Both include “The Dog Breath Variations,” “Uncle Meat,” “Stinkfoot,” “Montana” (from 1973’s highly successful Over-Nite Sensation), “Pygmy Twylyte”/”Room Service,” and “A Token of My Extreme.” In fact, the songlist for that concert and what was chosen for A Token of His Extreme overlap considerably. This was the same group Zappa recorded the same year for You Can’t Do That on Stage Anymore, Vol. It consisted of Zappa (guitar, percussion, vocals), George Duke (keyboards, finger cymbals, tambourine, vocals), Napoleon Murphy Brock (sax, vocals, comic repartee), Ruth Underwood (percussion, especially her trademark xylophone and vibraphone), Tom Fowler (bass), and Chester Thompson (drums). After moving away from the orchestral settings he’d been experimenting with and stripping away much of the onstage circus theatrics of the Flo and Eddie era, Zappa was now working with a five-piece ensemble he remained justifiably proud of long after its breakup. Still, on August 24, 1974, Zappa spent his own money and took his current line-up of the Mothers to the studios of KCET in Hollywood to capture what that astonishingly cohesive unit could do live.
Even then, it’s hard to imagine another jazz/fusion gang in town, the quirky and bizarre Mothers of Invention, would have been acceptable for programmers of pre-cable fare. That genre didn’t hit its popular stride until Jeff Beck issued Wired in 1976. In addition, the jazz/rock fusions of Miles Davis and Mahavishnu Orchestra weren’t exactly mainstream. The irreverent humor of Saturday Night Live-which later did invite Zappa to its stage-hadn’t yet debuted.
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In terms of TV rock shows, Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert was less than a year old, and was pretty much the only game in town beyond the Saturday afternoon dance parties like American Bandstand. Where would “Stinkfoot” fit into that mix?
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The charts were full of John Denver, Paul Anka, The Carpenters, The Hues Corporation, Abba, and Helen Reddy. After all, the Top Ten that year included “The Way We Were” by Barbra Streisand, “Seasons in the Sun” by Terry Jacks, and “The Streak” by Ray Stevens. It’s hard to believe that Frank Zappa really, really thought he could get an hour of his music on American network television in 1974.
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