After visiting a site on the internet Zappa Patio I put my thoughts in this little story in june 1999 mostly around 2 o' clock at night as a bit of nostalgia for the old folks!
Harry de Swart, Breda Holland
Hitweek
A long time ago (1967) I read an article of Frits Boer in Hitweek a famous Amsterdam Underground Magazine in wich he announced the LP Freak Out. This made me very enthousiastic for the music of Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention. In the following years I bought their LP’s and collected anything I could find on Zappa (Zappa interviews.htm mostly in Dutch). As a 17 year old kid I was fascinated by this weird music, none of my friends could appreciate. When later I played Wild Man Fischer to them, it never was the same as before.
Funny thing was that because of that I traded a canadian mono issue of Freak Out for a LP of Canned Heat (what would that be worth nowadays?). Someone else gave me the LP Ship Arriving Too Late To Save A Drowning Witch saying that if I didn't want it he'd throw it away.
The Fugs were also very funny to get my parents out of their minds.
Censorship check out this page
What made it very interesting was that Frank Zappa refused the "Edison" a dutch music award because the LP We’re Only In It For The Money was censored. Later there was a sampler Mothermania on which we could hear the censored pieces. The "plastic" recordcompany against us the "alternativo’s". So I bought Mothermania and someone bought We’re Only In It and Ruben & The Jets for me in America.
VPRO-piknik 1970
I remember being on a graduation party of the guitarplayer in my band when someome came in and called "Zappa's on TV" We all went in to see it. For the first time I saw Zappa performing ("in levende lijve" that's dutch for live). With the Turtles, at least two of them. When Jim Pons joined FZ it was clear to me that Frank had his revenge on a noted L.A. disk jockey who said: "I’d like to clean you boys up a bit and mold you. I believe I could make you as big as The Turtles" (relevant quotes on the sleeve of the Freak Out album).
(photo on the right is made at VPRO piknik in Uddel 1970 copy right TS)
The end
When Zappa released Tinsel Town Rebellion, Shut up & play yer guitar en You are what you is in one year, I quit. It would cost me fl. 150,-. In 1999 I bought a CD Cheap Thrills with html-pages of all Rycko CD’s. It only cost 10 guilders.
A new start
On the internet I visited Zappa Patio (no longer exists) and it discribes differences between LP’s and CD’s.
I then started to look at my 38 (in the meantime 90)
LP's of Zappa and the Mothers and compared the information with
what I found on the internet.
And what I found out
I found out that there are
differences between track separation, printing on labels,
matrixnumbers, sleeves etc.
And I found out that there's a lot of Zappa Vinyl still for sale. So I try to complete my vinyl collection
The results you find at "LP's and Labels". It's
infomation for freaks who want to know the difference between the
color of the label of their Taiwanese pressing and my French
pressing. So have fun with it.
Below you see me with the book Frank Zappa of a German journalist Rolf Ulrich Kaiser, which was -as far as I know- only published in Dutch.