In December 1973, Frank Zappa and his backing band had just wrapped up a world 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. Both Napoleon Murphy Brock and Chester Thompson joined in time for the fall tour. New songs were constantly being added to their set lists, while others were regularly getting dropped or re-arranged. It’d been a long year on the road. And Zappa was ending 1973 with a bang.
When his band set up at Los Angeles’ Roxy Theater, Zappa brought along a camera crew and a recording truck. He played three nights, recording all of them to 16-track and filming on 16mm film. His plan was to make a concert movie and maybe release a soundtrack album. But things didn’t quite turn out that way.
For one, making a movie was expensive. 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. 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.
In late 1974, parts of these concerts were released on the double-LP set Roxy and Elsewhere. The album mixed material from these shows with music recorded a few months later, all of the Roxy material overdubbed and remixed. 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.
But no movie came out. For 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.
Now, 40 years later, the Frank Zappa estate has released a curious item: Roxy by Proxy, a CD with a little more than an hour of unreleased material from these shows. When announced, fans could pay a vast sum for the license to make and distribute their own copies of this album. A few actually did and now you can find sanctioned copies for sale on eBay, indie record stores and online. I snagged my copy through an online distributer in Kitchener, Ontario.
But enough about the history, let’s get to the album itself. The Roxy by Proxy is made up of material familiar to Zappa fans and shares some songs with the original Roxy album, but presented in a different way, closer to the way they would’ve sounded to the audience that December.
Both albums have performances of “Cheepnis,” for example, but the version here is as it was performed: no vocal overdubs and fewer instruments in the mix. It’s the same with “Village of the Sun,” “Echidna’s Arf (Of You),” and “Don’t You Ever Wash That Thing?.” They’re all different performances (with different solos and chatter) and the occasional flubbed note, the sort of thing Zappa ironed out in editing. It’s interesting to fans of the original album, especially to hear how different the same song sounded on consecutive nights.
But there are new songs too, a 15-minute version of “Dupree’s Paradise,” stuffed with keyboard, bass and trombone solos; a rapid-fire reading of three older Frank Zappa tunes (“King Kong,” “Chunga’s Revenge,” and “Mr. Green Genes”) and a linked version of two Zappa standards, “Uncle Meat” and “Dog Breath.”
Most interesting to me is an early version of “Inca Roads.” When it was officially released on 1975’s One Size Fits All, it was a speedy guitar solo monster, lurching between tempos and here, it’s slowed down to a leisurely pace, with George Duke crooning like a lounge singer before breaking into a funky keyboard solo.
Last fall, the Frank Zappa estate released Road Tapes Venue Two, drawn from a few shows in August, 1973. Although it was only a few months earlier, the performances are vastly different: where that band stretched out instrumentally, this one’s restrained. They don’t go off and improvise for 15 minutes, but stick to the compositions: “Dupree’s Paradise” is nearly twice as long on Road Tapes, for example. There’s less fluff, but there’s less magic, too.
Indeed, there’s only a few moments on Roxy by Proxy that compare to Roxy and Elsewhere peaks here: Zappa’s solo on “Penguin in Bondage,” Bruce Fowler’s trombone solo in “Don’t You Ever Wash That Thing,”a percussion-only take of “Cheepnis,” the extended encore suite. When directly compared to them, it’s not as great a release as the original Roxy or the Road Tapes albums.
But what sets it apart and makes it one of the most fascinating releases in the Frank Zappa catalog is the liner notes by Ruth Underwood. For most of a decade, she was his go-to percussionist and she’s appeared on over a dozen releases. In a lengthy essay, she goes further than anyone else has in breaking down Zappa’s music, explaining everything from what mode and key songs were played in, even how the performances changed from night-to-night, mixing in personal observations here and there.
It’s a fascinating read: she’ll explain in one sentence how a song drew on Stravinsky, then remember how she had to jump from a kettle drum to a small kit, ducking under her marimba and leaving the mallets behind so Zappa could pick them up and continue playing those big drums. Listening to the music after reading her break down each composition is illuminating: suddenly the little burst of percussion makes sense, the sudden inclusion of musical riff is explained. Her notes shed light on these little details of his music. There’s a grand plan happening behind everything that sounds like the band improvising. That, more than anything else on this release, makes this one indispensable for Zappa fans.
Obviously, Roxy by Proxy isn’t for everyone. If you’ve never dipped into this period of Frank Zappa (or even into his music at all), there are better places to start: I’d recommend either (or both!) Roxy and Elsewhere and Road Tapes (available only through Barfko-Swill). But if you’re already acquainted, it’s a nice piece of the Zappa puzzle and Underwood’s liners are just about essential for anyone interested in the workings of his music.
Rating: 3/5