Launched in March 1972, Simply One other Band From LA marked the tip of an period for Frank Zappa and The Moms Of Invention. The album was recorded stay at Pauley Pavilion, The College Of California, Los Angeles in August 1971 – simply months earlier than the ‘Flo & Eddie’ line-up of the group was dropped at an finish.
The accidents that Frank Zappa suffered on the Rainbow Theatre, London, in December 1971 meant that touring was out of the query for the foreseeable future and the Moms – Aynsley Dunbar (drums), Howard ‘Eddie’ Kaylan (vocals), Jim Pons (bass, vocals), Don Preston (keyboards), Ian Underwood (keyboards), and Mark ‘Flo’ Volman (vocals) – had been disbanded. Regardless of the severity of Zappa’s situation, the composer busied himself with the recording of jazz-fusion classics Waka/Jawaka and The Grand Wazoo, producing and guesting on Ruben And the Jets’ For Actual!, and the writing of an unrealized stage musical, Hunchentoot.
Zappa additionally used his convalescence to evaluation tapes of stay reveals that had been recorded along with his lately bought moveable Scully four-track machine. He noticed the discharge of certainly one of these reveals as a approach of compensating the Moms, as he informed Sounds in 1972, “I started figuring out ways that I could get the guys some money, because our tour was cut short and we didn’t do about six jobs… I happened to have a tape of a concert we did just prior to the European tour, so I decided to release that as an album and I managed to work a deal where I got each member of the group an advance payment of 2,000 dollars, which is way in excess of what they would have gotten if I’d just done it under normal circumstances.”
Not solely was this a neat approach of making certain dues had been paid, the discharge of an edited model of the live performance as Simply One other Band From LA pointed in direction of a brand new working technique for Zappa. From this level on, stay recordings turned intrinsic to his working technique. As his archive of tapes grew, so did the fabric at his disposal to edit and manipulate – successfully changing into one other instrument within the studio.
These had been early days although, and Simply One other Band From LA was a comparatively easy job. Recording engineer Barry Keene later summed up the method, “I recorded the band utilizing simply two microphones. As an alternative of utilizing dozens of mics, I set the combination utilizing the quantity controls of the band’s instrument amplifiers. I informed them in the event that they wanted to listen to their instrument with extra quantity, they needed to name in a roadie and have their amplifier moved greater or nearer to them. The purpose was, in the event that they turned up their amp, the album can be ruined. They trusted me fully. Because of this, the album’s sound is their sound – not a studio combine. I recorded direct to a four-track. Frank and I then merely combined 4-to-2 at Ike Turner’s Bolic Sound studio in Inglewood. That was some night time. I’m certain all of us keep in mind it effectively.
“Frank was still recovering from his injuries… I was transporting him to the studio on a mattress I’d put in the back of my ’47 Chevy panel truck… I moved him from the Chevy to his wheelchair and rolled him into the recording studio to supervise as I mixed.”
The outcome was a punchy and dynamic recording that showcased the strengths of what some followers would name the “vaudeville” period of the band. The primary facet of the unique vinyl was taken up by the fittingly colossal “Billy The Mountain.” The near-25-minute-long suite will be seen as Zappa’s response to the style of the day for “rock operas” – together with The Who’s Tommy and The Fairly Issues’ SF Sorrow. The completely absurd plot follows Billy, a mountain, and his spouse, Ethel (a tree rising out of Billy). Billy unexpectedly receives a royalty verify compensating him for all the images taken of him over time, and the unlikely couple resolve to go on a trip, leaving a path of devastation throughout america of their wake (“the first noteworthy piece of real estate they destroyed was Edwards Air Force Base” – the place Zappa’s father had labored). Alongside the way in which, Billy evades the draft, and an ace secret service man named Studebacker Hoch known as in to catch the mountain. Ultimately, Hoch falls into Billy’s mouth and suffers a 200 ft drop. The ethical of the story? “A mountain is something you don’t want to f–k with.” Sensible phrases.
The narrative might need been surreal and kooky, nevertheless it allowed Zappa to throw in a myriad of reference factors – Howard Johnson’s diners, Jerry Lewis-hosted telethons, Ron Hubbard, Gimbels division retailer, Neil Sedaka – making it a sweeping panorama of American life within the late 60s. The music adopted go well with, with quotations from Crosby, Stills and Nash’s “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” “Over The Rainbow” from The Wizard Of Oz, “Wild Blue Yonder” (the official track of america Air Pressure), “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and “Johnny’s Theme” from The Tonight Present stitched into the wild tapestry.
“Billy The Mountain” additionally demonstrated the dexterity and precision of the enjoying throughout this period of The Moms and the theatricality of Kaylan and Volman as frontmen. The duo’s vocal gymnastics and propensity for coarse humor gave a definite taste to Zappa’s work throughout this era, with the composer clearly working up materials that might finest go well with the singers. Their aptitude for improvisation was additionally known as upon – “Billy The Mountain” was a possibility for the pair to insert native references, a lot to the delight of crowds throughout the nation. And the vary of the 2 singers meant that Zappa might reinvent materials, such because the brilliantly heavy and freewheeling model of Completely Free’s “Call Any Vegetable” included right here. Nonetheless, the makes an attempt at humor might transcend the pale, as on “Magdalena,” a Kaylan and Zappa co-write. Zappa generally used brutal matters to skewer society’s lowlifes – right here, it’s performed for laughs.
In sharp distinction was the finale, a model of Uncle Meat’s “Dog Breath” dominated by a muscular and frantic, wah-wah heavy guitar solo from Zappa that pre-empts the fretboard heroics that might come to outline his stay reveals as the last decade went on. For an album that marked the tip of an period, Simply One other Band From LA did a wonderful job of displaying the place Zappa was heading.
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