AS AN AM

I have said before that the reason a Zappa collector might want bootlegs are the "eyebrows", the flourishes and improvisations that Frank encouraged the band to add. That's one of the deficiencies of this album, one of Zappa's "Beat The Boots" sets. There are no eyebrows on these songs, cut from two different shows (one of which I recorded when it was first broadcast, and it didn't sound this bad).

The other problem with this set is the sound. At best, you could call it fair. There is distortion throughout.

The album begins (I'm sure the bootlegger thought this was very funny) with a statement from an interview where Zappa complains about the bootleg release of his concerts, particularly the songs he has not officially released yet. Yeah. Very funny.

The rest of the album consists of five tracks, actually good performances of some good songs. Young & Monde, officially released as Let's Move To Cleveland was announced with a different title each night (I saw three shows on this tour). It's one of my favorite of Frank's 1980's instrumental pieces. And Black Napkins and The Black Page are also fantastic songs.

But because of the sound quality, and the fact that better versions of each song are easily available, this is only for the hard core collector.

This is the first disc in the Beat the Boots I collection and before being released in this collection, was only available as a bootleg. FZ, as a way to get back at all the bootlegs being sold of his concerts, released a good many of them in these Beat the Boots collections. He kept the same level of recording "quality" of the original bootlegs and, unfortunately, this particular album does not have a very good sound. The first track is a short clip from a radio interview where FZ expresses his feelings about bootleggers. The next two tracks were recorded in Cologne. The remaining three tracks were recorded at The Palladium in NYC. There is nothing special about any of these performances except for track 6 "The Torture Never Stops". Strangely enough, this track seems to have a somewhat better recording quality. The words are very clear and understandable. As the band leads into the "Evil Prince" verse, they play a snippet of Chatanooga Choo-Choo which sounds hilarious in contrast to this song which is usually very dark and then Frank does his cheeriest lounge singer vocals which makes it all even funnier. Then they do something completely surprising and sing part of the verse to the theme song of "My Three Sons" (an old TV series). It's amazing how the lyrics fit to the theme song and even that much more funnier. Then, FZ pumps out an excellent guitar solo as he usually does. Other than this performance, there isn't much here that hasn't already been done and you are probably better off not searching for this recording by itself. The performances are good enough, but the recording quality is only fair for the most part. For collectors/fans only.