CONCEPTUAL CONTINUITY

This was one of the laziest jobs Frank Zappa did on the Beat The Boots disks, and that's saying a lot. Apparently, he just took the album and made each side one track on this CD. Not that it is worth any more effort than that. It is an obvious audience recording, there are annoying audience members who don't stop talking throughout the show, and the sound quality is at best fair. At least you can hear what all of the instruments are playing.

The performance is nothing special, although you don't hear many recordings of Zappa with such a small touring band (I saw this tour, it was okay, but I've seen better). The only moment of interest is during Stinkfoot, when Frank interrupts the song to chastise some jerk walking through the crowd selling (most likely bootleg) t-shirts.

This album is another one of the audience-recorded bootlegs that FZ re-stole from the bootleggers and made it officially available as part of the "Beat the Boots II" box set in order to thwart the bootleggers from making money illegally from selling these poorly recorded live shows. This particular concert recording is from Cobo Hall, Detroit Michigan on November 19, 1976.

This is not at all a very good recording. The sound is poor, the audience noise is too noisy and you can hear audience members talking to each other. Of course, FZ did not bother to make these bootlegs sound any better. He wasn't about to wait more time and money on something that he had already lost money on because he never received money for the bootlegs before he officially released them. He just wanted to make it so that the bootleggers wouldn't make money on it either. By the way, the track listing as it stands was also put together like that by the bootleggers. It wasn't a matter of laziness, it was all part of the plan to not change anything about the bootlegs.

The Conceptual Continuity title comes from a reoccurring FZ theme where he said everything is eventually all tied together in his music. I suppose that it was also named by the bootlegger, though I don't know that for sure.

As far as "eyebrows" on this recording.....there isn't anything on here that you don't hear anywhere else that would otherwise make this recording or this concert special. It's all pretty standard except for where FZ chides a person for selling t-shirts in front of the stage right during the concert. The singing is quite lackluster, there are a few good guitar solos, but these are minimized by the quality of the recording. This might be worth something to a completionist, but a casual listener or even a fan would find this a very unessential recording. Avoid unless you need to have everything recorded by FZ.