Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention - L'Olympia, Paris, France, 10-26-1968 (A Fabio from Rio Guest Post)

I've been working a lot with guest poster Fabio from Rio on various projects. I just posted a Joan Baez album he made yesterday, and many more are coming soon. A couple of days ago, he asked me why I hadn't posted any Frank Zappa albums. Was it because I didn't like his music? I like some of Zappa's music, though I haven't gone deeply into his vast musical discography. I told Rio the main reason I haven't posted anything from Zappa is because there has been a tremendous amount of archival material that has been officially released. Dozens and dozens of live albums, for instance. So I don't see much need to post his stuff, when it's been so well done already.

That said, I mentioned that I did have one Zappa concert on my list of albums I've been wanting to post. But that list is many hundreds of albums long, and I probably wasn't going to get to it anytime soon. So Fabio volunteered to step up and write the liner notes, so this concert could get posted sooner rather than later. Thus, you can thank Fabio for this one.

The reason I was interested in posting this despite the vast number of official live albums released already is because there aren't many excellent live recordings from the band this far back in time. Zappa had only released three albums at this point, which would end up being just a tiny portion of his vast output. Few concerts were recorded, period, by 1968, and most of them were badly recorded bootlegs. But this one comes from an FM radio broadcast, probably on French radio, so it sounds as good as an official live album from the time. Admittedly, there was an official live album released in 2024 called "Whisky a Go Go, 1968" that is from the same time period, sounds just as good, and is much longer. But if you want more live early Zappa than that, give this album a try.

There's a lot more to say about this concert, but I'll let Fabio say it. He wrote extensive liner notes, which are included in the download zip. That includes lots of interesting quotes from a newspaper review of this exact concert, so be sure to check that out.

This album is 51 minutes long. 

01 Improvisations [Instrumental] (Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention)
02 King Kong [Instrumental] (Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention)
03 Plastic People (Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention)
04 talk (Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention)
05 Hungry Freaks Daddy (Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention)
06 talk (Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention)
07 Son of Mr. Green Genes [Instrumental] (Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention) 

https://pixeldrain.com/u/bjHdobd7 

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/1D8SeuqXEL1IcrA/file

The cover photo was taken at this very venue in 1968. So the odds are good that it's from this exact concert, although it's possible he played at the venue more than once that year. The original was in black and white, but I colorized it with the use of the Kolorize program.