12/21/10
beeradvocate.com rating- B
Blue Point Winter Lager- Euro Market, 31 St. Astoria, NY- 12 oz. Bottle into Pub Glass- 5.5% ABV- Poured with a nice 1 1/2 finger head which dissipated pretty quickly and left a thin web of lacing on the glass. Clear reddish brown color. Nice mouth feel a little on the light side of medium but has a creaminess to it. Average carbonation. I smell malts, grapes and maybe some raisins in here. This is not a bad beer, i'd say it is very drinkable if I don't focus on the "grape" aroma which is reminding me a bit of wine. This is pretty low in the ABV but I do sense a bit of alcohol warmth from this one in a not unpleasant way. I think I like this beer an would try it on tap I definitely like it better than the Magic Hat winter lager I had last week.
On the turntable is double LP Bootleg (unofficial release) called Fred Zappaelin- Frank Zappa- Recorded in multiple venues from Europe and the USA in 1980 by Zappa and his current band of the time distributed by the Mudshark Label.
Bootleg info provided by www.lukpac.org:
Issued in December 1980 with a black & white paper insert. The original edition was 2000 copies, but a re-press of 500 copies came in a deluxe color sleeve, and another 500 copies were pressed on colored vinyl.
This boot was made from a soundboard tape stolen from Carlos Santana's luggage at a hotel in New Haven, Connecticut, where Carlos was staying after a concert at the "New Haven Coliseum" [?]. Crazy but true. (A "friend of the thief" has been in touch, reporting that he also came by some Santana tapes of the same time period, as "both Frank and Santana were touring Europe at the same time".)
Frank Zappa would have been 70 yrs old today so I am listening to this as a tribute to him. Ironically Zappa's cohort Captain Beefheart passed away at age 69 a few days ago. I have a large Zappa collection which started about 5-6 yrs ago after reading Zappa by Barry Miles which was given to me for my birthday on December 19 as a gift from my mom. I subsequently got really into Zappa through his studio albums which I mostly have on CD. I chose this bootleg instead of a studio album as a reminder of how much the music industry has changed. These type of illicit bootlegs are basically extinct today because they are unnecessary in the advent of the internet. They are an interesting indicator of the dedication to artists that fans no longer have for current day artists. To produce these bootlegs one had to actively participate in criminal activity and in the case of the Mudshark Label founder he eventually served time in prison. One can argue the fact that these bootleggers were stealing from the musicians who created this music but one also must take into account who was the audience for these bootlegs, the hardcore fans. It is fairly safe to assume that no one was going to simply buy these bootlegs and not the studio albums. Most bootleg consumers were fans so infatuated with their favorite groups or artists and were willing to buy "more" than what was commercially available through mail order and under the counter transactions in brick and mortar record stores. In the case of Zappa he openly condemned bootleggers, but I theorize, he was most unhappy with the bootleggers making money of his fans. In one case Zappa openly encouraged fans to tape record his music off the radio when he broadcast his "Lather" acetates after they became caught up in legal limbo with Warner Bros. There is something special about these bootleg LP's. In the case of this LP the cover is handmade with Xeroxed pictures and setlists and the record labels themselves are all different with individual titles. This was obviously prepared by someone who was not "in it for the money." This type of product borders on folk art in my opinion.
A few years later I read Cosmic Debris: The Collected History & Improvisations of Frank Zappa by Greg Russo and started getting hardcore into Zappa bootlegs i.e. live concert recordings via the peer sharing website zappateers.com. The live recordings were what really hooked me on Zappa especially those which included his prodigious guitar workouts enhanced by his use of a wah-wah pedal which he used in a more refined sense as a tone controller. I currently have about 125 live recordings ranging from the late sixties up until the late 1980's. In addition I acquired about 40 or so hours of interviews culled and compiled from radio stations, magazine interviews, television which are fantastic and fascinating. For about a year that is all I listened to when I got on the subway at 5:30am. My sweet spot for Zappa is 1969-1974 give or take a year or two.
The Cosmic Debris book really opened my eyes to the culture and mythology surrounding Zappa's life and work. Conceptual Continuity, Los Angeles, Doo Wop, Stravinsky and Edgar Varese were some of the influences and ideas described in the book, as well as analysis of his studio albums, which helped me understand Zappa more than I would have. The vast amount of recorded output and the array of themes explored over the course of his lifetime as a musician is hard to get your head around at first especially when you are starting from scratch. I encountered a similar problem when I first started listening to John Coltrane. Not only was I a complete novice as far as jazz experience goes but his musical phases were very different. From his early years as a sideman to the avante garde of his Impulse! catalog I was pretty lost on where to begin and it took me a while to fully appreciate his immense catalog. I think Zappa is genuinely misunderstood by the general public and one of the few true geniuses in rock n' roll. That is not to say I agree with all his methods or opinions because he actually spent alot of time disparaging artists that I enjoy.
"Well, the conceptual continuity is this: everything, even this interview, is part of what I do for, let's call it, my entertainment work. And there's a big difference between sitting here and talking about this kind of stuff, and writing a song like 'Titties and Beer'. But as far as I'm concerned, it's all part of the same continuity. It's all one piece. It all relates in some weird way back to the focal point of what's going on." — Frank Zappa, Interview by Bob Marshall, October 22, 1988.
provided from wiki.killuglyradio.com
I am often asking myself the question."Does humor belong in music?" which in fact Zappa named one of his live compilation albums. In some ways it does and some ways it doesn't. Minstrel show artists, hillbilly singers and blues guys incorporated comic elements in their music. The Beastie Boys certainly included humor in there music. After listening to Paul's Boutique for the last few days I was wondering if there was any way to apply the idea of "conceptual continuity" to their work. Primus, a direct descendant of Zappa, was a really funny group lyrically and musically. Winonna's Big Brown Beaver, Nature Boy and Those Damned Blue Collar Tweaker's to name a few songs used to make me and my friends laugh out loud. Country and Western and R&B artists from the beginning of the genres all had comical songs in their repertoire. Music certainly does take itself to seriously sometimes. Music also is unintentionally funny. Check out Will Smith's daughters single "Whip My Hair Around". It would be fun to see what Zappa thought of that song. Howard Stern certainly had some fun with it on his show a few weeks back.
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