I've stayed in my share of dreary motels, haughty hotels, Socialist-designed apartments with poster-board walls, and even nuclear plant "guest houses" (don't even ask) in villages with names that lacked vowels, but I've never experienced anything quite like Frank Zappa's 1971 mind-blowing movie, "200 Motels." But then, I never dropped acid, either. (Becherovka was the only substance available to numb the reality of the Motel Moskva in Brno, Czechoslovakia, the worst of my many lodging nightmares). Every time I thought I was losing my mind - traveling the weary road on business trips in the 1990s - I remembered the opening line of a movie I once saw, and suddenly I didn't feel so alone in my misery: "Ladies and gentlemen, you can go mad on the road." So goes the intro to Zappa's "surrealistic documentary," which opened at London's Piccadilly Classic Cinema in the U.K. on this date in 1971.