Mother Load

By Alan di Perna

Guitar World, August 2007

THE EARLY SEVENTIES were a high point for Frank Zappa. He'd spent the Sixties establishing himself as one of the most original creative minds in rock music. By the time the Polyester Decade rolled around, Frank had acquired the clout to hire the musicians he needed to play his increasingly complex, challenging and truly bizarre music.

Eagle Vision's new DVD details the making of two early Seventies Zappa gems, Over-nite Sensation (1973) and Apostrophe (') (1974), combining archival footage with new, on-camera interviews with key Zappa band alumni and family members. Longtime Zappa
fans will enjoy seeing how gracefully stalwart Mothers of Invention sidemen like George Duke and Ian Underwood have aged. Vibraphonist Ruth Underwood demonstrates a few tricky passages from the albums, elucidating Frank's unique sense of harmonization.

Family members offer a more intimate view of Zappa's intense level of dedication to his music. Daughter Moon says life with Frank "was like living with a monk, albeit a monk with a lust for groupies.'' Guitarists ranging from Elliot Ingber (who played on 1966's Freak Out) to Steve Vai, Warren Cuccurullo and Frank's son Dweezil pay homage the late maestro's six-string mastery, and celebrity friends like Alice Cooper and Billy Bob Thornton offer anecdotes and reminiscences. But the ultimate authority on Frank remains Frank himself, who speaks his mind in several insightful archival interview excerpts.

Devoted Zappa-philes will find some of the concert and clay animation footage all too familiar, but it is worth revisiting in the new contexts provided by the DVD. The disc is rich in bonus materials, too. Dweezil goes through the original multitrack master of Apostrophe's "Nanook Rubs It," soloing tracks and unearthing all kinds of curiosities, including soul queen Tina Turner singing the lines, "The poodle bites, the poodle chews it." A trip through the prodigious Zappa vaults offers tangible evidence of Frank's obsession with documenting almost every note he ever played and offers hope that more DVDs of this sort will follow.

As Dweezil points out, Apostrophe (') and Over-nite Sensation hold a special place in the Zappa canon because they combine all the disparate aspects of Frank's twisted genius: dazzlingly dense orchestrations, moments of rock guitar savagery, biting social satire and sick humor. Beyond chronicling these two great albums, the DVD also offers a larger perspective on who Frank was, where he came from and why he was, as Cuccurullo puts it, "the Mozart of the 20th century."