Frank Zappa Live at The New Penelope!

Black and white newspaper advertisement.

Ad for The New Penelope’s opening on Sherbrooke Street and for The Mothers of Invention show, 1967

In January 1967, legendary musician, Frank Zappa, and his rock band, The Mothers of Invention, launched The New Penelope, on Sherbrooke Street, with two weeks of concerts. Gary Eisenkraft couldn’t have picked a better band to set the tone for his second New Penelope.

Black and white collage of varied newspaper clippings on yellowed paper with large titles and a photo of a man with long hair and sunglasses on the left half of the page.

Poster for The Mothers of Invention concert at The New Penelope, 1967

Gary managed to book the group, from Los Angeles, after their recent series of shows in New York City. They arrived in the middle of a freezing Montreal winter. Luckily, Zappa had his raccoon fur coat with him! Juan Rodriguez, a rock journalist in the 1960s, tells the anecdote of the raccoon fur coat and a few others.

Black and white photograph of three young men, two standing and one sitting, in The New Penelope, in the foreground one of them is sitting on a bench reading a newspaper, in the background the two others are standing while looking at him. The headline of the article being read reads Mothers Of Invention Now at New Penelope.

Crowd at The New Penelope, reading Juan Rodriguez’s review of The Mothers of Invention concert, after the band’s concert, 1967

Listen to the audio clip with transcript: “Juan Rodriguez on Zappa’s concerts at The New Penelope”.

As soon as Zappa arrived, he complained about the quality of the sound in the room. He even visited a sound equipment rental store, on the other side of town, for better equipment, to no avail! Even the layout of the room wasn’t to his liking. At his request, the stage was dismantled and moved, from the middle of the left wall to the back of the room.

The Mothers opened [the second The New Penelope, January 1967]. Originally nobody had heard of them; Melinda [McCracken, journalist and Gary’s girlfriend] went to work on that. I hired them at the last minute; their manager convinced me. Zappa came and didn’t like what he saw, and re-designed the club overnight.

― Gary Eisenkraft (interview with his sister, Harriet Eisenkraft, July 2002)

Black and white photograph of two members of the band Mothers of Invention in concert at The New Penelope, one plays a tambourine, the other man is Frank Zappa with a moustache and goatee and long black hair, playing electric guitar.

The Mothers of Invention on stage (Frank Zappa on the right) at The New Penelope, 1967

Despite these challenges, Zappa put on memorable concerts much loved by the crowds. Many people still remember these shows as having exposed them to a kind of music they’d never heard before. Yet another example of Gary giving Montrealers the chance to see a major band in an intimate venue, before they became more famous.

Black and white photograph of people standing and sitting while talking in The New Penelope. The musician Frank Zappa is sitting on a bench next to a young seated woman on the left side of the image, while listening to a woman with arms outstretched seen standing in front of him.

Mothers of Invention singer, Frank Zappa (right), and entourage before a concert at The New Penelope, 1967

Indeed, by that summer, Gary could no longer afford to hire The Mothers of Invention, whom he had paid at one third of their usual fee. It’s fair to say that The New Penelope had an impact on the musical tastes of Montrealers, given how many people there discovered Zappa for the first time. Zappa would return to Montreal to perform several times, in the decades that followed.

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