Frank Zappa ‎– 200 Motels / Original MGM Motion Picture Soundtrack / Featuring The Mothers Of Invention and The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra / Rykodisc 2x Audio CD 1997 / RCD 10513/14

UPC 014431051326

This 2 CD set is an out of print collectible! It is the original 1997 release in the fat double jewel case. Includes fold out poster.

Searching for this missing piece of the Frank Zappa catalog helped Rykodisc secure the rights to the United Artists and post-1985 MGM film libraries. But 200 Motels also serves as a good introduction to the late rock icon/avant-garde composer's absurd view of his world; i.e., the pop music business.

Essentially a filmed dadaist opera (the bulk of the music is performed live as the video cameras rolled, 200 Motels incorporates sporadic patches of Mothers of Inventions rock into the atonal, largely European, musical framework that Zappa was clearly more interested in. He shrewdly used contemporary pop merely as a marketing shill for the complex, often difficult, music that drove him. (For a taste of the film's uniquely skewed artistic sense, Ryko has included the original 200 Motels theatrical trailer as part of this set's enhanced-CD bonus material).

As always, the Zappa of 200 Motels sometimes confuses the profound with the obscene, but with every passing year, he seems more likely to take his place alongside the great American modernist Charles Ives, another composer whose work was every bit as commercially troubled and artistically misunderstood. --Jerry McCulley