u/Outrageous-Win-8297

My friend asked me to explain 200 Motels before we watch it.

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200 Motels is a 1971 opera about a contemporary rock and roll band going so insane while touring, with drugs(and lack thereof), with staying at boring Centerville (the mean average of all boring American small towns), with the literal devil, with local town groupies, and with the lack of beer, fame or money to get back home; that a government edict rules music to be wholly illegal, both for production and for consumption, commercial or not.

Experimental re-orientation facilities are constructed to turn musicians into useful members of society, and if that fails, there are concentration camps, or worse.

The musicians are to be lured to the re-education facilities with fake dick/breast enlargement ads.

This is all visually told in a stagy form, where the actors, musicians and performers interchange, and interact. Sets move. Stagehands can be regularly seen. The symphonic orchestra is made to sing an oratorio about dog-soup.

Ringo Starr appears as a guitarist, who's dressed like Larry The Dwarf who is dressed like Frank Zappa. The most sexist white man in history is sung as “Cowboy Burt”, but performed by a Native-American. Or as said in many other Zappa albums, “I’m Jimmy Carl Black, and I’m the Indian of the group". Keith Moon is a harp playing nun, while Theodore Bikel plays both the devil, and the presenter of the tv show that is inside of the band’s warped mind.

Their reality collapses upon itself, and the government drags them away to the camps. Bringing back some order and security to Amerika.

For a coda the whole cast sings a thank you anthem to all who worked on the production, especially as most of them are well unlucky to live in Britain, "and all of the food these people must eat".

Credits.

This is all shot and edited on some of the earliest video technology in history. The editor goes mad with rudimentary but very analog special effects. It’s not the tech we know from later commercial use of video as it’s still in its prototype phase.

Lets watch!

The business of seduction

200 Motels

Album songs Moz never does on stage, but you'd love a live version?