Ed Organus Maximus wrote:
Buffalo's nice every now and then, but by 1980 FZ' setlists were clearly heavier on vocal songs and crowd-pleasing antics/"greatest hits" kinda setlists. The Belew/Bozzio lineup still featured "pure musicky" bits alongside so called "comedy music" portions. Therefore, "Hammersmith Odeon" is still an essential album, feature as it does the pieces like "King Kong" (the hard, fast swinging version, fuck reggae!) and "Little House I Used to Live In". I'm pleased there is a Spring '78 arrangement of the latter tune.
My internal jury is still out on Hammersmith Odeon, mostly because I like listening to albums in their entirety, and with a 7 year old kid and pregnant wife I seldom get the chance to delve into a three hour set... The last time was on a 1200 km drive from Oslo to Hell and back last December - okay it was not really Hell, but Stjørdal a few miles from Hell... you can find the distance on Google Maps

HO has many fine moments, but the sound is slightly dull to my ears - check out the last drum roll in Pound For A Brown; it's more like going out with a fizzle or a whimper than the real bang that proper mixing and equalization probably could have intimated. The HO King Kong is energetic and wonderful, though!
However, I have known for a long time that I really enjoy Buffalo. It's not a problem for me that Zappa built the show around some of his best recent songs, and many of them hadn't even been released at the time. Buffalo is a great warts and all collection of stuff that could or would show up in all the 1981 albums, TTR, YAWYI and SUNPYG. Above all, I think of Buffalo as the return of the son of certified guitar insanity! I saw Zappa for the first time on the spring 80 tour and was blown away. But as great as his soloing was then, the memory of the stripped down Logeman band hadn't prepared me for the onslaught of the expanded fall 80 line-up with Harris, Vai and Colaiuta. A combination of a rock band and an army, for sure!