Special releases from King Crimson, Frank Zappa, and many others on Record Store Day 2013

Record Store Day, the annual celebration of independently owned retail music outlets, marks the arrival of many special releases. This year’s instant rarities include extremely limited items from the likes of King Crimson (a collectors CD with graphic novel, t-shirt, etc.) and Frank Zappa. From to the RSD site:

Frank Zappa &  The Mothers  rare  single originally released in 1973
Available on vinyl for the first time in 40 years!
Remastered from the original analog sources.

• Side A: I’m The Slime     [non-LP track, also shorter than LP version]
• Side B: Montana   [2013 single edit featuring 25 additional seconds]

See also a split 7″ single with Deep Purple and Type-O Negative.

Read about all the 2013 specials at the RSD site.

Right here.

 

Rare Zappa footage

 

Today is Frank Zappa’s birthday, an anniversary we always mark at Pointy Guitar. Frank would’ve been 72 today. Here is a nice clip from a 1973 performance in Sweden.

 

AD: Dweezil Zappa for Zoom

Ian Donald Calvin Euclid

Here we have Dweezil Zappa with Frank’s famous burned-in-Miami-by-Hendrix Strat. In ’92 when this ad was out Dweezil made a guest appearance on the Spinal Tap album Break Like the Wind. The band Z would’ve been on the horizon at this time. Scanned from Guitar School, July 1992.

From the Rooney Archive.

 

Live Zappa

 

Here’s a gorgeous vignette from Frank Zappa, a live reading of the song “Sleep Dirt.”

 

Co de Kloet meets Frank Zappa

Dutch Public Radio producer and tireless proponent of adventurous music Co de Kloet has shared a story about his meeting Frank Zappa in 1983. From de Kloet’s Facebook feed:

I was reminded of a rainy yet beautiful afternoon in Paris in a very expensive hotel suite: as a present I gave Frank Zappa a giftwrapped copy of the Sinclair Lewis Book It Can’t Happen Here, convinced that THAT was the inspiration for his song on Freak Out: but it wasn’t! He did not know the book and almost crushed my hand when he thanked me for the present.

He goes on to note that Frank played him recordings that would surface the following year as Them or Us.

Read more about Co de Kloet right here.

 

Happy Birthday, Frank Zappa

A grand version of “Black Napkins” in honor of what would’ve been FZ’s 71st birthday.

 

It’s Frank Zappa day in Baltimore

September 17, 2011 is being celebrated as “Frank Zappa Day” in the late icon’s native Baltimore. As their site describes it, Manifesto 2011 is bringing together artists:

Across all mediums, who crate and perform in the spirit of unfettered creative expression, raw talent, experimentation, and above all, a flagrant disregard for preconceived notions of style or genre

The musical lineup features, among others, Dean Ween.

Take a look at their site.

Right here.

 

Motherly Love

Forget about the brotherly and otherly love.

It’s not really what the song is about, but happy Mother’s Day, if you’re into that type of thing. (Do any mothers actually look at this site?)

 

The worst Zappa anniversary

On this day in 1993 one of my heroes died. Frank Zappa’s music and aesthetic had been a part of my life for a long time before his departure and remains so. Poking around the web I found an interesting obituary from Richard Gehr. Here are a couple pieces:

The missing link soldering modernism’s controlled strangeness with style-shuffling postmodernism, Zappa was a guitar hero writ freaky …

Zappa’s cultural import could easily take another half-century to appreciate … He’s also the closest our generation has to a Brecht/Weill …

Take a look at the complete piece right here.

And give Lumpy Gravy a spin today.

 

A Zappa relic shows up in the shop

The irreverent Beavis Audio Research site features a tale of repairing an ADA Digitizer 4 delay unit that once belonged to Frank Zappa. The history is good (there were multiple eBay auctions of items from Zappa’s Utility Muffin Research Kitchen several years back—from whence the ADA came), and so is the provenance (the shipping box for the device featured a Barfko-Swill return address). Beavis proprietor Dano describes what he found upon digging into the artifact:

(A) Zilog Z80 microprocessor. Folks, this is old school, no fancy ASICs, SMD or Chinese Glue Gun wads, just an old 8-bit MCU and an assload of discrete logic chips.

And he got it working too. Only one sad fact:

Unfortunately the lithium coin battery that was soldered to the original board had expired sometime long ago, and taken any Zappa Preset History with it. I can only imagine what hidden gems would have lurked in there…

Read the complete story and see a bunch of pics at BAR. Right here.

Thanks to Mike Brown for the tip.