March 5, 1987—Nightlife

[...] The stuff of the twirling carnival amusement, that was shot 8mm in 1961, I shot that. In fact, I shot most of the stuff that is in there. And it's 8mm that's been transferred to video.

And the way it was done, it was in a layer where we took the carnival footage and just figured a setting point for the beginning of the music and started it off. And there was enough of it that it would run all the way through the piece. And then the other material was on a second machine and I flash-cut it, and then that was like one pass through to get—'cause you hit the buttons on the rhythm and you can make it go in there. And everything that didn't work, we went back and tweezed and replaced all those shots. And the whole video could have been completed in about three hours, if it weren't for the fact that the guy in the machine room wasn't watching the chroma on the vector scope [...]

All you gotta do is get an 8mm camera and go to the LA County Fair. [...]

That was also from—That was shot around 1959, it's Captain Beefheart and his family. [...] The stomach, that is Terry Wimberly, he used to play piano in this band that I had in high school. And the girl with the kleenex under her nose was Beefheart's girlfriend at that time, that was Laurie.

So really it's just a bunch of home movies that were all cut together.

[...]

 

All compositions by Frank Zappa except as noted
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This page updated: 2013-02-24

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