"Like father, like son and company"

Frank Zappa may no longer be around, but a new generation of musicians is out to revive his legend.

Monday night, the Center for the Arts became a little stranger and a little sweeter as "Zappa Plays Zappa," the first officially sanctioned tribute band since the great musician's demise, played as part of their premier U.S. tour.

Even before taking the stage, "Zappa Plays Zappa" conjured an atmosphere that could only be described as "eclectic." The stage was crammed like a warehouse with percussion, keyboards, brass accoutrements, colored lights and stacks of amplifiers. The audience similarly stretched to the back row of the balcony, offering a mix of playful students and older aficionados, many of who sported graying Zappa goatees and Jesus manes grown out from earlier tours.

The late Frank Zappa always had a knack for combining masterful jams with a great sense of humor, and the band pulled off a near-perfect rendition. Bouncing between deranged rock and swift marimba maneuvers, prolonged R&B and steady cowbell trots, they revisited a spirit that had been lost since Zappa's death in 1993.

Dweezil Zappa, the eldest son of the late musician and coordinator of the band, maintained a cool sense of dignity as he pulled off intricate feats on his guitar during the opening song "Andy."

However, it was Napoleon Murphy Brock who really stole the show. Dressed more like a stage manager than a musician, the singer/saxophonist would let out a soulful bellow and then attempt an awkward but highly loveable jig, or try a penguin waddle in "Don't Eat the Yellow Snow."

Sweat accumulated on Brock's polo shirt as he revived absurd but fun songs like "Call Any Vegetable," which stresses the importance of talking to vegetables ("They will respond...") and "Who are the Brain Police," whose bizarre lyrics about melting plastic and peeling labels Dweezil Zappa said "confuses people still."

The instrumentalists, at the true heart of Zappa eccentricity, could stop and start on a dime. Billy Hulting ripped up the marimba with four mallets and made the notes scatter like beetles during "St. Alfonso's Pancake Breakfast." Scheila Gonzalez, when she wasn't churning out liquid gold on the saxophone, squeezed her last breath into the instrument and made it groan like an old car trying to start up.

One doesn't really know how talented a band is until they can switch paths mid-tempo or come to a complete halt on their leader's instruction. Dweezil took advantage of this skill, stopping the music to bring one side of the audience to thunderous applause with the instruction of his hand, then the other half. As he toyed with his captors, he also began to warm up and relax.

The tickets ranged from $38 to $48 a pop, so the older turnout for a tribute band came as no surprise. However, the audience did not lose its playfulness, as "I Am the Slime" had people head banging in their seats and the more extroverted students of the crowd doing windmills in the aisles. While the setting required that people remain sedentary, the atmosphere stayed exciting and almost conversational.

There were only brief intersections where the room lost a bit of its intensity, mostly during elongated instrumental meanderings that sound great on an album but somewhat monotonous when one is stuck in a theater seat for three hours.

The concert became a bit tedious two-thirds in when special guest Terry Bozzio, who originally backed Zappa in the '70s and later formed the band Missing Persons, hopped onstage for a noisy bout of "I'm So Cute." However, he redeemed himself when he entered the elaborate jungle gym of a drums and cymbals at the front of the stage and unleashed a canal of testosterone on "Black Page."

A poignant feeling of nostalgia washed over the crowd when "Peaches in Regalia" began to play. Many of the initial '70s fans, whom Dweezil described as the original oddball music lovers "shunned from the rest of society," nodded their heads in commemoration. It was the Zappa clan at its finest moment, wavering somewhere between the decades and generations.

Frank Zappa would have done been proud.