Cool pictures of musicians with their pet dogs and cats, which show how even the most self-obsessed, narcissistic Rock god has a smidgen of humanity to care about someone other than themselves. Though admittedly, Iggy Pop looks like he’s about to eat his pet dog.
 

Patti Smith and stylist.
 

This is not a doggy bag, Iggy.
 

There’s a cat in there somewhere with Joey Ramone.
 

Tupac Shakur and a future internet meme.
 

Bjork and a kissing cousin.
 

O Superdog: Laurie Anderson and friend.
 
More cats and dogs and musicians, after the jump…
 

 
Early in the second season of Ren & Stimpy, there appeared a rollicking and utterly disrespectful segment called “Powdered Toast Man.” 1992. The character of Powdered Toast Man unified the clueless and self-important silliness of The Tick with the tendency to wreak havoc of, say, Inspector Clouseau or Maxwell Smart. Voiced by the incomparable Gary Owens—and you might not know the name, but if you’ve ever seen Laugh-In or Space Ghost, you sure as hell know his voice—Powdered Toast Man was the spokesman for, obviously, a product called Powdered Toast, which was billed as tasting “just like sawdust!” According to Wikipedia, he was based on the character of Studebacher Hoch, from the epic song “Billy The Mountain” of off the Mothers of Invention’s 1972 album Just Another Band from L.A. I frankly don’t quite see the connection, but anything’s possible.
 

 
It’s kind of amazing just how dark and subversive the Powdered Toast bit is. The anti-advertising message is just the start of it. Tasked with saving a kitten from being run over by a truck, Powdered Toast Man causes a passing jetliner to crash into the truck, thus saving the kitten at the expense of who knows how many lives (the injured survivors cheer him on anyway). A few moments later, Powdered Toast Man thoughtlessly tosses the kitten out of frame, where he is apparently run over by a truck, to judge from the sound effects. Later on, he uses the Bill of Rights for kindling. He induces projectiles to emerge from his armpits by doing that “fart noise” maneuver, he uses his own tongue as a telephone…....... actually, you really need to see the video to believe it. The satire of the prevailing superhero ethos really couldn’t be more savage—or more entertaining.
 

The Pope, “clinging tenaciously” to Powdered Toast Man’s buttocks
 
Appropriately enough, the role of the Pope was voiced by Frank Zappa. According to IMDB.com, it was the last time he would ever portray a fictional character (granted, he didn’t do this all that often). How did this come to pass? As often happens in showbiz, Zappa had expressed some admiration for the early Ren & Stimpy episodes, and ... one thing led to another. John Kricfalusi tells the story on the commentary track for the episode:
 

Yeah, Frank Zappa was a fan of the show, and I was a huge Frank Zappa fan growing up. I had all his records. and when I found out he was a fan, our mixer, one of the sound engineers, was also mixing some Frank Zappa records, and he ... handed the phone to me one day and it was Frank on the line. So Frank invited me to his house that weekend. ... and I went with Elinor Blake and Frank and his family and I, Moon Unit and Dweezil. We all sat around watching Ren & Stimpy cartoons all afternoon. He was laughing all through them, and after it was over I asked: “Hey Frank, you want to BE in a cartoon?” and he said: “Yeah, that’d be great” and I said: “You want to be the pope?” and he said: “Yeah, I always wanted to be the pope.”

 
(Note: Elinor Blake has had a successful musical career in her own right: After working as an animator on Ren & Stimpy, she released several albums under the name April March.) As it happens, Zappa has hardly any lines, but that’s all right.

Another interesting link between Zappa and the show: There was a recurring Ren & Stimpy segment called “Ask Dr. Stupid” in which Stimpy would respond to letters in an incredibly stupid way. Turns out, Zappa recorded a track called “Ask Dr. Stupid” all the way back in 1979.

The episode is available in full on The Ren & Stimpy Show: The First and Second Season (Uncut)
 

 
via Showbiz Imagery and Chicanery

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Ren & Stimpy creator John K animates The Simpsons
‘Make Me Laugh’: Frank Zappa and Gallagher on bad 70s game show

 
Missing Persons were an acutely ‘80s band, made up of former Zappa sidemen who heard the siren call of the New Wave and crafted compellingly icy and anxious music. Drummer Terry and singer Dale Bozzio (a married couple), guitarist Warren Cuccurullo, and bassist Patrick O’Hearn met during the recording sessions for Zappa’s masterpiece, the epic rock opera Joe’s Garage, and were encouraged to form Missing Persons by Zappa himself. The representative early single “Mental Hopscotch” gained a ton of well-deserved attention for their debut EP. (Crate digger advisory: used vinyl copies of that can still be found fairly cheaply. I’d recommend giving it a listen. I still have mine from when I was 14, it holds up.)
 

 

 
Despite its collective musical chops, the band’s focal point was the kitschy but high-octane outer space sexuality of singer Dale Bozzio. As a former bunny at the Boston Playboy Club, Bozzio was comfortable flaunting her figure, and had a penchant for performing in things like plexiglass bikinis and bubble-wrap jackets, foreshadowing Lady Gaga’s costumery by decades. Her outlandish appearance far outpaced contemporaries like Madonna and Cyndi Lauper, which made Missing Persons a darling of MTV, which in turn propelled their debut LP, Spring Session M to chart HUGENESS. The band continued past its initial burst of inspiration, though—their follow-up, Rhyme & Reason, was less musically exciting (perhaps the element of surprise had worn off), and it failed to crack the Top 40. 1986’s Color in Your Life fared even worse. Commercial failures and tension in the Bozzios’ marriage finally doomed the band. Cuccurullo went on to further success as Andy Taylor’s replacement in Duran Duran, and Terry Bozzio returned to high-profile session work.
 

 
Dale, however, has lately gone the “featuring” route, having yesterday released Missing In Action by “Missing Persons featuring Dale Bozzio.” Missing Persons is missing a lot of people—Bozzio is the only member from the original lineup to appear on the album, but casual fans are probably unlikely to care, as to most people she was the band. Her performance on the single “Hello Hello” is actually quite good. Her voice has lost a lot of flexibility (that’s not a criticism, age does that, so it goes), so all the idiosyncratic hiccuping accents she used to pull off aren’t to be heard here, but her singing has retained expressiveness and gained depth. The music, composed by latter-day Yes member Billy Sherwood, feels like it’s trying a bit too lazily to sound conspicuously early ‘80s. It would have been so much cooler if she’d hired someone like Trans Am to write the music, honestly.
 

 
Bozzio spoke illuminatingly about her life and career at last year’s Scion Music(less) Music Conference, and as it turns out, she’s a terrific storyteller, and seems like a hell of a cool lady. The whole interview is good, but for the impatient, there’s a kinda cute Hugh Hefner story in part 1, GREAT Zappa stuff in parts 2 & 3, and Missing Persons’ origin story is in part 4.
 

 
More after the jump…

 
The advent of YouTube laid waste to the smug superiority that extreme Zappaphile fanboys had about their own deep knowledge of the history and collected improvisations of Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention. No matter how much you thought you knew—and I include myself in this equation—even if you’d have read every single book ever written about the man, when YouTube launched, it became obvious that major gaps existed in nearly every Zappa otaku’s mental database and record collection.

This is especially true when it comes to things that appeared decades ago on European television (most unmentioned in the major Zappa biographies). Here’s one amazing little example, an animated short set to Uncle Meat‘s darkly surreal ditty “Sleeping in a Jar.” This seems like it might have been made for some sort of demo for Madison Avenue (it’s not dissimilar from the Clio Award-winning Luden’s Cough Drops commercial Zappa scored in 1967) but it’s kind of smutty for that purpose with that not-so-subtle carbonated cum shot.

Interestingly this racy animation aired on Swedish television in 1971 on a show called Spotlight. They say the Swedes are a liberated people sexually speaking and if this passed muster for TV back in 1971, well, that’s saying quite a lot. This wouldn’t be shown on American network television today.
 

 
I lived in Austria for a while—I was living there in 1993 when the sad news of Frank Zappa’s death came down the pipe. It was striking to me how much more vital his fandom was there; intense Zappa fans were (and are) very, very common, you’d see casual references in the media to Zappa quite often. This quality he shares, I suppose, with Jerry Lewis and countless bebop heroes, he was more appreciated in Europe than in his native U.S. When he died he was truly mourned in the public sphere. I wasn’t in America at the time (obviously), but I doubt that it was quite as keenly felt here as it was in Europe.

So when I heard that some scientists had decided to name a strain of bacteria after Frank Zappa, I knew that they would turn out to be from Europe, and I was right about that. Italian microbiologist and ardent Zappa fan Andrea Campisano of the Edmund Mach Foundation is the lead author of the study published Tuesday in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution about P. acnes Zappae, “a formerly pimple-causing bacterium that apparently has moved from human skin to the bark of grape vines.”

The Italian word zappa means “hoe,” and the name of the new strain is also a reference to “the agrarian roots of the wine-related institute where the discovery was made.” Actually, Zappa has this in common with Arnold Schwarzenegger. The root “egge” in Arnold’s name means “harrow” or “back hoe,” and the word “Schwarzenegger” would translate as “black back-hoe man.”
 

Campisano said he played Zappa’s music regularly and kept a quote from the genre-bending rock musician displayed on his computer screen in the laboratory: “If you end up with a boring miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on television … then you deserve it.”

 
Insofar as pimples and Frank Zappa albums share the trait of being incredibly common—Zappa released somewhere in the neighborhood 60 albums during his lifetime, and he died at the young age of 52—that’s another link.

And then there is this...

Here’s Frank and the Mothers of Invention, live at the Roxy in LA in 1973.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Make Me Laugh’: Frank Zappa and Gallagher on bad 70s game show
Amusing ‘The Big Lebowski’ poster starring Frank Zappa, Iggy and Bowie

 
Just how good a year for music was 1968? Consider this list of albums from that year:
 
The Rolling Stones, Beggars Banquet
The Beatles, The White Album
The Kinks, The Village Green Preservation Society
Procol Harum, A Whiter Shade of Pale
The Band, Music From Big Pink
The Zombies, Odessey And Oracle
Janis Joplin, Cheap Thrills
Sly & The Family Stone, Dance to the Music
Cream, Wheels of Fire
Joni Mitchell, Song To a Seagull
Creedence Clearwater Revival, Creedence Clearwater Revival
Jimi Hendrix, Electric Ladyland
Frank Zappa, We’re Only In It For the Money
Jeff Beck, Truth
Pink Floyd, A Saucerful of Secrets
The 13th Floor Elevators, Bull of the Woods
The Monkees, Head
Can, Delay 1968
The Doors, Waiting for the Sun
Jefferson Airplane, Crown of Creation
Eric Burdon and the Animals, The Twain Shall Meet
Harry Nilsson, Aerial Ballet
Iron Butterfly, In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida
 
If those titles hold any appeal to you at all, then you are definitely going to enjoy Tony Palmer’s stunning 1968 documentary All My Loving, which purportedly was made as the result of a gauntlet that John Lennon and Paul McCartney threw down to Palmer (whose films before that had—a bit like George Martin—focused on classical music), to make an hour-long movie that captured the state of the music world in 1968. What makes the movie work, quite aside from Palmer’s adventurous editing style, fondness for tight closeups, aural brio, and impressionistic chops, is the palpable sense that something really interesting was happening in society—crucially, before the post-Altamont, post-Manson hangover had set in. It was a perfect moment for a documentary of this kind. The musical personages in the movie, many of them legends, are treated as very interesting pop stars but not much more than that, and that relative impartiality is essential to what makes All My Loving so good.

It’s difficult to overstate how wonderful All My Loving is. Stylistically, it suggests an experimental movie produced by 60 Minutes (or the English equivalent, anyway). In other words, it’s loose in form but stentorian in tone (but never unsympathetic to the youth movement). The amount of astonishing footage that Palmer managed to cram into a mere hour boggles the mind. Palmer appears to have access to just about anyone he wanted, so we get brief statements or conversations with Paul McCartney, Jimi Hendrix, Donovan, Eric Burdon, Frank Zappa, Manfred Mann, Pete Townshend, George Martin, and so on. With the possible exception of Zappa, Burdon’s the most articulate of the bunch, pointing out the similarities between taking LSD and doing a stint in Vietnam.

The movie features truly scintillating performances from Cream (“I’m So Glad” and “We’re Going Wrong”), The Who (“Mary Anne with the Shaky Hand”), Pink Floyd (“Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun”), Donovan (“The Lullaby of Spring”), Jimi Hendrix (“Wild Thing”), the Animals (“Good Times” and “When I Was Young”). There is some utterly fantastic close-up footage in which The Who destroy their instruments at the end of a gig at, of all places, the Peoria Opera House as well as some similar footage of Jimi Hendrix just shredding the entire concept of rock and roll right in front of your eyes. ALL of the performance footage is remarkable.
 

 
There are also some amusing interviews with a “sleazy” music publisher with a pencil mustache who by rights should be named Monty Python (his name is actually Eddie Rogers) and a self-confident “jingle executive” from America named Jim West (motto: “Selling Spoken Here”) who explains how to use advertising techniques to con teens into coming to see the Mona Lisa. There are a handful of other British music industry types who are barely identified and don’t have to be—they’re the local color. They also get some frankly inane comments of the dismissive variety from none other than Anthony Burgess.

Palmer made dozens of documentaries from the 1960s onward, and they cover a fascinating range of personalities, including Leonard Bernstein, Benjamin Britten, Rory Gallagher, Peter Sellers, Liberace, Hugh Hefner, Leonard Cohen, and on and on. He codirected 200 Motels with Frank Zappa. The governing tone of All My Loving is one of indulgent “concern,” of investigating a “problem” to be “solved”—we hear about the deafening volume of the new music and the possibly shallow values of the kids and so forth. There’s some startling imagery from Vietnam thrown in as well—never forget Vietnam. This movie goes all over the reservation to evoke 1968—and succeeds.

With its big, messy crescendo, the end of All My Loving somewhat resembles 2001: A Space Odyssey and “A Day in the Life,” and, to Palmer’s credit, the ending, which rapidly shows the breathtaking variety of images we’ve seen over the previous hour (scored to “Be-In (Hare Krishna)” from Hair), works marvelously. Set aside some time for All My Loving. You won’t regret it.
 

 
via Beatles Video of the Day

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Mind-blowing early Soft Machine footage, 1968
Carnaby Street in Color, from 1968

“Have you ever defecated onstage?”

Straight from the horse’s mouth, take it away Bob Andelman:

When I was a freshman at the University of Miami in 1978, I worked at WVUM 90.5 FM as an air personality. One day, the station manager, Bob “Bear” Mordente, was looking for someone willing to go out to the Royal Biscayne Hotel in Key Biscayne to interview musician and pop culture legend Frank Zappa.

I said I’d do it if no one else volunteered. Then, as now, I wasn’t afraid of interviewing anyone. Then it was foolish; I had no on-air experience and even less experience interviewing anyone for broadcast. Oh, and I knew absolutely zero—ZERO!—about Mr. Zappa.

A time was set for the next day and I went back to my dorm to see if anybody had any idea what I should ask the man. Lucky for me (not really) the drug dealers—I mean students—in the room next to me had piles of Zappa and the Mothers of Invention albums and purported to be experts on the man. Experts on the myth, as it turned out, but “urban legends” as a buzzphrase was still a good 20 years off. Anyway, these two knuckleheads filled me up with wide-eyed stories of ridiculous things that Zappa allegedly had done on stage over the years and I took copious notes.

The next day, Mordente and I drove out to the Royal Biscayne Hotel and our moment with destiny. Mordente handled recording the sound on a reel-to-reel machine so I could focus on Zappa and my litany of ludicrous questions.

I asked the most idiotic, moronic things of this brilliant American master and I must say that he treated me with great kindness in return, encouraging me to see him as a person, not some bizarre cartoon, and to just engage him in conversation. It was advice I remember and follow to this day, whether I’m talking to musicians, authors, politicians, athletes or entrepreneurs.

My unvarnished, unedited interview with Frank Zappa aired immediately on WVUM, was repeated often, and became a legend in awfulness.

Despite this, I had a blast working on the college radio station, mostly handling Friday and Saturday overnights, spinning deep album cuts, taking requests from my pals in the dorms and meeting some really bizarre stoner listeners in the greater Coral Gables community.

What survives from my day with Frank Zappa—we were together a couple of hours—is the edited, 30-minute recording you’re about to hear. Ladies and gentlemen, my day with Frank Zappa, September 14, 1978.

 
Below, Zappa a month later on October 13, 1978 at The Capitol Theatre in Passaic, NJ. Zappa is playing the famous burnt guitar that Jimi Hendrix gave him:

 
Martin Perlich interviewed Frank Zappa eight times on his “Electric Tongue” program on the Los Angeles progressive rock radio station KMET. Although Zappa was well-known to be a difficult interviewee, Perlich knew what he was talking about and always got the best out of him. In this excellent and wide-ranging 1972 talk, Perlich and Zappa discuss classical music, the philosophical role of music in society and “modernism” in a general sense. There is a great section where they discuss how to explain to kids what they’re seeing on television isn’t necessarily true and Zappa predicts that there will be another monumental media innovation within the next several decades that will will cause or require the human brain to have to rewire itself again in the same way that television had. Heady stuff and exactly what you want from a vintage Frank Zappa interview…

Interesting to note that Zappa sticks up for (the then chart-topping) Grand Funk Railroad more than once during the interview, a group he would later (improbably) go on to produce. Zappa also talks about the 20 piece orchestra that he would be performing with soon at the Hollywood Bowl (and recording The Grand Wazoo with) and tells the story of having a deranged “fan” push him into the orchestra pit at the Rainbow Theatre in London.

At a certain point, John Lennon and Yoko Ono come in for some withering comments regarding their “jam session” at the Fillmore East. For whatever reason, Lennon re-titled the Zappa composition “King Kong, ” the centerpiece of the Mothers’ live act for years and a song that took up an entire side of the Uncle Meat album, as “Jamrag” and credited it to Lennon/Ono on their 1972 Sometime In New York City live album. Zappa’s own mix of this material, radically different from the Phil Spector-produced tracks on John and Yoko’s record came out on his Playground Psychotics live set in 1992.  Zappa tells the full story in the interview.
 

 

 
Below, John Lennon and Yoko Ono onstage with The Mothers of Invention at the Fillmore East, June 4, 1971. The Mothers at this time were comprised of Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman on vocals; Bob Harris, keyboards; Don Preston, Minimoog; Ian Underwood, keyboards, alto sax; Jim Pons, bass, vocals; and Aynsley Dunbar on drums.
 

 
As regular readers of this blog know, I am a massive Mothers of Invention fan and also a huge Lenny Bruce aficionado. I’ve got a painting of the original Mothers above my desk as I type this and several pieces of rare Lenny Bruce memorabilia on the bookshelves behind me.

Last week when I found that wild recording of Lenny speaking to students at UCLA, I also found this gem. It’s had fewer than 75 plays.

What is “this” you ask? Why it’s a short live recording of Frank Zappa and The Mothers Of Invention, who were—on June 24th and 25th,1966—the opening act for Lenny Bruce at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco. This is a record of one of those nights.

Zappa later wrote of meeting the great comedian (who he named-checked on the cover of Freak Out in the “These People Have Contributed Materially In Many Ways To Make Our Music What It Is. Please Do Not Hold It Against Them” list of his influences and heroes.)

“I had seen Lenny Bruce a number of times at Canter’s Deli, where he used to sit in a front booth with Phil Spector and eat knockwurst. I didn’t really talk with him until we opened for him at the Fillmore West in 1966. I met him in the lobby between sets and asked him to sign my draft card. He said no – he didn’t want to touch it.”

The YouTube poster claims the recording to be from a soundboard source and it does sound pretty good once it gets going. Certainly it’s one of the earliest live Mothers recordings in circulation (and news to me). It starts off with “Plastic People,” then goes into “Toads Of The Short Forest” and “I’m Not Satisfied” before the group launches into the sea shanty “Handsome Cabin Boy” and turn it into a guitar rave-up of epic proportions with Zappa’s axe making a noise that was probably quite novel sounding to the ears of those in attendance.

The MOI were but a five-piece at the time with Jimmy Carl Black on drums; Ray Collins on vocals; Roy Estrada on bass, Elliot Ingber on guitar and Frank Zappa on guitar and vocals.

The performance of “The Orange County Lumber Truck” that follows the “Handsome Cabin Boy” jam is not from the same show. I don’t see how it could be without Bunk Gardner, Don Preston, Motorhead Sherwood or Ian Underwood (who all seem to be present and accounted for by the sound of things). Which is not to say that it’s not absolutely amazeballs—because it most certainly is. I just don’t know what the provenance is.
 

 
And to keep the Frank Zappa/Lenny Bruce connection going, here’s The Berkeley Concert (recorded on December 12th of 1965) as originally released on Zappa and Herb Cohen’s Bizarre record label in 1969.
 

 
“We Don’t Mess Around” was a band rehearsal—there’s no audience—for a show at the Krone Circus in Munich that a German TV station taped on September 8, 1978. At the time Zappa was touring with arguably one of the tightest bands he ever assembled—Ike Willis, Denny Walley, Arthur Barrow, Tommy Mars, Peter Wolf, Ed Mann, Vinnie Colaiuta—and you even get to see Frank playing the accordion…

With some documentary elements including a shopping trip and an interview with Zappa’s bodyguard. Some of this material overlaps with/was included in Zappa’s own Baby Snakes feature.

Songs you will hear are “Pound for a Brown on a Bus,” “Baby Snakes,” “The Deathless Horsie,” “Dancin’ Fool,” “Easy Meat,” “Honey Don’t You Want a Man Like Me?” “Keep It Greasy,” “Why Does It Hurt When I Pee?” “Sofa #2,” “Seal Call Fusion Music,” “Bobby Brown,” “Conehead,” “Dead Air,” “I’m On Duty,” “St. Alphonzo’s Pancake Breakfast,” “Rollo.”

Zappa’s guitar solo on “Easy Meat” is stunning and the camera stays right on his hands, building an ephemeral sculpture in the air. The interview with his limo driver/bodyguard is laugh out loud funny.
 

Trout Mask Replica painting by Cal Schenkel

Even if the name Cal Schenkel doesn’t quite ring a bell, there is very little doubt that you’ve seen his illustrations, photography and collage work work adorning literally dozens of iconic album covers by Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention, The Fugs, Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart. He was basically Zappa’s visual partner for longer than a decade working on the covers for Straight/Bizarre releases and rented a wing of the Zappa family home in Laurel Canyon for his live-in art studio. Schenkel is the guy who hollowed out the carp for Don Van Vliet to wear on the Trout Mask Replica cover—that stinky photo shoot was said to have taken over two hours—and he’s the fellow who realized the Sgt. Pepper‘s goof for We’re Only In It for the Money. He’s got a primitive “ragged” illustration style (which predates punk graphics) that is distinctly his own and Schenkel a master of creating humorous and strikingly surreal images that have intrigued generations of record buyers, inspiring a certain meme in recent years and even Halloween pumpkins.

Over the weekend I ended up on Cal Schenkel’s website and it occurred to me that many DM readers would probably like to know about what’s on offer there. For starters, his prices are fantastic, more in line with what an Etsy crafts-person might sell their wares for than the price tags something for sale on the wall of an art gallery would have. The work is priced to sell. Schenkel’s a working artist living in rural Pennsylvania and this is how he pays his bills without having to deal with the rigmarole of the art world—he’s had just two solo exhibitions of his art in the past 20 years. More power to him, and to you, especially if you happen to be a Zappa fan—there are rumored to be many of you among DM’s readership—who likes art and getting a damned good bargain.

For as little as $200 you can get a portfolio of thirteen mostly Zappa-related prints. Individual Giclée prints sell for as little as $25. You can get a signed photograph of Captain Beefheart taken by Schenkel. He does hand-painted caricatures of one of your favorite mustachioed guitarists. He does hand-painted versions of some of his famous album covers, too. And like I was saying, the prices are right. Personally I feel like he’s underselling his work, but I happen to be a big admirer of Cal Schenkel’s art.
 

 

 

 

 
See more at Cal Schenkel’s website.

Below, Frank Zappa and Cal Schenkel invent Adult Swim back in 1971 with the “Dental Hygiene Dilemma” animation from 200 Motels:

 
Frank Zappa was fond of cheesy monster movies and sci-fi flicks. He had a record label called Barking Pumpkin and his favorite holiday was Halloween. From 1977 until he stopped performing, Zappa and whatever Mothers of Invention he was touring with at the time, made a stop at New York’s Palladium Theater on 14th Street, the same venue where The Clash’s Paul Simonon smashed up his bass (as seen on the cover of London Calling) and that was reborn as the Palladium nightclub (home of Club MTV) and later NYU student dorms…
 

 
First up, the 1977 show as recorded by radio’s King Biscuit Flower Hour:
 

 
The marathon (nearly four hours) 10/31/1978 show from that year’s Palladium run:
 

 

 
In 1981, MTV did a live simulcast of Zappa’s Halloween show from The Palladium:
 

 
We partly have French-American experimental, modernist, avant-garde composer Edgard Varèse to thank for The Mothers of Invention.

When Frank Zappa was a teenager, a musical prodigy living in rural Lancaster, California, he idolized Varèse. He tracked down The Complete Works of Edgard Varèse, Volume One after a year’s search (this is what life was like before on-line ordering) and studied it obsessively. Zappa was graciously permitted an expensive long-distance phone call to Varèse’s home as a fifteenth birthday present from his mother. He ended up talking to Varèse’s wife, the famed literary translator Louise McCutcheon Varèse, instead, as Varèse was out of the country.

The young Zappa eagerly sought out a correspondence with the man he considered his mentor. Varèse wrote to him, describing his current work (Déserts) and telling Zappa to visit him if he ever came to New York. Zappa wrote an earnest and impassioned letter to him at 16 while visiting relatives in Baltimore, asking to visit him. He did speak to Varèse on the phone eventually, but the two men never met.

Zappa wrote to Varèse:

...It might seem strange but ever since I was 13 I have been interested in your music. The whole thing stems from the time when the keeper of this little record store sold me your album “The Complete Works of Edgard Varèse, Vol.l .” The only reason I knew it existed was that an article in either LOOK or the POST mentioned it as being noisy and unmusical and only good for trying out the sound systems in high fidelity units (referring to your “IONISATIONS”). I don’t know how the store I got it from ever obtained it, but, after several hearings, I became curious and bought it for $5.40, which, at the time seemed awfully high and being so young, kept me broke for three weeks. Now I wouldn’t trade it for anything and I am looking around for another copy as the one I have is very worn and scratchy.

After I had struggled through Mr. Finklestein’s notes on the back cover (I really did struggle too, for at the time I had had no training in music other than practice at drum rudiments) I became more and more interested in you and your music. I began to go to the library and take out books on modern composers and modern music, to learn all I could about Edgard Varèse. It got to be my best subject (your life) and I began writing my reports and term papers on you at school. At one time when my history teacher asked us to write on an American that has really done something for the U.S.A. I wrote on you and the Pan American Composers League and the New Symphony. I failed. The teacher had never heard of you and said I made the whole thing up. Silly but true. That was in my Sophomore year in high school.

Throughout my life all the talents and abilities that God has left me with have been self developed, and when the time came for Frank to learn how to read and write music, Frank taught himself that too. I picked it all up from the library.

I have been composing for two years now, utilizing a strict twelve-tone technique, producing effects that are reminiscent of Anton Webern.

During those two years I have written two short woodwind quartets and a short symphony for winds, brass and percussion.

Recently I have been earning my keep at home with my blues band, the BLACKOUTS. We have done quite well and in my association with my fellow musicians I am learning to play other instruments besides drums…

I plan to go on and be a composer after college and I could really use the counsel of a veteran such as you. If you would allow me to visit with you for even a few hours it would be greatly appreciated.

It may sound strange but I think I have something to offer you in the way of new ideas. One is an elaboration on the principle of Ruth Seeger’s contrapuntal dynamics and the other is an extension of the twelve-tone technique which I call the inversion square. It enables one to compose harmonically constructed pantonal music in logical patterns and progressions while still abandoning tonality.

Varèse became involved with the New York Dadaist circle upon moving to America as a young artist in 1915. His 1931 piece, Ionisation, mentioned in Zappa’s letter, was written for percussion instruments only. Varèse met and planned to work with Soviet inventor Léon Theremin, whose invention of the electronic musical instrument of the same name fascinated Varèse. His interest in electronic music, including the revolutionary musique concrète, frustratingly overreached what was technologically available to him at the time.

Surrealist Theatre of Cruelty pioneer Antonin Artaud wrote a libretto for Varèse’s futuristic, science-fiction stage drama, L’Astronome (The Astronomer), but the project was abandoned when Varèse become distracted by a different composition, Espace. Author Henry Miller wrote the libretto for the also unfinished Espace, describing Varèse’s music as “The stratospheric Colossus of Sound”.

Varèse’s influence cast a long shadow on Zappa’s massive body of work. The Mothers of Invention’s first album, Freak Out!, includes “In Memoriam, Edgar Varèse,” the second movement of “Help, I’m A Rock.” Zappa’s final project in July 1993 was The Rage and the Fury, a recording of Varèse’s music. Zappa said,  “Varèse’s music has never been given the credit it deserves and I believe it’s because the technology was never there to record the compositions properly.”

Deserts

Amériques

Ionisation

Varèse’s Offrandes conducted by Pierre Boulez, a longtime champion of his work, with Anna Steiger soloist.

Previously on Dangerous Minds
Poème Électronique: Le Corbusier, Edgard Varèse & Xenakis Collaborate, 1958

 
In an area of Tokyo known as “Foot Town,” a G-rated entertainment neighborhood for tourists, there sits the Tokyo Tower’s Wax Museum, the world’s greatest (only?) collection of progrock and krautrock wax figurines—but not for long. On September 1, the museum will be closing due to losing its lease as the Tokyo Tower building undergoes updating.

Exhibits on display in the wax museum include the improbable figures of Ash Ra Tempel’s Manuel Göttsching, Klaus Schulze, Mother of Invention Don Preston and members of Faust, along with the better-known faces of Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson, ELP’s Keith Emerson, Robert Fripp and Frank Zappa. The majority of the wax figurines there have nothing to do with krautrock, prog or music in general.

It is not known what will happen to the wax figures, which are owned by Gen Fujita, the son of Den Fujita, the multi-gazillionaire who originally brought McDonald’s to Japan.
 

 

 
Via The Wire/Thank you kindly Nick Abrahams!

 
Apparently the famously litigious Gail Zappa has trademarked the name “Captain Beefheart.” I read about this yesterday, after it was tweeted by WFMU but didn’t know what to make of it.

As Spin opined:

“To those who’ve followed the latter-day activities of the Zappa estate executrix, this latest move may seem a bit worrisome.”

Perhaps it does. Don Van Vliet died in December of 2010 and is survived by his wife Jan. If Gail Zappa is working on behalf of the widow Beefheart—and maybe she is—well, that’s one thing. If she’s not, that would be quite another. At this point no one seems to know exactly what’s going on.

Gail Zappa filed for the Captain Beefheart trademark in August of 2012. The Zappa Family Trust released the “original” 1976 version of his Bat Chain Puller album earlier that year. The tapes had gotten caught up in a legal dispute between Frank Zappa and his former business partner/manager Herb Cohen and Zappa refused to allow it to be released, causing Beefheart to rerecord the album as Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) for Warner Bros. Records in 1978.

This is from the Trademarkia website:

The description provided to the USPTO for CAPTAIN BEEFHEART is Audio and video recordings featuring music and concerts; musical sound recordings; musical video recordings; phonograph records featuring music; pre-recorded CDs, DVDs, audio tapes, video tapes, audio discs, video discs, audio cartridges, and video cartridges featuring music and concerts; downloadable audio recordings, downloadable video recordings, and downloadable MP3 files all featuring music and concerts; downloadable motion picture films, downloadable television shows and downloadable radio shows all featuring music and concerts; downloadable multimedia files featuring music and concerts; electronic publications, namely, books, magazines, manuals, journals, catalogs, brochures, newsletters, featuring music and concerts recorded on computer media; interactive multimedia computer game programs; music-composition software; software for creating music; software featuring musical sound recordings and musical video recordings; multimedia software recorded on CD-ROM featuring music and concerts; electronic game software; downloadable ring tones for mobile phones; downloadable graphics for mobile phones; sunglasses.

There’s bound to be more to this story… Stay tuned.

UPDATE: I found this on the GZ sez section of Zappa.com:

Re: Trout Mask Replica -Jan Van Vliet
Added: April 29th, 2013 in Questions
On Apr 11, 2013, at 2:11 AM, Odd Magnus Grimeland wrote:

I would think Jan Van Vliet has an interest in the estate of Don, similar to your own interest in the estate of Frank. I wonder how she is involved in the new issue of Trout Mask Replica and how her interests are taken care of?

Cordially,

O. M. Grimeland

GZ: There really isn’t a cordial way of not minding your own business and answering for anyone other than myself is not my business.