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Take Off in Toronto, Eh?
9 November 1981
Maple Leaf Gardens
Toronto, Canada
© 1999 by Fred Duquette
That was quite a concert; I had imaginary guitar solos playing in my head for days afterwards. He did 5 encores that night and was touring on the "You Are What You Is" album, which had no Zap guitar workouts on it and instead featured Steve Vai's impossible strat tricks; Steve Vai was in the lineup for that show; he wore a lumberjack and touque outfit aka Bob and Doug MacKenzie; practically every song had a guitar solo because i remember him saying something about Toronto fans demanding "meat"; his solos were really hot. We got there that afternoon, looked around, went to the show. As we walked in, a WALL OF COPS were there searching everyone. I had three joints in my shirt pocket, my friend had rolled an ENTIRE vial and placed them in a pouch of Drum tobacco. The cop let me go through but my friend got stopped, searched, they found the heap of j's. The cop takes them, pockets them, and let my friend, go through.
We were freaked, and then the show starts. Big Neon number with the Zappa moniker over the stage (a geometrical font, lots of triangles and circles), stage jammed with equipment and players. Zap lost tune in the middle of a solo and he threw his guitar to a roadie; another threw Frank a replacement to keep playing, took about 3 seconds; the roadie then tuned it and leaned it on a monitor. After the song, Frank ditched the replacement and took the first guitar again. Must have been a favorite.
During the intermission, some drunk fucker started screaming FRANKIE FRANKIE FRANKIE and we all, like daft ducks, repeated. Others yelled BOBBY BROWN GOES DOWN but he never played it. Zap played conductor sometimes, would just get the band going, ditch the guitar, turn around and start waving his arms like a conductor. He later began composing "classical" and at last conducted a hot German group of musicians weeks before he died (I think that trip killed him) I remember the hardest working memeber of the band was the xylophone and gong player - that guy jumped from one set of "sounbd effects" to another like a gymnast in the middle of the song. What a memory; he was at the height of his powers finding a tight balance between weirdness and logical song structure.
I remember reading Lowell George having quit the mothers because Frank was too controlling, demonstrated by all his songs being attributed to him only, but I really think the instrumental solos show a highly flexible, musician dependent unit - the guitar and drums stick out because they can explore the rythymic structure more freely but no one really seems to be leading, its like free association. Unfortunately, I have absolutely no musical training, so I don't have a language repertoir to define what they do when they all get into that instrumental state of mind, but I must say if any "philosophy" defined the way i think, i.e., the style, it would be the way Franks band played instrumental works; thats how I think sometimes; my friends call it "Planet F--", and they shakes their heads; too bad they can't orbit too..
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