Description:
Frank Zappa – Cheaper Than Cheep (2025)
Review:
…Cheaper Than Cheep was recorded on June 21, 1974 at a rehearsal studio on Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood, where Zappa was joined by a Mothers of Invention line-up including Chester Thompson (drums), George Duke (keyboards, vocals), Jeff Simmons (guitar, vocals), Napoleon Murphy Brock (tenor sax, flute, vocals), Ruth Underwood (percussion), and Tom Fowler (bass). Zappa enlisted a film crew with multiple cameras to capture the intimate performance, while Wally Heider’s mobile truck outside handled the audio with Zappa associate Kerry McNabb engineering. The title is derived from Zappa’s crack at the beginning of the show that it was “cheaper than cheap” – a nod to the fact that he self-funded the concert on a tight budget. Ever the taskmaster, Zappa had rehearsed and sound-checked with the band earlier in the day, and despite exhaustion as well as the L.A. heat in a small, crowded space, the Mothers came through with a blazing performance that dug all the way back to Freak Out! and up to more recent compositions, some of which hadn’t yet been heard. In this era where live music on television was in demand – think The Midnight Special and Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert in the U.S. or The Old Grey Whistle Test in the U.K. – Zappa planned on shopping the finished special to television networks. Sadly, he discovered that the audio and video weren’t properly synchronized, a similar problem to that which befell his intended 1973 Roxy concert film, recorded just months earlier. Due to the limitations of technology at the time, Zappa abandoned the film. In August, he and the band performed for the cameras at Los Angeles’ Public Television station KCET for the special A Token of His Extreme (with portions released later on video as The Dub Room Special). Now, over fifty years later, Vaultmeister Joe Travers and director Ahmet Zappa have rescued the long-lost footage and restored Cheaper Than Cheep to its originally intended state, with over two hours of music from Zappa and The Mothers of Invention as well as segments with artist Cal Schenkel and animator Bruce Bickford. Joe Travers is quoted in the liner notes recalling his discovery of the tapes marked, simply, with the concert date: “I had no idea what they were or what they were for. They remained a mystery for years. The digital transfers of the elements happened over a long period of time, mostly due to budget and priority. Some were done for identification purposes while Gail Zappa was alive during the 2000s. Imagine how exciting it was for us to finally discover what this stuff actually looked like for the first time. It was a gold mine waiting to be unearthed. Most of the masters were transferred during the ‘Save The Vault’ Kickstarter campaign by Alex Winter circa 2017 or so.” — SecondDisc
Track List:
CD 1
01. Cheaper Than Cheep
02. Cosmik Debris
03. Band Introductions
04. RDNZL
05. Village of the Sun
06. Montana
07. Duke Goes Out
08. Inca Roads
09. Get Down Simmons
10. Penguin in Bondage
11. T’Mershi Duween
12. The Dog Breath Variations
13. Uncle Meat
CD 2
01. How Could I Be Such a Fool
02. I’m Not Satisfied
03. Wowie Zowie
04. I Don’t Even Care
05. Let’s Make the Water Turn Black
06. Dupree’s Paradise Introduction
07. Dupree’s Paradise
08. Oh No
09. Son of Orange County
10. More Trouble Every Day
11. Apostrophe
12. Camarillo Brillo
Media Report:
Genre: art rock
Origin: Baltimore, Maryland, USA 
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.3.0 (UTC 2013-05-26)
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