short review: halloween 1981 palladium

Date: Tue, 1 Jul 2003 12:40:20 -0700
Newsgroups: alt.fan.frank-zappa
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Copyright 1981 The New York Times Company
The New York Times
November 5, 1981, Thursday, Late City Final Edition
SECTION: Section C; Page 22, Column 6; Cultural Desk
LENGTH: 225 words
HEADLINE: ROCK-JAZZ: FRANK ZAPPA
BYLINE: By STEPHEN HOLDEN
BODY:
THE last of five Frank Zappa Halloween concerts at the Palladium on Sunday
proved to be an unexpectedly magnificent mixture of rock-jazz surrealism
and social satire. Mr. Zappa and his eight-piece band wove together some
20 Zappa songs into a sprawling, unstructured oratorio - two hours of
uninterrupted music - that offered a musical rollercoaster ride through a
dozen styles, including rap, reggae, heavy metal and
television-incidental.
Frank Zappa's nightmarish vision of America is as scatalogically Swiftian
as one could imagine and is shot through with moral outrage. But composed
as it is of rock and pop kitsch, it also confers an air of monumentality
on the very things it ridicules.
The evening was predominantly instrumental, with Mr. Zappa's songs serving
as jumping-off points for long instrumental passages, many of them
conducted by the composer. The music, which was heavy on malleted
percussion, synthesizer and electric guitar, was arranged by Mr. Zappa
with a very keen sense of instrumental color, and several of his lead
guitar solos sustained a lyric tone that made a compelling contrast to the
scabrously witty sections.
The older Frank Zappa gets (he's now 40), the more impressively focused
his epic vision of the American junk culture becomes.