![]() ![]() Well, the monitoringconditions obviously weren’t very controlled. ![]() Andthen you set up a couple of portable speakers. We would stick a tapemachine–say for instance we would be in a civic center orsomething–and there’d be a tape machine back in the dressing room. What happened is, themonitoring conditions kind of got out of hand. So we wereat the mercy at however well the blend was. And then they wouldcombine those down to just one stereo pair on the 8-track. For a while, we evenhad the hi-hat in the stereo pair of cymbals. And I would give them a stereo pair of tom-toms, all thetom-toms, and a stereo pair of overhead cymbals. They might take a mix,for instance, a left and right mix of all the drums, and then theywould take their own kick drum, and their own snare, and their ownhi-hat. The problem we had was, number one,we didn’t have a remote truck, so we were really in a machine, so wewere splitting off the signals in multiple ways. In the experimental stage,we were experimenting how to do it. Pinske: It was a little bit of a combination of both.It was kind of like the baby–like the birth of how we ended up doingthings on a much more elaborate scale later. Mix: And they were doing separate mixes, or theywere taking submixes from you? Claus Wiedemannoriginally took an 8-track, and then George Douglas kind of took overthe 8-track. We did dosome 4-tracks out of the console, but we ended up getting them awayfrom the console, and putting some of them backstage. Pinske: Not necessarily out of the console. Mix: Then you had a 4-track out of the console, andthen an 8-track out of console. That was before my time, as well, when they were doing a lotof the Nagra stuff. Pinske: I think Claus Wiedemann had something to dowith that. Mix: Zappa makes references to the guitar solos on”Joe’s Garage,” which he says were recorded on a 2-track Nagra, whichonly had guitar on it, and somebody would just turn it on for solos andthen turn it off again. So,when they say “UMRK remote,” it wasn’t really the UMRK remote then. And that was a whole different setup than the UMRK remote. Which was really just a taperecorder in a dressing room that we rolled in every time during theshow. But all the original “Shut Up ‘n Play YerGuitar” albums were collaborations of different tapes, just like”Tinsel Town Rebellion” sort of was. The guitar albumthat came out later, I did. Inoticed when I was looking through all the albums that they creditedGeorge like on some of the original guitar albums. We had backstage tapes from GeorgeDouglas, which was basically just the machine in the dressing room. I overdubbed all these vocals on top of them, like “FineGirl” and a lot of pieces like that. We took recordings like–see, I overdubbed on alot of them. “Tinsel Town Rebellion” was acollection of all kinds of recordings from pretty much–a lot of themwere before my time. Mix: Now I’m confused, because I thought “Crush AllBoxes” was somehow connected to “Tinsel Town Rebellion.” So we kind of just shifted over anddid “Ship Arriving Too Late” then. Not on “Drowning Witch.” As a matter offact, we were doing “Crush All Boxes,” that one album I was telling youabout, a double album, and then his manager said the recordcompany only wanted a single album. Mix: Did he assemble it as a double album, and thencut it back? But like in the case of “Drowning Witch,” forinstance, it ended up being a lot better single album. And Frank, a lot of times, wanted to give hisfans their money’s worth. And this is what Bennett Glotzer,which is his personal manager, always accused us of. And we’d endup making a double album out of it. ![]() And I found that kind of being–not just as Ilook back on it, but as we were doing a lot of the projects, sometimeswe would have like a really, really good two-sided album. Just making up stuff tokind of stretch it out. And then he kind of got intostretching it out by throwing in all those new versions of–differentlyrics to some of the songs that were on YAWYI. He never had–like I told you about”Thing-Fish.” “Thing-Fish” was actually a really neat, slick, and trimkind of a show when we first did it. He would do arecord of some old stuff, and then he would just all of a sudden throwa couple new songs on there. ![]() Pinske: Unfortunately, what Zappa got in the habit ofdoing is mix-and-matching so many things on a record. ![]()
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