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"Coneheads & Crewsluts"
29 March 1980
Paramount Theater
Portland, Oregon
© 1998 by Fast Frank
Every year, up to and including most of, 1979, I had made good on my vow to scoop up each and every FZ album at the time of release. 1979 blew it, pretty much. There were just too damn many of the suckers for me to keep up with! And it was tough, too, because there were some real gems that came out around that time period. "Sheik Yerbouti" just plain knocked me on my ass, and then there were the three acts of "Joe's Garage"...THREE for christ sakes!
"Sheik Yerbouti" was, is, and always will be an amazing album both in the way it demonstrates FZ ability to span the spectrum of musical styles as a writer, and the ability to have that music performed with such tight perfection that it simply boggles the brain. Not to mention the fact that the guy could play a guitar solo that would peel the paint right off your Grandma's wooden leg!
We had suffered through a four-and-a-half year absence of Frank-in-the-flesh, and I was ready for a fix, lemme tell ya! Dr. Demento would play "Dancin' Fool" and I would turn into a snivelling pile of semi-set jello. On Saturdays after midnight KBOO radio would play whole chunks of stuff, from "Jewish Princess" and "Bobby Brown Goes Down" to "Broken Hearts Are For Assholes" and "I'm So Cute." Boy, now THAT is community sponsored radio!
Then, in early 1980, KGON and the now defunct Q100 radio started playing the single version of "Joe's Garage"...a lot! Well folks, that could only mean one thing...Frank was coming! And come he did, on Saturday, the 29th of March. Spring was in the air, and we were pumped and primed. A guy I worked with was a fellow Frank freak, and we both worked the same shift. We carefully worked out a Zappaplan, which consisted of getting off work at 4:00 and haulin' balls to the Paramount. Then we remembered we were both married, so we had our then-wives pick us up in his van with a bucket of Colonel Sanders (boy, I can't believe I used to eat that shit!) and our own special brand of eleven herbs and spices.
As we cruised along I-5, we passed several cars with the same destination. People held up signs that said "Joe's Garage or Bust!" We held up our sign that read "Why Does It Hurt When I Pee?" Amazingly, we managed to park at the curb right next to the Paramount...boy, THAT wouldn't happen again in a million years! The side door of the van slid open, and in a dry-hacking cloud of green fumage, we fell out onto the sidewalk, kinda like that scene in "Fast Times At Ridgemont High" where Spicolli and his stoner buds find themselves in a similar situation.
As we floated into the lobby, we were treated to a really nifty a capella version of "Night Owl", courtesy of Ike Willis, Ray White, and I can't remember who else...hmmm, you know those stories you hear about how weed does things to your memory? Now, what the hell was I gonna say...
Mr. Zappa announced that the songs they were going to play had not yet been released, and sure enough, all 18 songs were from the upcoming "You Are What You Is" LP which was more than a year away from being bestowed upon us. Heck, we didn't care if they were never going to be released. I mean, Frank could have stood up there and played cocktail music all night and we would have loved every fucking note of it!
A wonderful addition to this band was Tommy Mars, keyboardist extrordinaire, and his array of things of a keyboard nature. I had the opportunity to meet Tommy years later when The Band From Utopia played at the Roseland Theater in Portland, and he's a very nice guy, very humble considering his great talent. Arthur Barrow played bass, and tinkered upon a tiny tinkler as well (ennybody catch the clever wordplay there? nyuck nyuck!)
It was a hell of a show, folks. Don't let anybody try to tell you otherwise, okay? In fact, it was so good, that toward the end some, er, "overly enthusiastic" member of the audience took a nose dive from the balcony...to the ground below (oh fuck I'm gonna need a truss...) I noticed somebody's arms dangling down from the balcony, which was only a few yards from where we were sitting. "Gee, that's odd..." I thought to my self. Then, his upper body hung down for a brief moment. Then there was like this eerie moment when the rest of him was hanging there, obviously unattached to anything solid. Then he dropped head first, and with an impressive "THUD!", the guy landed neatly in the aisle. Hmmm, I guess some people will do anything to be noticed...
"Later That Week..."
A few days after the show, a free-lance "rock critic" wrote an amazingly dumb review of the event for the Columbian, a Vancouver Washington newspaper which can be extremely useful for paper-training your own personal Phydeaux, or at the very least, for lining the bottom of the bird cage (especially if your bird is named "Bird Reynolds"). Being the "Oh, Yeah?!?" kind of guy I am, I fired off a scathing Letter to the Editor rebuking every word this "rock critic" had written about the concert. Unfortunately, the letter was censored and "edited" to the extend that the only part that remained was my name and address.
But the "rock critic's" write-up did one thing. It once again proved Mr. Zappa's contention that music critics are people who don't shit about, and cannot play the very topic they claim to know so much about....
"..the shape of the universe is a Moebius vortex...time is a spherical constant. Now imagine a Moebius vortex inside a spherical constant and you've got my cosmology. But WHEN is very important..."
- Frank Zappa
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