11/8/2023 0 Comments Frank zappa roxy and elsewhereFor decades, it’s been seen as one of the big treasures in the Frank Zappa vault. Some short clips have come out over the years, offering a tantalizing glimpse at what could’ve been. It’s one of Frank Zappa’s best: his band rips through tricky compositions with agility, breaks into an improvised skit during “Dummy Up” and has a couple of his most memorable songs: his ode to cheesy zero-budget Sci-Fi “Cheepnis” and “Village of the Sun,” a nostalgic (and surprisingly irony-free) look back at his early years as a musician.īut no movie came out. The album mixed material from these shows with music recorded a few months later, all of the Roxy material overdubbed and remixed. In late 1974, parts of these concerts were released on the double-LP set Roxy and Elsewhere. Especially when you’re on the road all the time, as Frank Zappa was: both him and this band were touring again only a few months later. Synchronizing concert footage with audio alone is a huge task editing down three nights of concerts, each shot with multiple cameras, into a cohesive 90-minute film is an even bigger one. But things didn’t quite turn out that way.įor one, making a movie was expensive. His plan was to make a concert movie and maybe release a soundtrack album. He played three nights, recording all of them to 16-track and filming on 16mm film. When his band set up at Los Angeles’ Roxy Theater, Zappa brought along a camera crew and a recording truck. New songs were constantly being added to their set lists, while others were regularly getting dropped or re-arranged. Both Napoleon Murphy Brock and Chester Thompson joined in time for the fall tour. They’d played Australia, Europe, and shows across North America, touring with an ever-changing band: Jean-Luc Ponty left in the summer Ian Underwood split in November. In December 1973, Frank Zappa and his backing band had just wrapped up a world tour.
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