UNMITIGATED AUDACITY

This is a bootlegged portion of a 1974 concert that Frank decided to release, completely unenhanced and unremastered, in late 1991. The sound quality is appropriately horrendous, and while I don't know how long Frank and his band played that night, I'm guessing that it was a lot longer than the 46 minutes captured on this album. Negatives aside, however, this is still a pretty decent listen, if only because the novelty value is high due to this album providing the listener with the opportunity to hear Frank's mid-70's band (not that much like the original Mothers, mind you) take on over half of Freak Out!. That's right, not only does the album open with the band doing "It Can't Happen Here" (!), it follows this with half a dozen of the "normal" songs from Freak Out!. Granted, the songs don't necessarily work here as well as they did in the context of the original album, but it's still neat to hear a heavily funkified "Hungry Freaks, Daddy," and it can't really be denied that Napoleon Murphy Brock shows a better voice for the doo-wop songs than Frank (from a "pure" standpoint, anyway).

After the FO! chunk is done, followed by standard runthroughs of "Let's Make the Water Turn Black" and "Harry You're a Beast," we fade into the middle of an extended runthrough of "Oh No" (called here "Oh No, I Don't Believe It"), which then jumps into a runthrough of "More Trouble Every Day." They're basically the same as what's on Roxy, albeit in worse sound quality, but they're definitely enjoyable. The album then closes with a couple of minutes of "Louie Louie" and then, in the first acknowledgement that it's 1974 and not 1969, breaks into a fun rendition of "Camarillo Brillo," with an even more emphatic barking of, "and she was breeding a DWARF." And that's it. Not an essential album by any stretch of the imagination, but a nice one nonetheless, and yet another testament to the coolness of the San Francisco Amoeba Music Store.