Sorry, Frank! Though the title of Zappa and The Mothers' 1971 album was Just Another Band from L.A., listeners knew what the maverick bandleader was alluding to: his latest group was anything but. Vocalists Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan (a.k.a. Flo and Eddie) and bassist Jim Pons - all freshly recruited from The Turtles - were now happy together with Zappa, drummer Aynsley Dunbar, keyboardists Bob Harris and Don Preston, and multi-instrumentalist Ian Underwood in one of the most outrageous and potent line-ups of The Mothers ever. Though Just Another Band has its fans, this brief era of Mothers history was best captured on Fillmore East - June 1971. Underneath its plain, white bootleg-esque cover, Zappa unleashed a live concept album linked thematically to his motion picture 200 Motels and its life-on-the-road theme. With 200 Motels just having received the deluxe treatment last year from Zappa Records and UMe, the labels have turned their attention to Fillmore East. While the original album has been expanded as a 3-LP vinyl set, the original concerts are premiering in full as part of a bigger set: The Mothers 1971. This comprehensive 8-CD set follows the smaller, 4-CD box The Mothers 1970 which introduced Flo and Eddie into the band alongside Dunbar, Underwood, George Duke, and Jeff Simmons.
The 100-track, nearly 10-hour The Mothers 1971, produced by Ahmet Zappa and "Vaultmeister" Joe Travers, presents each and every note of all four shows played at NYC's late, lamented Fillmore East on June 5-6, 1971 from which the original album's dozen tracks were drawn. (The concerts were among the closing acts at the historic venue; it closed permanently on June 27. Today, a bank sits in its place.) It marks the very first time the complete Fillmore East concerts, including the subsequently-released jam session with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, have been released in unedited form. They're also newly mixed from the original tapes by Craig Parker Adams and mastered by John Polito.
But the Fillmore shows are far from everything on this comprehensive set. To paint a fuller picture of the Mothers' 1971 - one which began in triumph and ended in tragedy - the box recreates a composite concert from the June 1 and June 3 performances in Scranton and Harrisburg, PA (respectively), and concludes with the full Rainbow Theatre concert in London, England on December 10, 1971 when a "fan" attacked Zappa following the band's performance of The Beatles' "I Want to Hold Your Hand," leaving him with serious injuries. The band had been playing that night with rented equipment, due to the shocking fire that engulfed the Montreux Casino on December 4 (and their instruments with it). Thankfully, Zappa and the Mothers emerged relatively unscathed, not knowing that the fire would be mere prelude to more horror.
The premiere of the Rainbow show could threaten to cast a pall over the higher spirits displayed at the Fillmore East shows, but happily that's not the case here. The complete Fillmore shows (which occupy the first five-and-a-half discs of the box) are very much a delight for fans of this still-controversial period of Mothers history in which Flo and Eddie steered the group in a more overtly comical direction. Though the duo dominates the proceedings, whether with raunchy humor or distinctive harmonizing (and frequently with both!), the musicianship for which Zappa was known is still very much in evidence.
The box set makes the case that all of the strengths of this iteration of the band, individually and collectively, were in fact showcased at the Fillmore. The epic "Billy the Mountain" was performed at every show, ranging roughly from 30-36 minutes in length. Zappa's parody of a rock opera, about a talking mountain named Billy (with "two big caves for eyes") and his wife Ethel ("a tree growing off his shoulder") allowed for city-specific references, absurdist comedy, satirical jabs at the American right wing, and plenty of Frank's tasty guitar. For the first two shows, the band arguably topped "Billy" with full-throttle renditions of "King Kong." Flo and Eddie mostly sat out the lengthy and intricate jazz-rock instrumental which premiered on 1969's Uncle Meat and allowed for ample, impressive soloing on the Fillmore stage. So did an intense reading of "Chunga's Revenge" which closed the first show of June 6 in ferocious fashion with Zappa's searing guitar, Dunbar's forceful drums, and Pons' hypnotic bass all intuitively linked. If the musicality of the Fillmore stand took a back seat to the comedy on the released album, balance is restored on the box set.
Other highlights of the Fillmore sets include the grooving, twisty, mostly-instrumental "Little House I Used to Live In" and numerous, eclectic selections excised from the original LP including the mordant one-two punch of "Concentration Moon" and "Mom and Dad" from We're Only in It for the Money (1968) and the early, high school-themed Zappa composition "Status Back Baby" from the abortive I Was a Teenage Maltshop project with Captain Beefheart. From: https://theseconddisc.com/2022/04/27/review-frank-zappa-the-mothers-1971/
