Zappa.com

I was wondering what the whole story of the Palermo riot was, but haven't been able to find almost anything on the web about it.

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my flickr

On dubroom special a snippet of footage shot backstage at an infamous Zappa concert in a mosquito-infested soccer stadium in Palermo, Sicily in 1982 that ended in a riot (the event is commemorated on the cover of The Man from Utopia, and the performance itself has been saved for posterity on the second disc of You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore, Volume 5 also track 8 disk 2 VOL 3.

There more in the Real FZ book if i remember correctly i sure FZ talks about it His father was from The place the riot took place.

Edit or maybe be it is on the interview picture disc(lp) Anyway He talked about somewhere he says he went back too his fathers roots and it was Bleak.

Found it.

Interviewer:
Last year you had a riot on your hands in Italy - or Sicily?

Frank Zappa:
Sicily.

Interviewer:
You went there for a visit of the old roots.

Frank Zappa:
That's right. I wanted to see the town that my father was born in and I went there and I saw it and then we played the concert and the next thing you know, you have the army and the police; each with their own general telling them what to do; an audience that had brought their own guns; and they're shooting tear gas and tearing up this stadium that we were playing in. We played for an hour and a half in this riot with tear gas in our face and everything else, and when it was all over we went off the stage and we were trapped inside this place. The audience was circling around outside shooting at the police and the police were shooting back.

Interviewer:
It wasn't a very nostalgic view of your roots, was it?

Frank Zappa:
Well, I got a pretty good idea of what my Sicilian roots are like after seeing the town of Partinico - it was pretty bleak

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Arf you out of your fucking mind.

What would happen if Italy rebooted? sure, si silly goes fly over the Rock of them Gibbos and the Azores High (stable weather condition for a big part of Western and Middle Europe along all latitudes) ..while the infamous Scandinavian Lion is watching it all run boomitch.

In relation to that mentioned cover, Utopia and stuff, my idea be, and to make no mistake, insist that Frank had not only midgets in his mind, there are quite a few others. That interview only enforces my opinion.

..in Spain there are three different police branches. Do not get me wrong, here where I live these green men are the only guests which get a wink. Hallol.

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Ga na het werk and wirk
bring a thing into effect tha' is
Leave madchic to hau' cuisine
HyFlyRadio alongside chap

..and myRadio plays now Les Claypool's Frog Brigade...

...intergnat in a sort of panic.

_________________
Ga na het werk and wirk
bring a thing into effect tha' is
Leave madchic to hau' cuisine
HyFlyRadio alongside chap

I´m downloading a bootleg of the Palermo Show from zappateers. I guess it's a good audio documentary of the whole thing, but i was wondering how or why it happened? I think i read something about the police and the army being desorganized and against each other, some door being thrown down, people trowing shit (not literally, but who knows?) to the stage, or something, but i guess there was never an official reason for the whole thing.

What a tour, there's also the Geneva incident that you can hear at the end of YCDTOSA vol.5.
The liner notes on disc 2 read as follows:

"Disc Two of this set is dedicated to the 1982 band. About half the material here comes from our ill-fated concert in Geneva, Switzerland (which ended with a small riot). The 1982 tour itself ended with a much larger riot in Palermo, Sicily a few weeks later. The '82 band could play beautifully when it wanted to. It is unfortunate that the audiences of the time didn't understand that we had no intention of posing as targets for their assorted "love offerings" cast onto the stage (in Milan they threw hypodermic syringes)."

To top it all wasn't Frank afraid of needles?

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my flickr

I'am not sure try goggle something you never know.

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Arf you out of your fucking mind.

Have you tried googling "rhetorical question"?

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my flickr

nO WHY

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Arf you out of your fucking mind.

I just did! Fun times.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorical_question

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You gotta give the people something good to read, on a Sunday

On the liner notes, it says that half of it was recorded in Geneva and the rest in Munich, Balzano and Frankfurt.

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On the liner notes of Vol 5 Disc too,you didn't make it clear as too which of the three or more things it could had been.

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Arf you out of your fucking mind.

It has material from those shows, but also others. The guitar solo in "RDNZL" on YCDTOSA 5 is in fact from Palermo.

"I think three people got killed during our last show in Palermo in Sicily," he says. "We were playing a soccer stadium when for some unknown reason the cops started firing tear gas into the crowd. From what i could see from the stage, some of the kids in the audience started shooting back at the cops. I didn't find out about the deaths until later."

"That was our last European tour. It's too expensive to play, too expensive to travel around, and with the anti-American sentiment around, it is hard to go onstage and do what you do with the emotional freight that is attendant to European attitudes toward American foreign policy," he says.

"When we first started to go to Europe in the '60s there was some of that especially in Germany, with all the student activism and all that crap. We had a bunch of riots then. But then it died down. And now its back. Anyone who is an American is only an American."

FZ on Billboard 28 Ago 1982

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my flickr

I believe on Zappateers one correspondent from that area of the globe said that in fact no one was killed at this show.

Unfortunately, I can't find that post at the moment.

Yeah right, it usually is a lots of shouting, squabbling and showing offs in Italy. ...but that doesn't mean one has to accept outrages at a concert. Students in France and Germany at that time were the most civilized persons one could wish for (in effect the only ones really)

_________________
Ga na het werk and wirk
bring a thing into effect tha' is
Leave madchic to hau' cuisine
HyFlyRadio alongside chap

And he must have found a way to tour Europe again.

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You gotta give the people something good to read, on a Sunday

In Kiel, Germany, May 23, 1982, Zappa was very ill and ended up stopping the show after around 70 minutes due to objects being thrown onstage.

After that he began telling audiences in every city that this would be their last European tour.

However, he did go back. When asked about this in an interview in 1984, he just said, "I changed my mind."

Those oh-so-cool frozen 'Eighties, the biggest drop of a'ttitude from the bonsai of ..dunno, the last soul. ....and the new wayve hasn't found the rapids yet...

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Ga na het werk and wirk
bring a thing into effect tha' is
Leave madchic to hau' cuisine
HyFlyRadio alongside chap

My italian is not great but i think this is a tv documentary from a guy who was at the concert. Anybody has seen it?
http://vimeo.com/34892176

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my flickr

From reports at Zappateers this documentary is not about the riot, but about FZ visiting the village of Partinico the day before the concert.

deleted out of guilt

has been broadcasted by one of the channels of italian national television, rai tv. They do replicas of these documentaries quite often. I'd really love to see it. Who knows maybe one day they will show it again....