Hi, I have seen FZ two times, but far away from the mothers.
1st time was about 89 in Offenbach (near Frankfurt). It was very crowdy and there was no good mood between the band and the audience, I guess a lot of the people were drunken and/or stoned and I wished them to hell, they just were loud and disturbing (I was stoned too, but I was attentive anyway). Before the concert I could peep over someones shoulder before me who browsed a book with a program. Suddenly my heart stood still, cause I read these two names ending with
Fowler (I knew about 25 albums at that time, one of them was
roxy and elsewhwere) and I was much more thrilled as I was anyway. They started with a rocking piece, guess it was
tell me u love me, the way it is played on
tinseltown rebellion. They played a lot of the unknown new songs and it was difficult to get into it, cause the words were very important and the issues were very american (TV-preachers, republicans...). Stuff like
bolero was much more accesible for a german listener. I also can remember a clear-like-glass solo of Bruce Fowler (maybe it was
big swifty, which was a usual
container for jazzsolos in that tour). Another memory is the kind FZ conducted the band in a moment, when it failed: He gave his signs to the musicians, also to Ed Mann. But this one was very sunken in his playing in this moment (eyes downwards) and so didn't notice the order. Zappa began to run into the direction of Ed Mann who "woke up" cause of this suddenly movement on stage. This moment made the otherwise invisible puppetstrings between FZ and the musicians visible for a few seconds and I could see that it just worked the way, it was described in the books about FZ. I also remember, maybe it was the same (instrumental) piece: after FZ did a lot of conducting and using the synclavier he just kept sitting on his chair, his whole body turned towards the audience, his ellbow resting on the synclavier and his head resting on his hand. He just kept sitting this way and looking provocative into the audience just as he wanted to say: I have set now all the controls for the big machine behind me and it works, are you impressed? Meanwhile the band played ahead this crazy complicated stuff accompained by the funny vocalsamples out of the synclavier. After the concert we called them mickey-mouse-voices, when the CDs then were released I recognized them as the same samples as used on
pornwars.
I only have a little fragment of the concertticket, cause the guy at the ticketcontrol just threw it onto the floor. I put it into the case of
You can't..Vol 1, cause that was the next release after the concert, it is still in there.
My 2nd concertexperience will come later here, cu
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