200 MOTELS

A disorienting and often chaotic morass, just like the film it's a soundtrack for, the 200 Motels soundtrack combines some very challenging orchestral work with spoken word parts from the film and more conventional songs. For better or worse, though, it's the major studio album of the Flo and Eddie era of the Mothers - they'd only appeared on a few tracks on Chunga's Revenge, and the rest of the output of their stint in the group consisted of live albums.

The orchestral experiments are interesting but difficult to get into, not least because Zappa's intent of parodying overblown Hollywood orchestral scores of the 1950s and 1960s lead him to produce music which at points sounds an awful lot like overblown Hollywood orchestral scores of that era with avant-garde flourishes. It's taken me a while to appreciate how the orchestral material glides between conventional and avant-garde modes and blends elements of both at points, and if you aren't much of a classical listener (and I admit that I am not) it will likely also take you a while to come to appreciate these pieces.

Still, those interested in Zappa's orchestral compositions have a wealth of releases to choose from - The Yellow Shark and the related Everything Is Healing Nicely, the two volumes of the London Symphony Orchestra recordings, Orchestral Favorites, Boulez Conducts Zappa, or even Lumpy Gravy. Zappa kept trying all through his career to get his orchestral works given a really solid, sympathetic performance from an orchestra which actually bought into what he was doing, and it was only really with The Yellow Shark that Zappa, almost at the end of his life, was able to accomplish this ambition to an extent he was truly satisfied with.

Still, all those other releases are more focused on the orchestral material than 200 Motels is - so if you're here for the classical suites you're going to get the Mystery Roach or Lonesome Cowboy Burt bursting in just as you're getting used to it. As for the non-orchestral songs, well, they're decidedly a mixed bag. Lonesome Cowboy Burt is a straight up country parody with few of the experimental stylings which most users of this site probably look to Zappa to provide, Mystery Roach is a real earworm of a number, but the other material isn't similarly memorable.

Nonetheless, I appreciate the way the double album allows a broader range of "group on the road" experiences to come across than just the groupie-featured nonsense that dominated the Fillmore East live album, and which has become associated with this era of the band as a result.