HALLOWEEN 77

As the title suggests, this album was recorded at the 1977 NYC Palladium Halloween Zappa show. Some of this show is familiar to the long-time Zappa fans, as it was used for an hour long (including commercials) recording used for a radio broadcast. Since I was a rabid Zappa fan in those days (some things don't change), I taped the broadcast (I still have the cassette, and somewhere a digitized version of that tape). But the tape contains only about a quarter of what is on this set.

If you are a fan of the "Sheik Yerbouti" album, it is noted in the liner notes that the band recorded many of that album's basic tracks during the pre-show rehearsals for the series of shows that this one was a part of.

To me, the best parts of this set belong to Tommy Mars (keyboards) and Patrick O'Hearn (bass), two of the most talented musicians Zappa ever brought into his band (that is saying alot, considering the number of of amazing musicians that played for Frank). The fact that Zappa gave them both plenty of solo spots during their tours indicates that the master appreciated their abilities as well.

I won't go too much into the set list, as there are no rarities performed at this concert, but I will pick out a few notable selections.

The rendition of "Conehead" barely resembles the well known version of the song. Here it is barely developed, has no lyrics, and is used as just a riff for an extended guitar solo. The riff sounds a bit like the later versios, so I suppose it could be called the same song.

The real highlight is "Wild Love", extended to just over thirty minutes, including many solos, and some hijinks. Which brings me to the one drawback of this album. A lot of the improvised bits Zappa and his band performed on stage don't translate well to an audio-only release. This can be heard on other albums as well. Throughout this concert, Zappa repeatedly leads the band and the audience through a strange bit of dialogue, that may or may not have made sense at the time. He also brings out Roy Estrada to do his odd sort of conducted vocals, that to me doesn't stand up to repeated listenings.

However, the performances of all of the songs, and there are about thirty of them, are all outrageously good, and make this a great album.