ROXY: THE MOVIE

It took a lot of work to synchronize the audio and the video of those concerts from those 3 nights at the Roxy in 1973. Don't expect a very clear picture, but who really cares when you can have a Zappa performance on video from the 70's. There is no big visuals effects on a Zappa concert. The music is what it counts. It's kind of funny to see Tom Fowler with a big cigar in the mouth for a long period of time and Frank smoking his cigarette sitting on a chair when he is not busy. The rhythm section with 3 musicians is solid including the young Chester Thompson. They play a important role in the show. As usual no music of Frank Zappa can be without flute, trumpet and xylophone. It is always impressive to hear how much the music here was original with some adventurous time signatures mixing prog, jazz and avant-garde.

But i personally never enjoyed the Zappa guitar's solo and at the end of the show when Frank invites people from the crowd on stage to dance during some insane improvised music. It was maybe fun for the audience, but watch this for 20 minutes on video is not my kind of thing. The editing of those shows was made to keep the cameras long enough on each members to enjoy the solos. The audio is nice for a concert that took place 40 year ago and acceptable considering the technical issues they had to overcome. This is not a perfect product, but a rare and precious thing to have in your prog collection. It comes with a single cd that contains 6 of the 11 songs on video.