FRANK ZAPPA - ZAPPA '80 - MUDD CLUB / MUNICH

I'm still waiting for the actual CD set but I'll probably have to wait until the LP boxes become available as I ordered them together.
Anyway, a CD-rip hit my mailbox earlier this week, so it's back to 1980 this evening.

Frank Zappa, Ike Willis, Tommy Mars, David Logeman, Arthur Barrow, Ray White.

Great idea to have two shows that have a complete different setting: a club in New York, and an arena in Germany.
Superb vocals with Ray and Ike. Amazing guitar playing by Frank. The one and only Tommy Mars ('Pound For A Brown' !!). And the excellent Arthur Barrow / David Logeman rhythm section.

In 1980, The Mudd Club was a happening, underground venue in lower Manhattan best known for being a popular hangout for the counterculture and a bastion of new wave and punk, which dominated NYC’s music and fashion scene. As Travers writes in the liners, “celebrities and musicians alike would frequent the ‘art bar cabaret’ during its heyday between 1979 and 1983, dancing, drinking and making the scene amongst the New York City denizens of the deep.” Zappa loved the small, seedy club and the punks, posers and hipsters that called it home, and so made it a priority to play there while on tour. On May 8th, 1980, he played at the tiny 240-capacity room, sandwiched between much larger arena dates in Cincinnati, Philadelphia and the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Long Island where he played two shows in one night to more than 20,000 fans total.

Whereas the Mudd Club show took place early into the tour, the concert at Munich’s Olympiahalle arena was the final show and saw the band firing on all cylinders after three months on the road together. The set, which included most of the songs played at the Mudd Club, was nearly twice as long.