Zappa Still Alive in "Roxy the Movie"

Roxy the Movie (2015)
Dir.: Frank Zappa
TC4P Rating: 7/9

Except for my brother Otis, I often feel quite alone in my regard for Frank Zappa, especially in 2015. Some of my friends have Zappa in their collections, but nobody that I am aware of listens to him on a regular basis like I do. And except for when I am with my brother, I have no one else in my life with whom to discuss Zappa and his work.

While I was aware of Zappa when I was a bit younger (I remember being fascinated by him when he hosted one of the more notorious episodes of Saturday Night Live), I did not own one of his albums until 1980. After hearing the song Dancing Fool on Dr. Demento's show, I purchased my first copy of Sheik Yerbouti on double LP (with that iconic cover photo of Frank in Arab garb), and I never looked back. Within a year, I owned seven more of his albums. I kept buying even more albums, anything that I could find in our local record stores. I followed every move Zappa made in the press, including his political misadventures, and it just made me feel even more connected to this music from what truly had to be another universe, though he was (tragically) human as anyone else, just prodigiously, ridiculously more talented and outspoken. At a garage sale in the mid-'80s, I picked up the very first Mothers of Invention LP, Freak Out, and after that, it was just a not so simple matter of filling in the gaps, owing to how crazily prolific he was, both in his lifetime and posthumously. Tupac has nothing on Frank.

It is now some thirty years later, and I have nearly every Zappa album -- official and otherwise -- around ninety albums in some form or another, LP, disc, or digital. I have read numerous biographies on the man and even his own autobiography, books of analysis and criticism of Zappa's music output, and magazines devoted to his legacy. The Zappa Wiki Jawaka is a regular online destination for research for me, and I also regularly listen to The Zappa Podcast, released sporadically throughout the year, which is the true apotheosis of Zappa nerdom. Zappa, like Lincoln, is never far from my mind.

And like many Zappa fanatics, it is the hope of discovering missing artifacts and long dormant music that spurs us through the years. For some, one of these artifacts being dangled on the end of a forty year old stick is Roxy the Movie, a concert documentary built from a quartet of performances in L.A.'s Roxy Theatre in December of 1973. The shows featuring the music of one of Zappa's justly renowned and finest ensembles were available on a double LP called Roxy and Elsewhere in 1974, along with selected tracks in the You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore series. (And even more from two of the shows on a 2014 release called Roxy by Proxy.) But what had happened to the movie that was being filmed during that set of shows?

Sound problems, man. Really, synchronization problems. Something got messed up, the timing on the sound in relation to the image went out of whack, and it took forty years (with shifting focus on Zappa's part until his death in 1993) to figure the mess out and release a finished film out of it. Editor John Albarian was brought in to sort through the wreckage. As he puts it in the liner notes, " Four shows multiplied by four cameras multiplied by 80 minutes equates to about 21 hours of picture and sound that needed to be sunk together but couldn't due to their difference in speed." It took him over eight weeks to figure out what needed to be done to get the film and sound to play together nicely. Then he had to cut the film together.

And what we have is what we didn't have before. Criticism is fairly useless, because you can't go back and have Frank do it all over again. We were missing this, and now we get to see it in all of its ragged glory. If you are not already a convert to the cult of Zappa, I am not sure if maybe Baby Snakes is the better entry point film-wise, but Roxy the Movie does show off one incredible band on some of Zappa's most complex (and therefore, difficult to play) pieces.

The Band:

• Napoleon Murphy Brock (flute, tenor saxophone, vocals)
• George Duke (keyboards, synthesizer, vocals)
• Bruce Fowler (trombone)
• Tom Fowler (bass guitar)
• Ralph Humphrey (drums)
• Chester Thompson (drums)
• Ruth Underwood (percussion)
• Frank Zappa (lead guitar, percussion, vocals)

Zappa, after discussing sound problems with the audience (certainly presciently), launches into a discussion of marital aids that leads into Penguin in Bondage. Next is the percussion-heavy T'Mershi Duween, followed by a medley jamming together The Dog Breath Variations and a section of Uncle Meat. Excellent renditions of RDNZL and Inca Roads give the entire band a workout before leading into one of my favorite numbers from the film, Echidna's Arf (of You), with its manic start-and-stop rhythms. 

Most impressive for me in the film was getting to see Ruth Underwood attempt some insanely intricate vibraphone, marimba, and xylophone parts in several songs. This is especially true in the next number, Don't You Ever Wash That Thing?, where Frank even calls attention to her at one point when it is her turn to shine (though she has already been going crazy on percussion the entire time). She is clearly very caught up in the concert and has a definite rapport with Zappa onstage. 

Next up is Cheepnis, a number clearly close to Zappa's monster-movie loving heart (and mine). He introduces the number with a lengthy discussion of the Roger Corman film, It Conquered the World (that I just watched again right before Halloween), including a description of its absolutely silly monster. As Frank describes it, "The monster looks sort of like an inverted ice-cream cone with teeth around the bottom. It looks like a... like a teepee or... sort of a rounded off pup-tent affair, and, uh, it's got fangs on the base of it. I don't know why but it's a very threatening sight. And then he's got a frown and, you know, ugly mouth and everything..." Napoleon Brock Murphy's lead vocals tell us the tale, but the middle section with the squeaky vocals describing the giant poodle attack (my favorite part of the song) is completely missing from this version, though the full song does appear on Roxy and Elsewhere. [Note: The poster art (and blu-ray cover art) for Roxy the Movie is itself a takeoff on the original poster for It Conquered the World.]

The show closes with a quite lengthy (17 minutes) version of Be-Bop Tango (Of the Old Jazzmen's Church). Zappa stresses that he wants to make sure they get this take right, and tells the audience, "This is a hard one to play," and then adds with a smile (even though he does play guitar during it), "That's why I don't play it." Clearly meant to stretch the limits of his orchestra, the entire band is up to the task, but in this number, it was the twin drum playing of Thompson and Humphrey that stood out for most for me, as well as jazz giant George Duke on keyboards. The song itself devolves into a weirdo dance contest with members of the audience (and one ringer stripper, who is really not that good) trying to keep up with whatever wild cacophony the band can play. It's truly stupid but also fun in its way, even if it goes on too long. Still, as a record of a Zappa concert in 1973, it is pretty accurate, even if there is an element of "you just had to be there" to get it.

If there is a criticism on the film from me, it is one how Zappa's guitar playing is not showcased as well as I thought it would be. He is rather jammed into a corner of the stage, and oftentimes the camera appears behind his guitar so we don't really get to see him play from that position. He looks cool, sure, but if you are trying to study the man and his style, he is often not afforded the most opportune of angles. Still, Zappa himself is his charismatic best onstage in Roxy the Movie, and fully in control of both the band and his audience in that neo-game show host voice that he perfected.

Extras on the disc include three additional song selections, totally around 20 more minutes, not included in the film. One song has another dance segment, this time involving groupie supreme, Miss Pamela Miller (one day Mrs. Des Barres), who is given the highly misogynistic task of sexually titillating the band members (even taking a crack at Ms. Underwood) to distract them from their playing. One could be taken aback at this behavior in 2015, but again it falls into the category of accepted behavior for 1973 (and well afterward) and comes off less dirty and more innocent silliness than it would seem. And besides, in a time capsule aspect, it is easy to see what was so appealing about Miss Pamela. She was a lovely girl.

And now I have another addition to my extensive Zappa catalogue, not just by having Roxy the Movie, but also because the Blu-ray comes with a second disc with the soundtrack to the film. Will the onslaught of Zappa releases ever end? I certainly hope not, and I am fairly certain that his recorded legacy will not only outlast the impending 25th anniversary of his death in 2018, but also probably my own demise. Hopefully someone will invent a way, besides identity theft, for me to purchase new Zappa albums when I am dead and buried. Just pipe the music into my coffin...

The Kollege of Musical Knowledge

I highly recommend that if you have a mother that can't sing, and she insists on singing to you constantly throughout your childhood, that you get rid of her immediately and trade her in for one that can vocalize to a sufficiently able degree.

My mother sang to us often as we were growing up, and, luckily for us, she could sing. It's not as if she walked around the house regaling us with song after song at all hours of the day. She certainly did not do such a thing. But she would pick her moments, and when the mood was right or the song had some sort of topical relevance to whatever mischief was going on at that particular moment, she would start in on some song from her childhood and sing a few bars (or sometimes more). I always found this pleasant, for frankly, she never sang enough.

One of the songs she would do a little of now and then was "Three Little Fishies (Itty Bitty Poo)", and was especially fond of saying the line "...and they twam and they twam all over the dam." Because we never had a recording of this song, I only knew it from my mother's singing it to us, and it would be several years before I actually heard the song on the radio (KHAR Easy Listening in Anchorage) and learned the name of the man who made it a #1 hit back in 1939: Kay Kyser.

From what I understand, he was a bandleader who didn't really lead his band, except as a figurehead, and had little to do with the arranging or producing of the records on which his name appeared as the artist. That's fine: Walt Disney could barely draw, didn't actually create most of his characters, or even write his name in the scrawl in which it famously appears, but Disney was still a genius. I'm not saying that Kyser was a genius, far from it, but he was an able comedian, was exceedingly popular in the 30's and 40's, had 11 Number One hits and over 35 hits in a span of 15 years, and had one of the most popular radio shows in the world: The College of Musical Knowledge. Kay Kyser was actually an academic, and he carried this posture over into the character that he used to portray himself to the world: the grand professor of all things musical, he spoke in a weird mix of Southern politeness and hipster lingo that were an especially odd combination coming out the mouth of a man that you swore never took his nose out a book.

But this professor was so popular that Hollywood just had to come calling, and Kyser and his orchestra made seven starring features (and were featured in two cameos in other films) throughout the 40's. None of them were ever going to win any awards, at least not for quality, but that really wasn't supposed to be the focus anyway. (Most would say they were made to be fun entertainments, but a cynic would say they were simply made to make money. Though I normally side with the cynics on these lines, I will walk this particular line and say that they were made to be fun entertainments and to make money, like most Hollywood pictures of any generation. Now, is everybody happy?)

I first encountered a Kyser film when I tuned in to what I presumed would be a horror film, since I knew very little about the film called You'll Find Out (1940) beyond the fact that it starred Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and Peter Lorre. That combination alone was enough to send me to the station for a viewing, but when I looked the film up in my Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, it said that the real star was Kay Kyser, and referred to the horrific trio as being "wasted". I took this to mean that were underused, but you never know with the Psychotronic.

The truth is that the scaremeisters are underused, though they do have some good moments, but the film really does belong to Kyser and his band, and most especially to the strange deadpan comic stylings of trumpeter Ish Kabbible (born Merwyn Bogue). I knew Ish's name from "Three Little Fishies", where it is mentioned at the beginning of the song, but I always thought he was the singer. It turns out that the voice actually belonged to Harry Babbitt, who figures prominently in the film, along with singer Ginny Simms and saxman Sully Mason. But Ish turned out to be my favorite part of the film, and because of this movie, I started hunting down any Kyser I could find on CD. But I didn't see another Kyser film until two weeks ago.

Home for New Year's vacation, I ventured onto TCM to find a pair of Kyser films showing back to back, and both from 1943: Swing Fever and Around the World. Swing Fever is an odd attempt to turn Kyser into a solo comedy star, with the band clearly relegated to the background, and used mainly in musical sequences. The film is rather unsuccessful, and would have been better as a Danny Kaye trifle in a couple of years. Kyser just doesn't quite fit in to this mold, though he is rather pleasant to watch. Around the World is a far more enjoyable effort, even if the film itself is rather slapdash and constitutes mainly of hijinks surrounding the Kyser Band's USO Tour during WWII. Stops all around the world (hence the title), numerous stage appearances in front of the troops, a lot of corndog jokes from Ish Kabibble, and some seriously haphazard slapstick involving Kay and fellow tour resident Mischa Auer (playing himself). My favorite parts of the film involve Auer sitting down at the piano and then playing his selection using a series of grapefruits, and any of the scenes utilizing the comic talents of the marvelous Joan Davis (a favorite of mine since seeing her in Sun Valley Serenade and Hold That Ghost).

As I said, these films are not Citizen Kane, nor were they meant to be. For a pleasant three hours, though, I was transported back in time to an era that I never knew, and only can know when I visit the entertainments or histories of that time. Personally, I'll check out the entertainments...