THE MOTHERS OF INVENTION: WHISKY A GO GO, 1968

A swathe of live releases from the Zappa family estate have come out in recent years. To give them their due, they do seem to go out of their way to stuff them with value - we're far from the days of Zappa's "Beat the Boots" releases where he'd toss out subpar live recordings (scrupulously making sure to label them as such via the "Beat the Boots" branding) for the sake of undercutting bootleggers, put it that way.

At the same time, there's some time periods in Zappa's career that have been more widely recorded (at least in terms of official live releases) than others. His 1960s era with the original Mothers of Invention, in particular, hasn't exactly been covered widely, though there's reasons for that - live recording technology in the 1960s was a bit behind where it was in the 1970s, Zappa's career hadn't progressed as far either, and taping your live gigs under such conditions is an expensive and unreliable process. Most live releases we've had from this period have had fairly slack sound quality, and the 1960s just aren't a well the estate has gone back to so often compared to the 1970s.

Now, however, this Whisky A Go Go set from August 1968 has been offered up, and it's a real gem. Zappa and the Mothers arranged this big, sprawling freakout party to get some live recording done - brief snippets would later end up on Uncle Meat - and as a result the sound quality is actually pretty good, especially considering the era and the organised chaos of any Zappa gig.

Compared to the tightly orchestrated air of some of Zappa's later gigs, the set here has a fun, loose, party atmosphere. Rather than playing one long, continuous set, the Mothers would instead play several smaller sets, with Alice Cooper and Wild Man Fischer coming onstage to keep the good times going when the Mothers took their breaks. (On this set we hear Zappa introducing the support acts but don't get their performances themselves.) Zappa and the crew might have taken aim at the Summer of Love back on We're Only In It For the Money, but here there's a sense of a vibrant and optimistic community keen on what Zappa and the group are laying down and a band who are appreciating the positive attention.

That isn't to say that the material here is frivolous - over the three discs more or less all the corners of the Mothers' sonic universe get visited, from proto-jazz fusion experiments to emotional doo-wop to satirical rock and everywhere in between. Pretty much every musical dimension Zappa and the original Mothers visited during their brief, intense lifespan gets visited here aside from musique concrete tape experiments, which were obviously the sort of thing you couldn't really do onstage in this era.

The end result showcases a very different side of the Mothers from the one we get from their studio albums of this period, but to my mind helps me understand them better. The frenetic editing and shifts of albums like Absolutely Free and Uncle Meat are now revealed to, in part, arise from the need to condense all this creativity down to the confines that vinyl would accept at the time. This is a more sprawling, wide-ranging, less curated and tightly edited Mothers, a Mothers those who came to their shows live back in the day got to hear but which previous attempts to put out archival live releases have failed to capture. It is, as far as I'm concerned, the missing piece in the original Mothers of Invention discography, and it's great that it's now become available.