"What are you listening to right now?" thread | Page 679 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

Currently listening to The Waterboys 6CD Fisherman’s Box: The Complete Fisherman’s Blues Sessions 1986-88…

…while awaiting the delivery of it’s 5CD/1DVD follow-up The Magnificent Seven: The Waterboys Fisherman’s Blues/Room to Roam band, 1989-90…

…103 (not including the DVD which has two concerts and more) more tracks covering the period after Fisherman’s Blues and the recording of its follow-up Room to Roam (including that album remastered), which Amazon should be delivering in the next few hours.

Embarking on my second run-through of the 8CD 50th anniversary box that takes in the four unedited Fillmore East performances on 5-6 June 1971, with the first appearance of the complete John & Yoko encore on the 2nd show of the 6th; a concert pulled together from two shows in Pennsylvania on the 1st & 3rd; and the Rainbow Theatre in London on 10 December where Frank was attacked after an encore of I Want To Hold Your Hand , which is one of the most shocking things I’ve heard (not the performance, the attack).

The help of the Lennon Estate in this box…

Of course, the Fillmore events from June 1971 are also special due to the encore performance from the last show which featured the now famous meeting of two giants – John Lennon & Frank Zappa. John & Yoko joined The Mothers on stage in front of an unsuspecting crowd to perform a mostly improvised set which included a cover of Walter Ward’s song “Well” and a workout of “King Kong” that morphs into an off-the-cuff jam eventually titled “Scumbag.” As the story goes, an agreement was made between the two that Frank would provide a copy of the 16-track master of the performance for John’s own use. During the mixing sessions of the Fillmore album at Whitney Studios, Frank also mixed and edited his version of the John & Yoko set. It was intended to come out on an unreleased album project found in the Vault called “Dynamic Tension,” among other things. Oddly, It would never be issued until 1992 on the double compact disc set “Playground Psychotics.”

In the early ’80s, Zappa won a lawsuit that awarded him the rights to his back catalogue. All of his Past Masters were delivered to him and he was one of the first artists to achieve such an accomplishment in the music industry. Upon inspecting the original Fillmore East masters, it was discovered that although the master tape box of the encore with Lennon was returned, the tape inside was not. By swapping out the physical reel with another unidentified reel of tape, someone has possession of the master to this day. This meant that during his lifetime, Frank was never able to do a remix of the performance if he so desired, and was forced to use his 2-track mix from Whitney 1971 for the Playground Psychotics CD. During my research, I went to the 2-track Fillmore line mix tapes mentioned above to see if the full, unedited performance was there. Sadly, on the back of the last reel, it was labeled, “Pulled and given to John Lennon .” And so it was that all of the surviving tape of the encore would end up with the Lennon Estate. All that was left in the Zappa Vault would be his master mix and edit from 1971.

When discussing the possibility of releasing the Fillmore tapes in total, it was vital that we somehow get our hands on the safety master that was provided to John way back in 1971. The wheels were set in motion to make that a reality and with the help of Universal, the Lennon Estate came through, providing the Zappa Trust with a hi-res transfer of the multi-track safety reel. Thus, with their help & kindness, the Zappa Vault finally has the source material back where it belongs for the first time in 50 years. This allows us to re-mix and present the full encore performance for the first time.

Joe Travers, Vaultmeister

And the horrific attack on Frank at the end of the Rainbow concert…

Directly following the encore, one Trevor Charles Howell ran up onto the stage and attacked FZ by shoving him off the front of the stage into the deep orchestra pit below. Frank never saw it coming. The band didn’t either, as they were making their way off the stage with their backs turned. According to first hand accounts, Howell was apprehended, brought backstage and eventually turned over to the police. For a period of time, nobody knew whether Frank was even alive. There was complete confusion inside and outside the theater. From The Real Frank Zappa Book, FZ wrote: “My head was over on my shoulder and my neck was bent like it was broken. I had a gash in my chin, a hole in the back of my head, a broken rib and a fractured leg. One arm was paralyzed.” Once he could finally leave the hospital and be returned to the States, he spent the better part of a year in a wheelchair and a leg brace. When all was said and done, he permanently sustained a lower pitched voice, one leg shorter than the other and chronic back trouble. It was bad enough that we lost Frank Zappa in 1993 at the age of 52, but had the incident at the Rainbow been fatal, losing him at age 30 would have been too tragic to bear.

Joe Travers, Vaultmeister

You can hear the shock of the attack spreads across the hall..

Wow! How the hell did I miss this from August 2020…

Just on my second play.