Chalk Pie
Unique material: lots
Chalk Pie was the name of a live album planned for release in 1982. The track list was:
1. Drowning Witch
2. Envelopes
3. Teen-Age Prostitute
4. The Dangerous Kitchen
5. Chalk Pie
6. We're Turning Again
7. Alien Orifice
8. The Jazz Discharge Party Hats
9. "The Torture Never Stops" guitar solo (title unknown)
10. What's New in Baltimore?
11. Moggio
12. "The Black Page #2" guitar solo (title unknown)
13. Clownz on Velvet
14. Frogs with Dirty Little Lips
JWB provides a track-by-track walkthrough:
Tracks 1-3 are identical versions and edits as side two of Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch, except they are mixed much differently.
1. "Drowning Witch" - Live with studio overdubs. The group vocal section is from Santa Monica Dec-11-1981 (early show), Zappa's vocal secion is from Chicago 27-Nov-1981 (late show), the first guitar solo from the Ritz 17-Nov-1981, and the first third or so of the second solo is from Chicago 27-Nov-1981 (late show) again. The rest of the song is unknown. It all contains studio overdubs, some of which render the basic tracks almost unrecognizable.
2. "Envelopes" - Live with studio overdubs. location unknown. Same version as on Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch.
3. "Teen-Age Prostitute" - Live at Santa Monica 11-Dec-1981 (early show) with studio overdubs. All vocals appear in this mix; many were mixed out in Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch, where the lead guitar was also brought forward. Same version as on Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch.
4. "The Dangerous Kitchen" - Live at Armadillo in Austin, Texas 16-Oct-1980. Same version as on The Man from Utopia original LP but mixed differently.
5. "Chalk Pie" - Live in Salt Lake City 7-Dec-1981. Same as on Guitar, but mixed slightly differently.
6. "We're Turning Again" - live in Santa Monica 11-Dec-1981 (early show) and Salt Lake City 7-Dec-1981. Unreleased version. Frank makes hilarious references to Journey, REO Speedwagon, Foreigner, and Styx at the end of the song.
7. "Alien Orifice" - Live in Salt Lake City 7-Dec-1981. Unreleased version.
8. "The Jazz Discharge Party Hats" - Live in Carbondale, Illinois, 15-Nov-1980. Appears to be the same mix on The Man from Utopia original LP.
9. "The Torture Never Stops" guitar solo (title unknown) - Live in 1980. Unreleased.
10. "What's New In Baltimore?" - Seems to be live with studio overdubs, location unknown. Same version as on Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers of Prevention, but the guitar solo is longer (full & unedited) and the mix is much different with less studio overdubs. [The guitar solo certainly is from Maryland November 15 1981 (late show), or must be, since it's the same as the album version, so I guess it's reasonable that the whole performance is from that show - Milhouse Guidry]
11. "Moggio" - Live in Chicago #2 11/27/81 with studio overdubs. Same version as on The Man from Utopia, but mixed differently. [Just a clarification ... it is mixed much more like the original LP mix than any other mix. So at least we know that the lead-guitar-prominence idea was there early, and only later did he decide to change it. - David Goodwin]
12. "The Black Page #2" guitar solo (title unknown) - Live in San Diego 12-Dec-1981 (early show). Unreleased. Might have been titled "Them Or Us".
13. "Clownz on Velvet" - Live at the Ritz 17-Nov-1981. Al DiMeola guests on lead guitar. Unreleased.
14. "Frogs with Dirty Little Lips" - Live in Santa Monica 11-Dec-1981 (early show) with studio overdubs. Zappa's son Ahmet guests. Unreleased version. Could have been used as the basic tracks for the Them Or Us version, as the studio overdubs appear to correspond with that version.
It is a shame that Chalk Pie went unreleased. The continuity is excellent, as well as the track selection. Does anyone know why Frank deleted it? Is it because of Al DiMeloa's dissatisfaction with his "Clownz on Velvet" solo? What a shame.
Tracks 13-14 have been bootlegged pretty widely, for example on the bootleg All You Need is Glove. Some people refuse to believe that it's actually Al DiMeola on track 12, but it really is. A bootleg called Chalk Pie only has tracks 5, 6, 12 and 13. The Chalk Pie tapes were leaked to collectors/bootleggers by one of the guys in the band, who shall go nameless, because, you get the idea (yes, I know which guy).
From Mark Pinske, interviewed in Mix Magazine 1/2003:
Originally, we edited together four different album sides, and the original album was only two sides. This happened a lot with Frank. As a matter of fact, there's a whole album that Frank and I did together called Crush All Boxes that nobody even knows about [ho ho ho].
MIX: I've heard about that because that was-there was something in the press at the time, and it was mentioned. There was also a stage pass, or a tour pass that had "Crush All Boxes" on it. But that material never came out?
PINSKE: No. As a matter of fact, I mixed the whole album, just before we went into this digital syndrome. Frank and I mixed the whole album called Crush All Boxes. And we mixed it on Telefunken C4D. The Telefunken noise reduction version. We used an Ampex one-inch two-track, and we used the Telefunken C4D noise reduction, which gave us a huge amount of headroom. And we mixed this whole album called Crush All Boxes. The company at the time decided it was too long. They just wanted a two-sided album, and this was four sides. So we took the masters, even after we mixed them, and put them in the tape vault. Little white boxes. I just wrote "Crush All Boxes" on the side of them. I don't think anybody knows what those boxes look like, except for me. Frank's tape vaults, they got quite cluttered. That's when we put out the Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch. We put that out instead, which is a two-sided album. They wanted something shorter. They didn't want another four-sided album. They kept harping about us putting out these big albums. So Frank started saying, "All right. OK. We'll give them two sides." And we did this thing with Moon Unit. And we just threw a lot the stuff together that ... We thought some of it was just for fun, but some of it turned out to make a lot of money later.
From Jon Naurin:
Sounds like Pinske might be talking about the album we call Chalk Pie. The Crush All Boxes we know was never supposed to be a double (to the best of my knowledge), and had nothing to do with Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch.
