Halloween

The Original Recordings

Joe Chicarelli, interviewed by Richard Elen, Apogee, 2002

Boston-born Chiccarelli is not only mixing it: it turns out it was the first live recording he ever made, soon after he had started working with Zappa in the late 70s. Chiccarelli had moved West and was working in LA's Cherokee Studios when he landed his first gig with Zappa, engineering the album Sheik Yerbouti and subsequently several other Zappa discs. And this live project.

The show was recorded on 16 reels of 24-track analog, recorded on an Ampex MM1200 in Dave Hewitt's mobile truck. "It was a great show," Chiccarelli recalls.

FZ, interviewed by Ralph Denyer, Sound International, April/May 1979

I've been amazed by the kind of separation I've been able to get on this last live recording we did in New York. We had the drums set up in a very strange place, they were up on the left-hand side of the stage with the drummer's back to the side-fills and a C24 mic overhead looking down at the whole set plus mics, not in but looking down at the tom toms—and the side-fills were loud. When I took the tapes into the studio there wasn't a homogenous amount of leakage from the side-fills in there. It was a very tolerable amount, kickdrum sounded tight, snare sounded good and all the rest of the drums. I take the bass direct, keyboards direct. All the guitar stuff was miked on the amps, I didn't bother taking direct on any of the (four) guitars.

[...] What I did with the stuff from New York was to mix it without any overdubs. It sounded fine and the audience recording was excellent. We had a total of 10 mics on the audience including two shotguns that were looking right down into the front row. Then there were three or four along the sides and a C24 in the centre and one at the back. The combination of all those signals gave a really full room sound plus proximity on all the things people were saying. All the applause sounds very realistic.

The Project

Carl Baugher, liner notes

After the 1978 Halloween shows (of which there were five, culminating with an approximately four-hour how on Halloween night), FZ went into the studio and physically excised masters from the original tapes with a razor blade. The stuff he liked best he compiled together on master reels. The rest of the stuff is scattered across dozens of reels. When it came time to put together this disc, the issue of sequencing, pacing and continuity became the order of the day. In other words, Joe and Dweezil needed to come up with about 70 minutes that played like a show [...]. The only answer was to go back to the vault, find all the original material, listen to it and decide what should go on the finished program. [...] The starting point, of course, were FZ's preferred performances. The result is that about half of the tunes you hear were FZ's personal choices and the other half were laboriously [...] compiled by Joe and Dweezil from the vault tapes.

Denny Walley & Janet The Planet

Andrew Greenaway, "Interview With Denny Walley," The Idiot Bastard, July 31, 2008

IB: How did you and Janet "The Planet" first get together?

DW: We first met in 1978. We were playing in New York at The Palladium, doing our annual Halloween shows. Frank filmed Baby Snakes the year before and Janet had no idea that she was included in the final film. When Frank saw her, he said "I'm so glad to see you here; you were so fantastic in my new movie." She was brought backstage and that is when I first met her. We started dating in April of 1987 and were married in August of '89.