200 Motels...help understanding

jimfist

Fractal Fanatic
I've always enjoyed and appreciated Frank Zappa. Joe's Garage and his work with Captain Beefheart are among my favorites. So I saw 200 Motels listed on amazon prime and fired it up. Woah....hmmmm....and....errr. A bit off the deep end for me, and I consider myself to have a fairly open mind, having grown up as a youngster in that hippie dippie weirdo crazed time of the late 1960s and early '70s.

So, is there any reasonable way to assess 200 Motels? Or is it just a really odd piece of audio/visual art madness, to be taken for what it is?

Help? Insight? Critique?
 
I've seen Zappa I think 7 or 8 times here in Bay Area back in the 80's and 90's maybe more, loved every show I'll need to play that album again its been a while, like Joes Garage too, Zoot Allures, Broadway the Hardaway, Sleep Dirt, Shut-up and play your Guitar among some of my Fav. On one of the shows in Berkley I believe I remember FZ was swinging around a blowup doll, some one yelled in the audience he should f- it or something like that, he got upset and walked off the stage for the rest of the song. Wish I could remember the name of the song, anyways best thing about FZs music is no two albums sound alike. I also remember smoking lots of pot and listening to Capitan Beefheart and Tod Rundgren "Another Live" for like 3 days straight... Oh to be young again...
 
Yeah, I probably should have been more clear. Not the album, but the movie that starred Ringo Starr and Theodore Bickel.

It’s a little film about how life on the road can make you crazy

Yes, I got the gist of it. Still, the movie is way, way, out there, which is fine by me. But terribly disjointed...which I guess is part of the point it's trying to make....maybe no point at all - which is odd IMO for a guy like FZ, who always seemed to have a point for doing anything. For a guy who was dead set against drugs, the appeal of 200 Motels seems like it's trying to satisfy exactly that audience. Watching with today's eyes, I really don't know what to make of it. Of course, it is definitely a commentary that strongly rejects the "comfortable" culture of much of society at the time (i.e. Leave It To Beaver, etc.) in favor of exploring the decadent underlying counter-culture madness/dysfunction.

I'd really like to see if anyone on the forum actually saw it when it was released, and what the general feelings were.
 
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