Recorded at Auditorium Theater, Chicago, Illinois at the stroke of midnight on the Day of The Mothers, 10 May 1974
May 10th was a Friday; Mothers Day was actually May 12th and the FZ giglist confirms two shows in Chicago on Saturday, May 11 so I am assuming that this is actually from the late show on the 11th.
And the stroke of midnight makes it Mother's Day, like they said. So they're only wrong about it being the 10th.
Recorded at Auditorium Theater, Chicago, Illinois at the stroke of midnight on one of the Mothers Day Concerts, 10/11/12 May 1974
In the past Zappa has avoided being a jukebox of old hits, but this tour is something special, with anniversary cards in the hall lobby and a musical run through from the Mothers' history.
At midnight Zappa announces it's officially Mothers' Day, while the sold-out crowd screams delighted faaar-outs. Then the man gives us a 15-minute rap about those early days, before kicking off an hour-long medley of the [Freak Out!] album. As he puts it, "You're gonna hear [Freak Out!] till it's coming out of your ass."
For those who keep track of such things: the first half and solo in Penguin are not the version FZ partially used on R&E. The post-solo section might be the same, not sure yet.
1:31-1:34 is from Roxy & Elsewhere. I mean, from the actual album. I assume it was pasted in there to cover a reel change. You can hear a slight tonal / ambience change for those three or four seconds.
I'm absolutely positive the end of the R&E version is 6:51-7:35 here.
All edits during the guitar solo in penguin were made by FZ, the edit I had to make was in the solo after the story of the MOI.
He didn't really like working at Convair even though they were gonna change the name of it to General Dynamics later.
In March 1953, all of the Convair company was bought by the General Dynamics Corporation, a conglomerate of military and high-technology companies, and it became officially the Convair Division within General Dynamics.
He took a machine called the Presto, which is something they used to use in low budget radio stations.
PRESTO Recording Corporation was a power-house company in the broadcast and recording industry, and most radio stations and networks that made use of disc recorders for delayed broadcast, or air checks, etc., were users of PRESTO EQUIPMENT. All of the major broadcast network headquarters, as well as many recording studios used PRESTO recorders.
And then he took some Norelco 1/4 track heads and he made himself his own five track headstack.
From the early 1940s, Philco was legally able to prevent Philips from using the name "Philips" on any products marketed in the USA, because the two names were judged to sound similar. As a result, Philips instead used the name Norelco, an acronym for "North American Philips [electrical] Company."
And invariably we'd last two days, the go-go girls would like us, but everybody else would say, "Play 'Louie Louie'" or, "Play 'Caravan' with a drum solo" or, "Play 'Wooly Bully'" or, "Play (one of those other kind of songs)." When we didn't do it, out the door.
And there was this guy who was making a movie called Mondo Hollywood.
And during that last week while we were there a man named Tom Wilson was dragged by the arm from another club down the street where he's about to get some pussy, he was dragged down to the place where we were working and forced to listen to us play.
Research, compilation and maintenance by Román García Albertos
