THE MOTHERS 1971

The Mothers 1971 boxed set is a grand collection of live material from the Flo and Eddie era, including all four sets from the Fillmore East residency previously captured on the Fillmore East - June 1971 album.

In its original configuration, that album painted a picture of a band almost entirely dominated by the presence of Flo and Eddie on vocals and positively obsessed with obscene songs about groupies. As it transpires, this really gives a misleading impression of the actual shows, which were built around epic performances of Billy the Mountain, often accompanied by King Kong - the two tracks accounting for as much as two thirds of the running time of the shorter shows, neither of which appear on the Fillmore East album (aside from the "Lonesome Electric Turkey" improvisation from one of the renditions of King Kong). Oh, sure, the groupie stuff is still there (as are Flo and Eddie), but integrated into the wider context of the show all that comes across somewhat better.

The last of the four Fillmore shows includes the famed encore with John Lennon and Yoko Ono as special guests, Ono's avant-garde vocal techniques perhaps fitting in better in Zappa's experimental context than anywhere else. Lennon's release of this stuff - Live Jam - involved a somewhat shabby failure by his management to ensure that the other performers in the encore got any royalties; one can only hope the Zappa Family Trust has shown more integrity in this respect.

After the Fillmore shows and a few bits of miscellanea (a radio spot, some outtakes, and whatnot), the set gives us a "hybrid concert" - blending together tracks from Scranton and Harrisburg from June 1-3 to form a complete setlist. The "groupie" material is more or less absent from this one, we get the longest Billy the Mountain on the set, and we get some material from Hot Rats, Absolutely Free, and We're Only In It For The Money to sit alongside the newer stuff. It's fairly close in content to the "early show" setlists on the Fillmore shows, and gives some insight into the band preparing for their residency.

Offering a much reconfigured setlist is the final show in the collection (also released separately on vinyl) - and gosh, is this one with baggage. This is the legendary Rainbow Theatre show, which culminated in Zappa being shoved off the stage by an erratic concert-goer and falling in the orchestra pit, a life-threatening situation which led to him spending months using a wheelchair and devising his Grand Wazoo big band project, the Mothers having dissolved in the wake of what must have seemed a curse-struck tour.

Some may be uncomfortable at the idea of this being put out there - but Zappa himself said that if he'd been able to find the full tapes in his archive he wanted to put out the show himself, perhaps so that it could stop being a show of an ominous and dark reputation and be appreciated for the musical performances offered that night.

Precisely because of the lost equipment from Montreux, Zappa and the band ran into a series of technical hitches during the show, and there's several points where Zappa or other band members have to address the front of house team to adjust the monitor levels. As it stands, they actually do a credible job; the Flo and Eddie lineup isn't often credited with particularly high technical standards or instrumental chops, but there's a perfectionism evident and once they get into a composition things go smoothly. The reconfiguration of the set list, of course, might be covering for a multitude of sins - for instance, only an abbreviated version of the Sofa Suite is offered up, and we don't get Billy the Mountain - but even so, for the band to bounce back from the Montreux fire so effectively is impressive, and one can only speculate what they'd have gone on to achieve had Zappa's tumble off the stage not changed the course of his career.