ELECTRIC AUNT JEMIMA

Culled from live performances from between May and September of 1968, this album is one of the more historically important of the Beat The Boots releases. I say it's historically important because it contains some odd medleys from the Mothers that you cannot find elsewhere, and also, it documents the Mothers playing jazz rock fusion a full two years before Miles Davis supposedly "invented" it.

The sound quality is fair, and varies a bit from the different concerts. At least in all of them you can distinguish what the musicians are playing, and there is very little crowd banter when the music is occurring.

The highlights are the medleys. The first begins with Little House I Used To Live In, makes it's way through Dog Breath Variations and a humorously played Blue Danube, and finishes on Hungry Freaks Daddy. The second is more bizarre. It begins with something called here English Tea-Dance Interludes, which morphs into Plastic People, played more like Louie Louie than usual. Over the Louie Louie rhythm section, the band plays King Kong and America Drinks before breaking into a standard version of Wipe Out. I can't recall hearing anything like it on any other FZ album.

3.5 stars, rounded up.

Here is another one of the official bootlegs from the Beat the Boots II box set. The box set is made up of bootlegged recordings that FZ released officially in order to prevent the bootleggers from making money off of his concerts. Nothing has been refined or fixed on these bootlegs, they are original and in their full bootlegged glory, meaning, most of them are not very good recordings.

The concerts themselves however were a lot better. FZ's standards for his own recordings were very high. There is a lot of argument over where these recordings were done. Zappa.com says it was done at the Fillmore East in 1970. Other sources, including ProgArchives say it was done in several venues. Then there are differences in opinion which venues and what tracks were done where and when. So, it's best to say that they were probably recorded between 1968 and 1970.

This entire album is all mostly instrumental with the emphasis on Jazz improvisation, with a little experimental noodling going on. If the recordings were done in this time frame, they were done when the emphasis was going from vocal humor to an improvised sound, probably because of FZ's throat injury from being pushed off the stage by a crazed fan. The performances themselves sound like they would have been stellar. But the sound itself is bad, not as bad as some of the other bootlegs, but not as good as others. There is no real mixing here, so some sounds are loud when they shouldn't be, nothing is balanced very well. So even the best performances are hard to listen to when they sound like this.

This would normally be one for completionists, but there are a lot of new arrangements and fragments of songs that haven't been available elsewhere, so there is a bit of value in that. Because of that, this one squeaks by with 2 stars, for collectors and fans only.