More Frank Zappa

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Frank Zappa

• You’ll find excellent Double Plus (A++) sound on all four sides of this classic Zappa Double Live album from 1977 
• The first copy EVER to hit the site – after looking for years for enough clean copies to do a shootout, our hard work finally paid off with this outstanding vintage pressing – exceptionally quiet vinyl too!
• 4 Stars: “The Zappa band, which includes bassist Patrick O’Hearn, percussionist Ruth Underwood, and keyboard player Eddie Jobson, along with a horn section including the two Brecker brothers, was one of the bandleader’s most accomplished. Zappa also was at the height of his comic stagecraft, notably on songs like “Titties & Beer,” which is essentially a comedy routine between Zappa and Bozzio…”  

Zappa Live

What the best sides of this live album have to offer is not hard to hear:

• The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
• The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl domestic pressings like this one offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1977
• Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
• Natural tonality in the midrange — with all the keyboards, guitars and drums having the correct sound for this kind of recording
• Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional space of the concert hall

No doubt there’s more but we hope that should do for now

Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.

TRACK LISTING

Side One

Titties & Beer 
I Promise Not To Come In Your Mouth 
Big Leg Emma

Side Two

Sofa 
Manx Needs Women 
The Black Page Drum Solo / Black Page 1 
Black Page 2

Side Three

Honey, Don’t You Want A Man Like Me? 
The Illinois Enema Bandit

Side Four

The Purple Lagoon

AMG 4 Star Review

Zappa in New York was recorded in December 1976 at the Palladium and originally intended for release in 1977. It was held up due to arguments between Frank Zappa and his then-record label, Warner Bros.

When the two-LP set finally appeared in March 1978, Warner had deleted “Punky’s Whips,” a song about drummer Terry Bozzio’s attraction to Punky Meadows of Angel.

The Zappa band, which includes bassist Patrick O’Hearn, percussionist Ruth Underwood, and keyboard player Eddie Jobson, along with a horn section including the two Brecker brothers, was one of the bandleader’s most accomplished, which it had to be to play songs like “Black Page,” even in the “easy” version presented here. Zappa also was at the height of his comic stagecraft, notably on songs like “Titties & Beer,” which is essentially a comedy routine between Zappa and Bozzio, and “The Illinois Enema Bandit,” which features TV announcer Don Pardo.

Learning the Record

For our shootout for Zappa in New York we had at our disposal a variety of pressings we thought should have the potential for Hot Stamper sound. We cleaned them carefully, then unplugged everything in the house we could, warmed up the system, Talisman’d it, found the right VTA for our Triplanar arm (by ear of course) and proceeded to spend the next hour or so playing copy after copy on side one, after which we repeated the process for side two.

If you have five or ten copies of a record and play them over and over against each other, the process itself teaches you what’s right and what’s wrong with the sound of the album. Once your ears are completely tuned to what the best pressings do well that the other pressings do not do as well, using a few carefully chosen passages of music, it quickly becomes obvious how well a given copy can reproduce those passages. You’ll hear what’s better and worse — right and wrong would be another way of putting it — about the sound.

This approach is simplicity itself. First, you go deep into the sound. There you find a critically important passage in the music, one which most copies struggle — or fail — to reproduce as well as the best. Now, with the hard-won knowledge of precisely what to listen for, you are perfectly positioned to critique any and all pressings that come your way.

It may be a lot of work but it sure ain’t rocket science, and we never pretended it was. Just the opposite: from day one we’ve explained step by step precisely how to go about finding the Hot Stampers in your own collection.

Do It Again

As your stereo and room improve, as you take advantage of new cleaning technologies, as you find new and interesting pressings to evaluate, you may even be inclined to do the shootout all over again, to find the hidden gem, the killer copy that blows away what you thought was the best.

You can’t find it by looking at it. You have to clean it and play it, and always against other pressings of the same album. There is no other way to go about it if you want to be successful in your hunt for the Ultimate Pressing.

For the more popular records on the site such as the Beatles titles we have easily done more than twenty, maybe even as many as thirty to forty shootouts.

And very likely learned something new from every one.