|
 1989
December
No 39 Frank's Wild Years
Andy Gill, 6 pp
Full text at Packard Goose
Packard
Goose.
At dead of night, behind barred gates and video security cameras up
in the Hollywood Hills above Los Angeles, a tall, angular man with
neatly trimmed hair and moustache sits at the console of his home
studio. He wears a tracksuit and trainers and looks young for his
age —he'll be 49 by Christmas—but every now and glen his kidney
stones give him a painful reminder of mortality. Frank Zappa is busy
remixing his past. The digital editing suite adjoining the lavishly
appointed studio has shelf upon shelf of master tapes of every
performance by The Mothers of Invention since Zappa's original
engineer Dick Kunc first started recording their gigs with a 2-track
analogue mixer and a portable Uher recorder back in 1969. One of
Frank's current projects is the compilation of a 13-hour, six
double-CD retrospective series of live performances culled from
these tapes, called You Can't Do That on Stage Anymore. It's a
typically gargantuan undertaking from a man who, in 1984, released a
triple-album (Thing-Fish) a mere month after a double-album (Them or
Us), and who has already issued both a triple-album and a double-CD
comprised solely of guitar solos. Frank's a virtual one-man cottage
industry now, figurehead and creative engine of a network of
companies with piquant Zappaesque names: Barking Pumpkin Records,
Barfko-Swill, Munchkin Music, 818 Pumpkin and, perhaps most unusual
of all in its directness, Zappa Records. (read
more) |
