200 Motels

200 Motels is a 1971 American-British musical surrealist film cowritten and directed by Frank Zappa and Tony Palmer and starring The Mothers of Invention, Theodore Bikel and Ringo Starr. A soundtrack album was released in the same year, with a slightly different selection of music. In 2009, 200 Motels was restored with an audio commentary by Tony Palmer and is currently available on an England-sourced for-retail DVD.

Plot

In 200 Motels, the film attempts to portray the craziness of life on the road as a rock musician, and as such consists of a series of unconnected nonsense vignettes interspersed with concert footage of the Mothers of Invention. Ostensibly, while on tour The Mothers of Invention go crazy in the small fictional town of Centerville ("a real nice place to raise your kids up"), wander around, and get beaten up in "Redneck Eats", a cowboy bar. In a long cartoon interlude bassist "Jeff", tired of playing what he refers to as "Zappa's comedy music", is persuaded by his bad conscience to quit the group, as did his real-life counterpart Jeff Simmons, who was fired for insubordination before the film began shooting. Simmons was replaced by Martin Lickert (who was Ringo's chauffeur) for the film. Almost every scene is drenched with video special effects (double and triple exposures, solarisation, false color, speed changes, etc.) which were innovative in 1971. The film has been dubbed a "surrealistic documentary".

200 Motels (soundtrack)

The soundtrack to Frank Zappa's film 200 Motels was released by United Artists Records in 1971 and features a combination of rock and jazz songs, orchestral music and comedic spoken dialogue. The album, like the film, covers a loose storyline about The Mothers of Invention going crazy in the small town Centerville, and bassist Jeff quitting the group, as did his real life counterpart, Jeff Simmons, who left the group before the film began shooting and was replaced by actor Martin Lickert for the film.

The album peaked at #59 on the Billboard 200, though reviewers deemed it a peripheral part of Zappa's catalog. This is Official Release #13.

Music and lyrics

The rock and comedy songs "Mystery Roach", "Lonesome Cowboy Burt", "Daddy, Daddy, Daddy", "What Will This Evening Bring Me This Morning" and "Magic Fingers", and the finale "Strictly Genteel", which mixes orchestral and rock elements, were noted as highlights of the album by reviewer Richie Unterberger. François Couture, a reviewer for Allmusic, said that "Mystery Roach" contains multiple meanings, all of which have a connection to lyrical subject matter in Zappa's discography. These include the freshwater fish, as the Mothers of Invention live album Fillmore East - June 1971 contained a song referring to the mud shark, a cannabis cigarette butt, which causes the character Jeff to go crazy within the context of the film's storyline, and a combed roll hairstyle, which connects the song lyrically to "Jelly Roll Gumdrop", a song from Cruising with Ruben & the Jets. The version featured on the album is different from the version featured in the film, as it is missing small electric guitar solos by Zappa, and was not scripted as part of the film in its electric arrangement, having originally been written in three separate, unused acoustic blues-oriented arrangements. The song was not performed live.