Tuesday, 17 July, 1984
Palace Theater, Los Angeles, California
Set lists
Main show
Zoot Allures
Tinsel Town Rebellion
Oh No
Trouble Every Day
Penguin in Bondage
Hot Plate Heaven at the Green Hotel
Dumb All Over
The Evil Prince
Carolina Hard Core Ecstasy
Advance Romance
He's So Gay
Bobby Brown
Keep It Greasey
Honey, Don't You Want a Man Like Me?
Carol You Fool
Chana in De Bushwop
Kreega Bondola (formerly "Young and Monde")
Why Don't You Like Me?
First encore
The Closer You Are
Johnny Darling
No No Cherry
Second encore
Dancin' Fool
The Illinois Enema Bandit
Review
Two years and three days after his last infamous appearance on stage in Palermo, Frank steps out to a warm welcome from this Los Angeles crowd. Unfortunately, while the audience's welcome is warm, this tape is anything but. Most of the recording is from one tape which is quite muffled and extremely unbalanced, with drums loud enough to cause distortion and vocals vanishingly quiet. The last part of the show, from about halfway through No No Cherry, is from a different tape which has somewhat clearer vocals but much more distant guitar.
Quirks of the tape aside, this performance is more or less what you'd expect for the first show of a tour. Still a number of mistakes as the band settles in, and not much in the way of improvised deviation at this point. Frank spends a couple of minutes talking about how he's glad to be on tour again, and then the band launches into Zoot Allures. Right off the bat, this band sounds cheesy and demented, a stark contrast to the beautiful and rich Zoots of '82.
Frank's Zoot solo is fairly mundane, which is no surprise given that he's been out of practice for two years. Frank takes his time working through the band intros, making a big deal out of each individual band member, and even including John Smothers. He finally gets to Napoleon, at which point the audience erupts into loud cheers that drown out most of what Frank is saying.
Tinsel Town Rebellion continues the trend of "cheese-oriented comedy music", as Frank puts it. In the absence of Tommy Mars's synths, this tune really does sound like a parody of itself, although for my money this is the best arrangement of this song ever. The third verse of this arrangement includes well-arranged quotes from and references to numerous '80s pop hits, including Bowie's "Let's Dance" and Culture Club's "I'll Tumble 4 Ya", before we go into what would in any other tour be the powerful climactic ending. Instead, we get Ike playing the Woody Woodpecker theme on kazoo to round off this delightfully hammy performance.
Woody Woodpecker heralds the start of Oh No, an established classic dating from Napoleon's last stint in Frank's ensemble. Like most established classics that made a comeback in the '80s, this song is now reggae. As if that weren't cheesy enough, every occurrence of the word "love" in the song has been replaced with "glove", completely destroying whatever charm this song may once have had. Then, all of a sudden, we get to the "and in your dreams..." section and the reggae stops, dumping us into a fast-paced version of the 10/8 vamp from the original Oh No. Frank couldn't just stick with ruining one classic arrangement of this number, though, and the band quickly drops that vamp again and goes into a cheesy, overblown big band-type climax as Napoleon sings "I just can't believe you are such a fool". This is one '84 rearrangement I do not enjoy.
Every cloud does have a silver lining, though, and in Oh No's case it inspired Frank to bring back the Roxy version of Trouble Every Day. This has also been rearranged, but much more tactfully. The first few bars as on Roxy are missing, and instead the band launches straight into the descending sax riff, at a much faster tempo than on that album ten years ago. Of course, this means that the ensuing dramatic drum fill is much faster too, but Chad pulls it off without breaking a sweat. When eventually the band reaches the vocal section, the increased tempo results in a very catchy rock 'n' roll vamp behind Frank's classic lyrics. While this is clearly based on the Roxy arrangement, it has a very different feel to it.
Frank gives us another mundane solo in Trouble, and then the band makes a segue into Penguin in Bondage, another Roxy tune. This one is fairly similar to the performance on Roxy, aside from continuing the faster pace, and contains another uninteresting guitar solo. The end of Penguin in Bondage is very well executed on this tour, though. Its final lyric, "and leave you a dried up dog biscuit", is followed by the band chanting "bow wow" over the opening vamp to a new song.
The new song is Hot Plate Heaven at the Green Hotel, a story of someone who lost their job and ended up in poverty. It's a political song, as is thematic for Frank in the '80s, and makes a point of the fact that "Republicans is fine if you're a multi-millionaire / Democrats is fair if all you own is what you wear / But neither of 'em's really right, 'cause neither of 'em care / 'Bout that hot plate heaven, 'cause they ain't been there". It would also be a source of many great guitar solos to come, although tonight's is nothing special.
Dumb All Over hasn't changed very much since 1982, except that the "and when his humble TV servant" bit has grown a reggae beat. The guitar solo is a different story, with Frank rearranging the Dumb All Over vamp into something I can only describe as "kickass" to solo over. He doesn't do much with it tonight, as we're coming to expect, but he would in time.
Frank then steps up to tell the audience about his new album, Thing-Fish. It is widely regarded as his worst album of all time, but that aside, some of its material was very well performed on this tour, including The Evil Prince, which Frank now introduces. The Evil Prince was a song specifically written for Napoleon to sing; the Prince, as with most of Frank's creations, being a character slowly created over time to suit Napoleon's performance style. The character was first referenced in The Torture Never Stops, first performed in 1975; indeed, on Thing-Fish the piece is inserted into the middle of Torture instead of the guitar solo.
However, I digress. Napoleon delivers a very operatic rendition of The Evil Prince for this LA crowd, and although the segue into the guitar solo is not as polished as it would get in later performances, this is still a force to be reckoned with. As expected by now, Frank delivers something less than noteworthy on guitar, and the tape cuts out before the end of this piece. A pity, as I would have been curious to hear how solid the ending was the first time around.
Nevertheless, the tape cuts back in during Carolina Hard Core Ecstasy, which sounds far more polished and directional than the released version on Bongo Fury. However, the high point of this tune is typically the guitar solo, and given Frank's lacklustre performances tonight, this one doesn't do much for me. Ditto Advance Romance, which seems to fly by without anything particularly eventful happening.
Then comes one of the signature medleys of the '84 band. He's So Gay, a Village People parody about flamboyant homosexuality, really shines with this many vocalists filling out the harmonies, and is one of the few songs that can make me smile no matter how bad the rest of the show. The segue into Bobby Brown is particularly pleasing; on any other tour, Bobby Brown would be the most forgettable part of the show, but this medley raises it to new heights of magnificence. As would be the norm for most of the tour, Frank ends the song with the line "watch me now, because the name of this song is Keep it Greasey!"
This band keeps it greasey, all right, and this faster-than-usual arrangement can be quite exhilerating to listen to. On this tape, though, the details aren't very audible, and so this song doesn't really do much. It eventually segues into Honey, Don't You Want a Man Like Me?, another very well-rearranged piece. This arrangement is much more in-your-face than the released version on Zappa in New York, and would be ripe with secret words as the tour progresses. All in all, though, this medley of four songs is far greater than any of the pieces in it alone.
Next up is a pair of new songs. Carol You Fool is a reggae (surprise!) song about a woman named Carol and a hopeless love story. As with most Zappa lyrics, the details are a little vague, but according to what I've read, she was a groupie who fell desperately in love with one of the band's road crew. Anyway, it's an enjoyable song in its own right, and in these early versions, Napoleon's tenor sax solo adds that little extra something that it would lose in later performances.
Next is Chana in De Bushwop, a song about an imaginary friend of Frank's daughter Diva. The lyrics are juvenile in a fun way, with a very basic rhyming scheme explaining how she lived in a tree, was nine foot three; and eats a horse, which is very large, of course. She even went to France, where she tried to dance. Ah, those crazy Bushwop folks. This is a bit of lighthearted fun that would persist through the entire tour, and also be a common ground for secret word abuse (as in the officially released version).
Kreega Bondola is the original name of the '84 arrangement of Young and Monde. This song would have many different names throughout the tour, since it's only lyrics come at the very end and would often be adapted based on the secret word of the night. Aside from the title-giving lyrics, it's an instrumental that contains a keyboard solo from Alan and a guitar solo from Frank for tonight, neither of which is anything special. It would gradually get longer and have more interesting solos as the tour goes on.
The main set ends with Why Don't You Like Me?, a version of Tell Me You Love Me with rewritten lyrics about Michael Jackson. I much prefer the 1988 arrangement of this tune (as heard on the CD release of Broadway the Hard Way), but on this particular tape, you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference.
Frank introduces the start of the first encore as being from their next album, Them or Us. The ensuing '50s medley (of which only the first tune is on Them or Us) would be a staple of the '84 band, and was never a disappointment. There's no amount of boring solos or lacklustre performances that a bit of good old '50s pop can't fix.
Dancin' Fool is mostly routine, except that something amusing (it's hard to tell what with only audio) happens with a stool at the start of it. Also, Frank comments that Ike was about to use the toilet, but they had to come back on stage before he could. That's not very interesting, yes, but neither is Dancin' Fool, at least until Frank announces the segue into The Illinois Enema Bandit.
The final song sounds as the Bandit always sounds, except for the guitar solo. Frank plays for a while on the usual vamp, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, it transforms into a hyped-up blues rock riff, complete with cheesy synths and guitars in the background. This is an incredible vamp, and it's just a pity that Frank's guitar sounds so distant on this tape. This may well have been the only good solo of the night.
To summarise, this tape doesn't sound very good, but I don't count it as a huge loss because the performance isn't great either. I've spent most of this review talking about what's new in '84, rather than what's good about this show, because there just isn't that much to tell about the latter.
Not to worry, there's always tomorrow.