all of the Roxy material overdubbed and remixed. In late 1974, parts of these concerts were released on the double-LP set Roxy and Elsewhere. Especially when you’re on the road all the time, as Frank Zappa was: both him and this band were touring again only a few months later. Synchronizing concert footage with audio alone is a huge task editing down three nights of concerts, each shot with multiple cameras, into a cohesive 90-minute film is an even bigger one. But things didn’t quite turn out that way.įor one, making a movie was expensive. His plan was to make a concert movie and maybe release a soundtrack album. ![]() He played three nights, recording all of them to 16-track and filming on 16mm film. When his band set up at Los Angeles’ Roxy Theater, Zappa brought along a camera crew and a recording truck. New songs were constantly being added to their set lists, while others were regularly getting dropped or re-arranged. Both Napoleon Murphy Brock and Chester Thompson joined in time for the fall tour. They’d played Australia, Europe, and shows across North America, touring with an ever-changing band: Jean-Luc Ponty left in the summer Ian Underwood split in November. In December 1973, Frank Zappa and his backing band had just wrapped up a world tour.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |