JOE'S DOMAGE

As much of a fan as I am of Mr. Zappa's music and would hate to think ill of the people entrusted to curate his oeuvre, I can't help but shake off the impression that those people sometimes abuse their position to rip off gullible fans, and this utterly pointless, worthless CD release, chronicling a rehearsal session from the early 70s featuring the same big band with which Zappa recorded the albums "Waka/Jawaka" and "The Grand Wazoo", is one of the most egregious examples of this. I might have been able to forgive how the music is regularly interrupted by barely audible spoken directions and random banter and I might have even been able to forgive the abysmal sound quality of the recording which constantly clips and cuts out, but I cannot forgive the fact that there aren't even any actual songs featured on this album: instead we get a mind-numbing collection of failed takes, musicians practicing short snippets of melodies without accompaniment and the band generally just messing around, randomly divided into multiple tracks and only occasionally interspersed with brief prototypes of songs that would eventually end up on the aforementioned studio albums. Maybe a few minutes of all of this stuff would have been cute to fill up an album featuring actual full takes of these songs; even releasing it in full for free on YouTube might have been interesting, but no one can convince me that the people who decided to release and sell CD copies of this recording could have honestly believed that anyone would willingly shell out 20 dollars and listen to 55 minutes of this crap if they weren't suckered into it. Do not buy this unless you're the most dogmatic of Zappa fans and need to hear absolutely everything that the man ever spat out onto tape.