A TOKEN OF HIS EXTREME

As the album cover shows, this is performed live on TV in LA on August 27, 1974. Yes the Roxy period. A six piece here and they are at the top of their game. Zappa, Duke, Thompson, Fowler, Brock and Underwood. 73 plus minutes and eleven tracks including so many classics that I've heard countless times. The sound quality is awesome and they are having so much fun here.

A lot of silliness especially on a track like "Stink-Foot" or "Room Service" and there is a lot of talking and fooling around in general. A Frank Zappa production. The one song that was a disappointment is "Inca Roads", my least favourite version that I've heard. The rest is all top notch and I'm not surprised to see a slew of 5 star reviews across the board for this one. I think it's an excellent addition to your Zappa collection myself. But it's also unique given this was performed on TV. An archival release that didn't appear until 2013.

Sourced from a live TV performance from August 1974, A Token of His Extreme finds Zappa with the revered mid-1970s incarnation of the Mothers - that's right, we're square in the middle of the Apostrophe/Roxy and Elsewhere/One Size Fits All era here, and that means you're in for a treat. Sure, sure, there's been plenty of material from this lineup put out over the years - but that's because it was one of Zappa's true golden ages, with excellent performers turning out stellar performances with a knack for improvisation which means that every performance they recorded has its own unique qualities.

Here, since they were recording this for television broadcast, the recording quality is particularly tight, and has been offered up in pristine condition by the Zappa Family Trust to coincide with their release of the video of the show. Notably, this includes a version of Inca Roads which ends up very close to what we eventually got on One Size Fits All, because Zappa was able to use the live rendition here as the basic track; earlier versions of the song I've heard have tended to have more of a lounge jazz intro than the later version got, so this might be one of the very first times the song took on its familiar form. (A guitar solo from the Helsinki concert captured on You Can't Do That On Stage Any More was added in to the album version of the track in an example of Zappa's xenochrony technique, later used extensively on Joe's Garage.) On the whole, it's another winner from this excellent incarnation of the Mothers.