Music Only A Mother Could Love
On The Road With Frank Zappa

By David Fricke

The Daily Planet, 12 November 1974

Picture, if you can, a stark, concrete cavern with smoke of all sorts drifting to the uppermost rafters, as the Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton area's answer to the counter-culture slowly files in to take up lotus positions on the floor; waiting for the assault of sound scheduled to be delivered by Frank Zappa and his notorious aggregation of Mothers.

Hardly anyone's idea of a good time unless they harbor serious masochistic tendencies, or profess undying devotion to Zappa's own perverse vision of the world as it exists in 1974. Then again, Frank Zappa has finally come into his own as a commercial recording artist, for which he most righteously rates the "hot damn" status of a sold-out crowd, even if it is in Allentown's Agricultural Hall (where the time warp stands at November 5 – which, in turn, means you can catch the aforementioned Zappa concert in the slightly more amenable surroundings of the Spectrum on Sunday the 17th).

For only the almighty known how many years, this composer-performer-sardonic satirist has labored under conditions of mistreatment and misunderstanding which would have sent lesser fellows to the lobotomy lines in nothing flat. Critics would profess to probe his every musical move while tripping over those clues Zappa himself leaves in every album, evolutionarily linking each one with the next. Audiences would too often get off on the bizarre comedy of it all, simply waiting for a doll to be dismembered in ¾ time.

And now that 'Don't Eat The Yellow Snow' actually sports a bullet on Billboard's Hot Shot 100, you would think Frank rates better treatment than he got from this bunch of applauding zeros. Sound reverberated from wall to wall with nervous energy. and obviously wise remarks from Frank were rendered inaudible in the process. A surrealistic touch was ingraciously added by peanut-popcorn-soda vendors of Pennsylvania Dutch-descent as they peddled their wares by stepping on seated concert patrons with clumsy abandon.

Who cares if the opening act doesn't show? Focus pales in its pretended musical intricacy anyway, when compared with Frank's own frantic, though carefully calculated madness. Of the original Mothers playing this weird stuff, only mini-moogist Don Preston remains; and he did not even bother to make the trip, leaving Ruth Underwood as percussionist, Chester Thompson as drummer, Tom Fowler on prowling bass, jazzchild George Duke at the 88's, and this soul cat with the outlandish name of Napoleon Murphy Brock as saxist, sing-songer, and choreographer.

"Hello, and thank you for coming to our concert (if you can call it that) and we want to play for you a thing called Stinkfoot." It was Stinkfoot all right. Well, the notes were right anyway, with the lyrics lost somewhere up near the reverberating ceiling. Penguin In Bondage, Pygmy Twylyte, Yellow Snow, and a slew of highly unpopular others, with choice instrumental interludes from Dog Breath In The Year Of The Plague – this was the basic musical run of things with Zappa visibly displeased at the surroundings, the audience, the sound, and the contractual logic behind his very presence there.

What obligatory comments there were could hardly be understood though he is rumored to have said "Someday when you kids are old enough to vote, maybe you can vote yourselves a real concert hall." But when words fail to evoke response, the tune's the thing. So it was to be jams and improvisatione for the folks on the floor, Frank's fingers dancing up and down his Gibson's fingerboard with the startling agility that marked Hot Rats as one or the finer super sessions to come out of that whole ridiculous genre.

Chester's Gorilla, a tender story about love between man and simian, was debuted while most of the show came straight from chartbreakers Over-Nite Sensation and Apostrophe. Quite assuredly, it could only have been to appease the audience, get the show over with, and maybe even sell some records.

Nevertheless, the concert offered some startling moments, among them, Zappa's imaginary flogging of Ruth Underwood in a pantomime kept alive by Brock's Hey Brutha dancing flair. Napoleon Brock, is without a doubt, Zappa's best lead singer-player since the notorious Ray Collins. While Flo and Eddie relied on anything conceivably gross, and Collins was just plain out-to-lunch, Brock has real style. He facially outrages and struts the stage in time to almost any beat, all the while churning up something sassy on sax.

George Duke is just so naturally amazing on piano that he complements Zappa's basic feel for rock with his deft tough of jazz without offsetting the structural balance (i.e., Be Bop Tango from their latest, Roxy and Elsewhere). Thompson and Fowler must have their chops down pretty pat to follow Frank as well as they do while the ever-charming Ruth keeps her own percussive kind of time.

Certainly one of Frank's industrious and more productive outfits since the old days; and Roxy ... goes a long way to substantiate that. Unfortunately, Agricultural Hall did them in acoustically, while the crowd, as appreciative as they tried to be in their own way, did the rest. Oddly enough, a concert like the Nov. 5 mess holds a certain magic for anyone who has wished to see Frank finally overcome the forces of commercial evil. No one likes to see a martyr get his, but in a strange inverted sense, debacles like this only make you stand up all the stronger for your hero.

Yet in this refined era of expensive sound systems, advanced technology and musical awareness, debacles like this still happen. So it seemed rather appropriate that the Mothers came back to encore with Trouble Every Day, the Freak Out song originally written for-about the Watts riots –

I mean to say that everyday
Is just another rotten mess
And when it's gonna change, my friend
Is anybody's guess
So I'm watchin' and I'm waitin'
Hopin' the best
Even think I'll go to prayin'
Everytime I hear them sayin
There's no way to delay that trouble
Comin' every day
(1965, Frank Zappa Music, BMI)

Frank's post-show musings on the whole affair? Nothing. While what passed for an audience went home to roll a few more, the Mothers of Invention picked up their combat pay and headed for the next stop on this, their upteenth national trek. Who said touring doesn't make you crazy?