Inca roads
Jan. 21st, 2006 01:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
randy_byersIn the mid-'80s, one of my favorite TV shows was Night Flight, which was on the old USA superstation late on Friday nights. Or was it Saturday nights? Or both? Anyway, they showed weird music videos and cult movies for the bonghit crowd. That's where I first saw the video for Frank Zappa's "Inca Roads," with some of the most amazing claymation I'd ever seen. I liked it so much that I taped it, but that was on Denys' Betamax machine, which we eventually stopped using when VHS took over. Sometime in the past few years, I spent a good two hours trying to figure out if it had been released on DVD, but couldn't find much about it at all. Then a month or so ago I stumbled upon mention of a Zappa DVD called The Dub Room Special, and after a bit of research determined that it contained the long lost "Inca Roads" video.
The Dub Room Special turns out to be a concert movie that Zappa put together for TV in 1982. It contains concert footage from August 1974 and from Halloween 1981, interspersed with goofy footage shot in the studio as they were editing the video. It's actually a lot more amusing than Zappa's earlier movie, 200 Motels -- although 200 Motels remains one of my very favorite Zappa albums. One of the things that ends up making The Dub Room Special of personal interest is that the Halloween 1981 show was just four weeks after my friend Reid and I had seen Zappa twice, at the Paramount in Portland on October 1st and at Mac Court in Eugene three days later on the 4th. I loved those two shows, although I remembered nothing about them. This movie has reminded me who was in Zappa's ever-changing band on that tour, and it gives me some clue as to what music Reid and I heard.
But I prefer the band and the music from the 1974 show, which includes two tracks that were used on Zappa's 1975 album, One Size Fits All, which is one of my other favorites. One of those two tracks is "Inca Roads," which is possibly my favorite Zappa song. And the video is still incredible after all these years. The claymation is by Bruce Bickford, and I don't know if he's done anything else. One of the fun things about seeing the whole movie is that there's some more of Bickford's animation, including a sequence that shows him moving a clay model of Zappa while Zappa himself shoots the frames. (Just one example of the self-referential humor of the movie.) The animated sequence of "Inca Roads," which comes during the long guitar solo, is a tour de force -- a phantasmagoria of mutating forms and free-associated, stream of consciousness images. It also has a soundtrack of its own that becomes yet another layer of the song, while the animation flows, weaves, and strobes layer on layer of images past our eyes. It's a strange, fecund feast -- which includes a sequence where one of Zappa's animated, guitar-playing fingers grows fangs and bites a chunk out of another, whereupon a third finger sprouts a hand and punches the fanged finger in the chops.
Zappa was a strange character, no doubt about it, and I by no means like all of his large body of songs. There are some songs in this movie that don't do much for me. But both bands are in amazing form, and Zappa's fanciful humor is less grotesque than it could sometimes be. Well, except for that whole nose-picking episode, but I think he was making fun of cocaine users, so that's okay. Great to have access to the "Inca Roads" video again, that's for damned sure. Can't wait to show Andy and carl!
The Dub Room Special turns out to be a concert movie that Zappa put together for TV in 1982. It contains concert footage from August 1974 and from Halloween 1981, interspersed with goofy footage shot in the studio as they were editing the video. It's actually a lot more amusing than Zappa's earlier movie, 200 Motels -- although 200 Motels remains one of my very favorite Zappa albums. One of the things that ends up making The Dub Room Special of personal interest is that the Halloween 1981 show was just four weeks after my friend Reid and I had seen Zappa twice, at the Paramount in Portland on October 1st and at Mac Court in Eugene three days later on the 4th. I loved those two shows, although I remembered nothing about them. This movie has reminded me who was in Zappa's ever-changing band on that tour, and it gives me some clue as to what music Reid and I heard.
But I prefer the band and the music from the 1974 show, which includes two tracks that were used on Zappa's 1975 album, One Size Fits All, which is one of my other favorites. One of those two tracks is "Inca Roads," which is possibly my favorite Zappa song. And the video is still incredible after all these years. The claymation is by Bruce Bickford, and I don't know if he's done anything else. One of the fun things about seeing the whole movie is that there's some more of Bickford's animation, including a sequence that shows him moving a clay model of Zappa while Zappa himself shoots the frames. (Just one example of the self-referential humor of the movie.) The animated sequence of "Inca Roads," which comes during the long guitar solo, is a tour de force -- a phantasmagoria of mutating forms and free-associated, stream of consciousness images. It also has a soundtrack of its own that becomes yet another layer of the song, while the animation flows, weaves, and strobes layer on layer of images past our eyes. It's a strange, fecund feast -- which includes a sequence where one of Zappa's animated, guitar-playing fingers grows fangs and bites a chunk out of another, whereupon a third finger sprouts a hand and punches the fanged finger in the chops.
Zappa was a strange character, no doubt about it, and I by no means like all of his large body of songs. There are some songs in this movie that don't do much for me. But both bands are in amazing form, and Zappa's fanciful humor is less grotesque than it could sometimes be. Well, except for that whole nose-picking episode, but I think he was making fun of cocaine users, so that's okay. Great to have access to the "Inca Roads" video again, that's for damned sure. Can't wait to show Andy and carl!
