#quintuple

Quintuple 28 🌸

The week between Xmas and New Year’s 1976, Frank Zappa played 4 sold-out shows at the Palladium in NYC, with a special lineup assembled just for the occasion : FZ and his current touring band (Ray White on guitar/vocals, Eddie Jobson on keyboards/violin, Patrick O’Hearn on bass [often fretless] and Terry Bozzio on drums) bolstered by Ruth Underwood (percussion/synthesizer), Dave Samuels (more percussion) and a five-piece horn section (some of whom were in the Saturday Night Live band at the time and / or were in-demand session musician types) featuring Tom Malone, Lou Marini, Ronnie Cuber, Mike Brecker and Randy Brecker. These shows / this band featured on the Zappa in New York live album, here given deluxe treatment with four discs of additional material and a nice booklet featuring a lot more photos from the concerts by Gail Zappa and informative liner notes by Joe Travers and Jen Jewel Brown, Ruth Underwood, and Ray White.

Disc one contains the 1977 LP mix of Zappa in New York on CD for the first time, which is cool, but the thing about it that annoys me to no end is that it’s the common “censored” version of the album, with “Punky’s Whips” removed (”Titties ‘n Beer” is also slightly shorter and “Punky’s” absence shuffled around the track sequence of the first two sides a bit), rather than replicating the “uncensored” first pressing version. On one hand, it’s possible no one could locate the “uncensored” LP master (it only snuck out on a couple European pressings, and may not exist as such in the Zappa Vault), but on the other hand, Zappa was so annoyed about (as is my understanding) being forced to edit the LP and the fact that it’s not the “real” / intended version of the record... in all seriousness, I feel like “they” (meaning Joe Travers, I guess) could’ve spliced together an “original version replicate / duplicate” master and just lied about it or whatever, I know I would have been happier / less annoyed. But it is what it is.

Discs two, three and four contain “bonus concert performances” in new you-are-there-sounding mixes with none of the overdubs or enthusiastic overuse of Eventide Harmonizer heard on the live album. It wasn’t possible to present all four shows intact, but this is pretty much just as good, with one version of every song played during the run of shows, including a few more spoken introductions from FZ and guest announcer Don Pardo to give you more of the flavor of what the concerts were like. Discs two and three are sequenced kinda like whole concerts. Forgoing highlights, the songs contained are Peaches en Regalia, The Torture Never Stops, The Black Page #2, Punky’s Whips, I Promise Not to Come in Your Mouth, Honey Don’t You Want A Man Like Me?, The Illinois Enema Bandit, Penis Dimension, Montana, America Drinks, Sofa #2, I’m the Slime, Pound For A Brown, The Black Page (Drum Solo), The Black Page #1, Big Leg Emma, The Purple Lagoon (with trumpet, percussion, baritone sax and bass solos [the latter two being unedited versions of ones used on the live album] and a fascinating part where Ruth plays “The Be-Bop Tango” against a spooky 7/4 vamp full of bass harmonics and other percussion interplay), Find Her Finer, Manx Needs Women, Chrissy Puked Twice (aka Titties n’ Beer) and Cruisin’ For Burgers. Disc four feels slightly skimpy track-wise, but it’s kinda like a 45-minute encore that includes an amazing 28-minute version of “Black Napkins” with trumpet, violin, and saxophone solos in addition to a long, expressive guitar solo, plus a different version of “The Purple Lagoon” which contains a really early version of “Any Kind of Pain” in lieu of a bunch of jazz-type soloing, and a crowd-pleasing “Dinah-Moe Humm” finale (at least there’s only one.)

Disc five is an interesting little compilation of “bonus vault content”, containing some of Zappa’s alternate mixes / edits / versions of stuff, sammiched by two solo piano renditions of “The Black Page” (one by Tommy Mars from 1978 and one by Ruth Underwood from a couple years ago.) Between those there’s a different version of “I Promise Not to Come in Your Mouth”, and “Chrissy Puked Twice” and “Cruisin’ For Burgers” are the same full-length performances as on the CD version of Zappa in New York, heard here in non-overdubbed analog mixes from 1977. There’s also an 11-minute version of “Black Napkins” heard in a 1990 mix you could kinda call an outtake from the aforementioned CD version -- some of the beginning and the sax solo was used on You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 6, but this is, thankfully, a more complete (albeit still edited) version entirely from the 1976 concerts. TO MY ANNOYANCE, the last of these Vault cuts is the, quote, “(Unused Version)” of “Punky’s Whips”, which is THE VERY SAME mix and edit of the song that should be on / was “censored” from disc one, but at least it’s on here somewhere.