Frank Zappa’s 1974 album Roxy & Elsewhere captured for posterity one of the most musically accomplished incarnations of The Mothers (George Duke, keyboards; Tom Fowler, bass; Ruth Underwood, percussion; Bruce Fowler, trombone; Walt Fowler, trumpet; Napoleon Murphy Brock, tenor sax, vocals; and Chester Thompson and Ralph Humphrey on drums) onstage and on fire.
Roxy & Elsewhere was recorded primarily over three nights (December 8,9,10, 1973) live at The Roxy nightclub in the heart of the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood. The Roxy is a pretty intimate club—a performer onstage there could practically make eye-contact with every member of the audience—and the musicianship during these sets was particularly inspired.
The shows were also filmed in 16mm. When Frank Zappa lectured at the Gifford Auditorium at Syracuse University on April 23, 1975, one of the audience members asked him “Can you tell us if anything is going on with your ‘Live at the Roxy’ movie?”
His reply:
“Well, I wish there was…The status of that film is this: I spent about $30.000-40.000 trying to get the thing on film, and I got it on film, and there’s some things that happened down there that were absolutely fabulous. However, they’re too weird to show on television, and I don’t think there’s really a market in the theaters for a straight concert film like that…So right now, it’s sitting in my shelf, being an expensive piece of home movie. Maybe one day, when TV loosens up a little bit, we’ll be able to show the lovely Brenda, doing…(FZ and George Duke laugh)...that was a real nice piece of film, that Brenda…(more laughter).”
A DVD of the Roxy shows has long been promised, but has never come out. Zappa “vaultmeister” Joe Travers was quoted on the Wikipedia entry for the album about the long-delayed DVD release:
“It’s sitting in the vault. Waiting for a budget to do it properly. Basically the film footage, the negatives were transferred by Frank in the ‘80s using ‘80s technology. What we want to do is go back to the original negatives and do it in High Definition and then create a 5.1 mix from the original masters so that we have surround sound as well as Frank’s 2 channel stereo mix. Once we get all that together, then we need to cut the program. Edit the program together, camera angles, what shows, what we are going to include from what shows or include all the shows. I have no idea what Dweezil and Gail want to do. It’s great stuff, but the process of just getting to that point is going to cost a lot of money and take a lot of time.”
This tantalizing 32-minute chunk of that film—neither song (“Montana” and “Dupree’s Paradise”) were actually on the Roxy & Elsewhere album—was screened at the Zappa Plays Zappa concerts and posted on the Zappa.com website for a while. George Duke’s solo that starts at about 11 minutes in is a thing of wonder to behold. The Roxy shows were also a fantastic showcase for Ruth Underwood’s skills. (Part of the Roxy performance of “Dummy Up” can be seen in the Zappa doc, The True Story Of 200 Motels).
With the Universal Music Group re-releasing remastered versions of the entire Frank Zappa catalog beginning at the end of August, hopefully a Blu-Ray of the 1973 Roxy shows in 5.1 surround will soon be on the way.