Album of the Day

You Can't Do That On Stage, Anymore (Vol. 4), by Frank Zappa (1991): Frank's late-era live albums were odd beasts. On the one hand, the liner notes for all proudly proclaim that there were no overdubs and all the performances are 100% live. On the other hand, Frank had no problem cutting and pasting all kinds of bits to form a single album, not only from song to song but within songs themselves. That's true in spades for the fourth installment of YCDTOSA (for an interesting overview of the whole series, see here), which spans performances from the early Mothers days in the late 1960s to the ill-fated 1988 big band. Given the lack of cohesion (or, dare I say it, "conceptual continuity"), these two discs are necessarily hit and miss. Still, it's worth a listen every now and then for gems like "Pound for a Brown - Solos 1978," "Carolina Hard Core Ecstasy," and the Vai-controlled "Approximate" and "Stevie's Spanking," complete with the spoken intro with the immortal truth: "there is no hell, there is only France!"