ARF: Notes and Comments: YOU CAN'T DO THAT ON STAGE ANYMORE, vol 5: Shall We Take Ourselves Seriously?

YOU CAN'T DO THAT ON STAGE ANYMORE, vol 5

Shall We Take Ourselves Seriously?

Notes and Comments

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	Uhhh, Mike Scheller says his life is a mess Fritz Rau says asparagus Should only be consumed By people with a larger mouth
From: berger@uran.informatik.uni-bonn.de (Carl Berger) This is the story of "Shall we take ourselve seriously ?" It happened at the show in Koln, 21st of May 1982. (The same show where "When no one was no one" and "But who was Fulcanelli" from the Guitar album were recorded).
This is the preamble to the song by Frank Zappa on that night.
"Ok Ladies and Gentlemen, this is something special. Come up to the microphone, Peter" (A guy walks onto the stage and transtalted that stuff into german) "The last time we played here in Cologne, something happened after the show that was unbelievable. As you know, there is a company here in the fatherland, that promotes concerts all over the place. And the man, who runs this company, his name is Fritz Rau. We have know Fritz for a long time. But the last time we played here, he put on a performance, that was incredible. If you can imagine, grown men, sitting in the box office at 3 o'clock in the morning, arguing, because the roadies got to eat asparagus. Now, this was so amazing, that I had to write a song about it. Tonight, Peter is going to play the featured role of Fritz Rau. Now give'em the first part of Fritz's big speech."
Peter now gave the audience an imitation of Rau's german dialect. Pretty funny that was. I transcriped that from a tape recorded that night. I was 14 years old, standing first row. One of my first concerts (after Genesis and Supertramp :) The other guy mentioned in the song, Mike Scheller, is a concert promoter as well.
Part of the May 21, 1982 show (including the premiere recordings of SWTOS) is available in the "Volare" bootleg.
In his "The Poodle Bites! or Repudiating The Poodle" Mike Keneally give as further details on this song:
[...] the song is about German promoter Fritz Rau's contention that asparagus should not be offered to just anyone backstage, causing him to throw some sort of unseemly fit, which Frank of course immortalized in song. [...] [the line] "shall we weep in the box-office dawn" [...] and the falsetto passage that follows is a quote from the Frankie Valli/Four Seasons song "Dawn"; the line is "Dawn, go away, I'm no good for you". Get it?

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