A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Song 185: “Peaches En Regalia” by Frank Zappa

Episode Date: July 21, 2026

This episode follows on from the episode on the GTOs. These two make up two parts of a three-part story, and I’m hoping to have part three, on Captain Beefheart, up before the end of the month. This episode is on “Peaches En Regalia” by Frank Zappa. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifty-five-minute bonus episode available, on “Song to the Siren” by Tim Buckley. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by editing, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

A History of Rock Music in 500 songs By Andrew Hig. Song 185 Features in Megalia By Frank Zappa Before we begin, this episode, surprisingly given the artist in question, has fewer content warnings than most.

However, it does feature discussion of songs that mention incest and quotes one line of lyric referring to underage sex. While other than that there is little to warn people about in the episode itself, including in the musical clips, it's worth mentioning that listening to the full songs discussed, for example by listening to the playlist associated with the episode, might be disturbing for some people. There is also some mention of drug use and some brief mentions of war atrocities in clips of songs which discuss police violence. Now on with the show. This episode is the second of three episodes, all of which are linked and all of which are linked,

which discuss in one way or another, bizarre and straight records. Those labels are among the first to be owned and run by a rock musician, as they were set up by Frank Zapper and his manager Herb Cohen, though, as we say, there is no first anything, and they came after the Beatles Apple Records and the Beach Boys' Brother label. But unlike most rock star vanity labels, they released a lot of interesting and important material in a whole variety of genres. Last time we looked at one of the least known artists on those labels,

which, despite having two names, really operated as a single company. Next time, we're going to look at probably the most artistically important artists to record for them. This time, we're going to look at the career of Zappa himself in this period, at the clashes with his previous label that led him to set up his own company, and at the making of what is still for many his greatest album, Hot Rats. The way I see it, Barry, this should be a very dynamite show. When we left The Mothers of Invention back in 1966, they had just released their first album, Freak Out, on Verve Records,

and, indeed, as a result of that release, had been forced to change their name from just the Mothers to the Mothers of Invention, as the label disliked the possible interpretations that could be put on the shorter name. That wasn't the only thing that Frank Zappa disliked about that album. He was unhappy with it even before it was released, because side four, a long avant-garde percussion instrumental, was, according to Zappa, intended to be merely the percussion part of a more extensive and complicated piece of music, but it was released unfinished.

And while the album was praised on its release, at least by the more forward-thinking critics and listeners, by the time it came out, it also no longer really reflected the music that the mothers played live. Even before the album was released, there had been a line-up change. Elliot Inber, the rhythm guitarist, was very fond of smoking dope and taking acid, something which Zappa not only didn't indulge in but didn't approve of, seeing it as a kind of weakness. Inger was turning up to shows increasingly stoned,

and was, according to some band members, even falling asleep in the middle of performances. The final straw, apparently, was when Inba turned up to one show on acid and played through the whole show without realising that his amplifier was turned off. After his dismissal, Inba went on to form a group called The Fraternity of Man,

whose most well-known song is the one that got included on the soundtrack to Easy Rider. Don't Bogart Me. A song which suggests the reasoning behind Ingb was Secking was largely correct. Don't Bogart that joint, my friend, pass it over to me. Don't Bogart that joint, my friend, pass it over. to me, roll another one,

just like the other one. The last thing the thing we're played on with the mothers is a real oddity. It's hard to express just how big the Batman TV show was in 1966, and everyone seemed to be trying to cash in on it, including musically. As we heard a few episodes ago, the Who recorded the Batman theme? Jan and Dean did an entire concept album based around the series and even Sun Ra made an album of Batman-themed instrumentals in a one-off studio band consisting of Ra and some of his orchestra's sax players

along with several members of the Blues Project performing under the name the sensational guitars of Dan and Dale that album had been produced by the mother's producer Tom Wilson and Wilson was clearly invested in the idea of making a Batman hit He actually got Bert Ward, the actor who played Robin in the series, signed to Verve, and produced a single for him with Zappa arranging and with the mothers, augmented by orchestral session musicians, as his backing band. They recorded over two sessions.

The first produced the B-side, a version of the old standard orange-colored sky, chosen because the Wham-Bam-Bam Al-A-Zam line was reminiscent of the Biff-Bam-Pau overlays that would appear in the TV show. But after that session, and the revelation that Ward was possibly not the world's greatest singer, the plan shifted. And while Ward was given singing lessons just in case his record took off, the A-side was written so that Ward would only have to speak, not sing. Zappa wrote the track, and you can already see the ambiguous fascination with female fandom

that would lead to him producing the GTO's album we heard about last episode. Here is a happy letter from someone just about your age. Dear cute, wonderful, fabulous, magnificent, exquisite boy wonder. A cold chill runs up my spine every time I see you sock a villain. And oh, how I cry when you're even scratch. Please don't send me a mimeograph copy of interesting facts about you. Inba leaving the group kicked off a number of other lineup changes in a very very short period of time, though always around the core of Ray Collins on vocals, Frank Zapper

on guitar, Roy Estrada on bass, and Jimmy Carl Black on drums. Van Dyke Parks either returned to the band on keyboards or joined for the first time, depending on which of the convoluted sources you read, but didn't remain long enough to be heard on any recordings. Another musician who didn't stay long enough to be recorded was Denny Bruce. Jimmy Carl Black was a great drummer, but he was a great R&B drummer and not a great technical musician. Zappa respected his musicianship enough to want to keep him in the band, but wanted to augment him with other drummers or percussionists more fluent in the kind of complex time signatures and polyrhythms that Zappa was now writing.

Bruce was brought in as a second drummer for a few months, but developed mononucleosis and was unable to continue. So he was replaced with Billy Mundy. Mundy was a former timpanist for the L.A. Phil Harmonic, who had become a session player, playing with Van Dyke Parks, guitarist Larry Beckett, and Jim Fielder,

who was a bass player, on the first album by Tim Buckley, who shared a manager with the mothers. Monday had also briefly been a member of a band called The Lamp of Childhood, formed around Jim Hendricks, Cass Elliott's former husband who he heard about performing with her

and Tim Rose as the big three, and who had been in the mug-wumps with Elliot, Denny Doherty, John Sebastian, Zaliyanovsky. Mundy left the lamp of childhood after their first single, a cover of Donovan's Season of the Witch. Along with Mundy came a new keyboard player who had actually been associated with Zappa longer than anyone in the band except Collins, and would go on to be the band's longest serving member, playing with the mother's off and on until 1974.

Don Preston was from a completely different musical world than the original. members of the mothers, having his roots in jazz and experimental music. Preston had grown up in a musical family. His father was a trumpet and sax player who was an arranger for the house band for the local NBC affiliate in Detroit where he was raised, but it was when he joined the army that he first started to really grow as a musician. Stationed in Germany, he was placed in the army band, which at the time included the great jazz flautist Herbie Mann. At the time, Preston was a moderately competent people.

piano player, and he also soon took up the bass. But as he said later, Herbie Mann was very helpful when I first started playing. I didn't even know what a bridge was, and after I learned what a bridge was I promptly forgot them a number of times. The other big connection he made during his army days was with his roommate, a trumpet player named Buzz Gardner, who taught Preston about modern classical and experimental music, particularly Berg, Verbein and Schenberg. Fresten was learning about all this difficult music, while simultaneously playing odd gigs with the music. pick-up bands where he'd play either piano or bass. This gave him enough experience that by the time he left the army in 1953, he was good enough to play bass with Elvin Jones, the great jazz drummer

who would later go on to great fame with John Coltrane's quartet. Jones was leading late-night sessions, which would feature soloists like Yusuf Latif, Kenny Borell and Pepper Adams, and these sets would be so long that Jones's normal bass player, Ollie Jackson, would get too tired to play after about four hours, at which point Preston would take over. for the rest of the night. For most of the 50s, Preston was primarily a bass player, playing live dates with Shorty Rogers, Nat King Cole, Nelson Riddle and others. Towards the end of the 50s, he formed his own band, A-ha, which stood for Athletic Harmony Assemblage, and was definitely not the later Norwegian pop band of a similar name, which included

Paul Beaver. Beaver was already starting to get interested in the electronic musical instruments which would lead, as we've heard in other episodes, to him becoming the world's first session Moog player. And yes, in this case there is a first for this very specific job, because he started it when the number of Moogs in existence was in single digits. It's Beaver playing, for example, on Star Collector by the Monkeys, Cool Cool Water by the Beach Boys, and going back by the birds. Many, many, many, many other records. At the time that Preston knew him, Beaver was a tinkerer and had a home studio full of exotic keyboard and electronic instruments, which inspired Preston to return. to playing keyboards and to start building his own synthesizer,

which by 1966 he had done, a year before Moogs came on the market. Preston had moved to L.A. in the early 60s, and not long after he'd gone back to being primarily a keyboard player, he had met Frank Zappa, who was in 1962 or 63 putting together a guitar-saxe organ trio to play clubs. Preston had joined this trio on organ, but according to Preston it only lasted as long as the audition,

when their music was deemed unsuitable when they had a club manager. Preston says that one of the songs they played at the audition was the instrumental piece that would later become the mothers of invention song, oh no. Over the next few years though, Zappa and Preston would get together and play experimental music, improvising to abstract images projected onto a screen,

along with Buzz Gardner and Buzz's younger brother bunk. This went on for a year or two, in parallel with Zappa's other activities of playing R&B music with bar bands and making knock-off surf records with Paul Buff. Preston didn't see Zappa for a year or two and then found out that Zappa had formed the band that became the mothers. Zappa invited Preston to audition for the band, but quickly discovered that Preston was not yet familiar enough

with rock or R&B music to be a mother. Preston's knowledge of modern classical music in free jazz was all well and good, and exactly the kind of thing Zappa loved. But he also needed someone who was able to just play Louis-Louis and other thuggy three-cord garage band staples with the requisite enthusiasm and feel. And Preston wasn't there yet, so he went away and spent a year playing with other rock bands

learning the music. And then when Van Dyke Parks left the mothers, Preston was invited to audition again, and this time was successful. Joining this line-up as Inba's replacement was Del Kasha. Kasha was a very, very seasoned guitarist who had been playing sessions for many years. He was older than many of the rest of the mothers,

having been born in 1937. Like Preston, he was something of a tinkerer and inventor. He had been inspired by Les Paul to invent various early echo devices to augment his playing, and he had been a professional musician since the 50s. He played on the Lawrence Welk show in 1959, and a few years later on Gene Autry's Melody Ranch. It's difficult to talk more precisely about Cash's career, because in his interviews he's frustratingly vague about what he did and didn't play on,

in ways that in general make him sound rather more important than he actually was, which is particularly annoying as he was in fact, as we just heard, an incredibly accomplished guitarist and banjo player, and did have a number of very real achievements. But, for example, in interviews he will talk a lot about playing guitar with Elvis in the film Roustabout, in ways that make it sound like Kasha played on the soundtrack. In fact, Kasha was just chosen to mime guitar in the film,

the actual tracks having been played by Scotty Moore, Billy Strange, Barney Castle and Tiny Tim Brel. He also talks about having been a member of the Wrecking Crew, and talks vaguely about sessions he played on for Phil Specter, Sonny Bono and others. I'm sure he did play on some sessions for some of those people, but I haven't been able to find any confirmation of which ones, and I've never seen his name on any AFM sheets for any sessions I've looked at. There's no official membership of the wrecking crew.

Like the Nashville A team, it's an informal name given to the people were always called as the first or second choice to play on a lot of the same sessions as each other. And while Casha may have played on some Wrecking Crew sessions, he would have been a long way down the list of guitarists called on. Just off the top of my head, guitarists who were regularly called on for wrecking crew sessions were Tommy Tedesco, Al Casey, Jerry Cole, Mike Deasy, Billy Strange, James Burton, Glenn Campbell, Barney Castle and Louis Shelton. So it's difficult to say much about Cassia,

because most of the information we have about him comes from his own interviews, and I don't think he's reliable enough to take his words a straight fact. But that's not to take away from his musicianship, which, as we've heard, was spectacular. Don Preston agreed, saying in an interview later, Zappa always had another guitar player because at that time he couldn't play guitar very well, so he always had a really good guitar player in the early group like Henry Vestine and Elliot Inber. Even when I joined the band, there was some guy, I don't know who it was, to this day but he had light lightning fingers. That's certainly evident on the one surviving

live recording of this lineup of the group, released very recently. But Preston also said he was very, very straight-looking and he really didn't fit with the band. He didn't really know any of us and we never got to know him, so he disappeared real fast. That was happening a lot with the early mothers. Oh, and we keep changing personnel though. You've got to understand that our band is constantly in flux because most of them can't stand to play in the band. They really hate what they're doing. They hate to work for me and they don't like their manager at all. So we keep firing people all the time. We fired a couple of guys last week and we keep putting new ones in. And so constantly the band keeps changing sounds because we never know. I'm about to burp and I'm trying

Cassia was replaced by Jim Fielder, who was, as we have established, a bass player, but switched to rhythm guitar when he joined the mothers. Fielder was a friend of Jimmy Carl Blacks, the two of them having worked in the same music shop. But while Cash's tenure in the group was very brief, and he never recorded with them, his time in the band did make a huge difference to rock and roll music history. One of the jobs Cassia had at the time was playing in a promotional band for Vox Amplifiers, and he was an advisor on developing new equipment. and one of the things he was involved in in some way

was the development of the wah-wah pedal. This is a contentious area with three different people having claimed to be the one who came up with the idea, all telling plausible stories, but Kasha was definitely involved in developing it in some way, and he made the first ever recordings with the Wawa in February 1967 for a cardboard demo disc that was sent out to retailers.

By rocking the foot back and forth, we get the Wawa effect. The same applies for chords. The wah-wah pedal lets you go from mellow rhythm to sharp lead. Quickly and all without dropping a beat. Kasha was still in touch with Zappa when the pedal was being developed. And depending on what you read, he either gave Zappa one or evangelised about it enough

that Zappa bought one as soon as they came on the market, when they were still primarily being marketed to horn players. Zappa started using it immediately as his effect of choice. A month later, Zappa met up and jammed with Eric Clapton, who immediately got his own pedal and used it on Cream's Tales of Brave Ulysses. And over summer 1967, Zappa also spent time with Hendricks and introduced him to the Wah-W-W-W-Wad, which Hendrix took to even more than Zappa had. So it's very likely that Del Cache's brief time in the mothers of invention,

a period so brief that for decades Zapper fans argued about if he had even lasted as long as a single gig, changed the sound of rock guitar forever. The big change in the mother's sound, though, came with the addition of Bunk Gardner, the brother of Don Preston's army bunk mate Buzz. Bunk Gardner is a serious multi-instrumentalist who plays saxophone, flute, clarinet, bassoon and piano, and like Preston was significantly older than the rest of the band. Happily, both Preston and Gardner are still alive today in their 90s. He had played bassoon in the Cleveland Philharmonic Orchestra from 1950,

before being drafted during the career in war, and his first recordings had been in 1959, playing on an album of orchestral versions of TV Western themes, titled The HIP. Gardner and Preston between them allowed Zapper to expand the mother's instrumental palette immensely. Having musicians who could cite read music, who were familiar with the avant-garde world that Zappa had always had one foot in, who were able to improvise in modes a million miles away from the blues-based grunting of most rock players of the era,

and who played instruments that weren't just the standard guitar, bass, and drums, allowed for a whole range of possibilities for orchestration. The mothers weren't the only band on the LA scene to do something like this. At almost exactly the same time, Love Expanded, to have Albon Snoopy Fistre on harpsichord and organ, and jazz saxon flute player Jay Cantrelli, who would later play with Jimmy Carl Black and the Gardner Brothers in Geronimo Black. But they went further in that direction than anyone else.

At the same time as all of this was happening, Zappa was also working outside the mothers, getting more production and arranging experience. Tom Wilson was working with the Animals and what would turn out to be their final album, Animalism, and brought Zappa in to work on the album. Zappa wrote, arranged and played guitar on the album's open, track all night long.

And he also played bass and arranged their version of Fred Neal's folk club standard, The Other Side of This Life, a song which, while it was never a hit, was also recorded around this time by Grand Parsons, Jefferson Airplane and The Lovin' In Spoonful. Zappa and Eric Burr, and became friendly for a while, with Burden often coming round to visit Zapper and watch Zappa's 16mm experimental films. Apparently most people found these boring or paranoia-inducing, but Burden would stay up till 4 a.m. watching them, and expected Zapper to become a great director. The two men, though, were fundamentally mismatched when it came to temperament,

with Burden by this point fully converted to the hippie peace and love philosophy, and believing that Zappers' on-stage provocations and aggression made him the Adolf Hitler of music, as he famously said in a record merit interview a couple of years later. Zappa, meanwhile, was unimpressed with the animals as musicians. He gave an interview to Hit Parader, in which he described the process, saying, I get to the studio at 11 o'clock, I'm the only one there. Then Tom Wilson comes in. He asks, where are the animals? I say, gee, I don't know, Tom. I had called the musicians union, and I had brought down a girl who plays the bass

and 12-string guitar who's a monster named Carol Kay. She's really good, one of the top studio players in LA. Also Don Randy on piano, Johnny Gwerin on drums. I was playing guitar on one tune and bass on the other side of this life, and I had a guy on harmonica, the guy who originally wrote Hey Joe. Eric shows up with his drummer around 1.30 or so because they had been to a monster party the night before, and they'd been out being spectacular celebrities, having a wonderful time in show business all over town, and paying very little attention to minding the store. They come walking in and everyone starts playing demos for them because they didn't even know what they were going to record. Meanwhile, we have all these union people sitting around at triple

time because it was a holiday. They were waiting to find out what to do. Finally, they decide what they're going to cut. We make two tracks with the union guys, and then the animals themselves show up around 4 o'clock in the afternoon, and they run through four or five old R&B songs like Long Tallie and hit the roadjack. The two songs The Union Cats played on sounded pretty tight. There was yet another band that Zappa were with at this point, The Factory, a band led by the singer and guitarist Lowell George, who had come to the attention of Zapper and Herb Cohen as a regular support act for the mothers. Zaffer produced a single for the group, Lightning Rodman. The single went unreleased though, and the factory instead made some recordings with

Marshall Leib, formerly one-third of the teddy bears, producing. But of course the most important piece of work that Zappa was working on in late 1966 was the second Mothers of Invention Album. Absolutely Free was the first album by the expanded line-up of the Mothers of Invention, and the only one to feature Jim Fielder, who left the band between its recording and release and went on to be a bass player again. Fielder is uncredited on the album, but played rhythm guitar. Various other musicians contributed as well, including John Balkin, a bass player who worked a lot with Buzz and Bunk Gardner both before and after their time in the mothers, and various session string and home players, while the album credited Zappa's old school friend

Euclid Motorhead Sherwood as a band member, even though he didn't join the band until after the sessions. This would be the first in a long line of Zapper and Mothers releases where the credits don't quite match reality. But for the recording are absolutely free, the mothers of invention where Zapper and Jim Field are on guitars, Don Preston on keyboards, Ray Collins on vocals, Bunk Gardner on Woodwinds, Roya Strada on bass, Jimmy Carl Black on drums, and Billy Mundy on percussion. The album comprise as two side-long sweets of sorts, something that was very unusual at the time of recording for rock music.

While it was recorded in November 1966, over just four days, issues with the record company led to it not getting released until May 1967, almost simultaneously with Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band, another album with no gaps between tracks, thus somewhat blunting the impact of the innovation. It opens with plastic people. In live performances, this had been a straightforward parody of Louis-Louis, setting lyrics attacking conformism to Richard Berry's original music.

Take a day and walk around, watch the Nazis run your town, then go home and check yourself. You think we're singing about someone else, but you're plastic people. However, in the studio it became something more extravagant and also more political, a piece with multiple shifts of mood and time signature, and with spoken sections referencing the then-recent sunset strip riots.

I hear the sound of marching feet down sunset boulevard to Crescent Heights, and there at Pandora's box, we are confronted with. a vast quantity of plastic people. Take a day and walk around, watch the Nazis run your town. This is followed by Duke of Prunes, a song that had a long history. The melody for it had started as a piece of orchestral music that Zappa had written for Run Home Slow, the western film written by his high school teacher that he had scored. There it had been the main melodic theme for the score.

Zappa had put fairly strict forward love lyrics to the track entitled it And Very True, and it had become a regular part of the mother's live set. A recently released recording of the mothers playing it in 1966, the only recording of the Delcasha line-up, shows it sounding at that point very like some of Brian McLean's work with love around the same time. But then in the recording session, Ray Collins decided to have some fun. As he later recalled, Frank had this beautiful tune called

And Very True, and when we went in to record it, being a little, crazy at the time, I just ad-libbed on the spot. The original lyrics, I think, was something like Moonbeam Through the Night, something very loving, although Frank didn't like love songs, and I changed it to Moonbeam Through the Prune in June, I can see your tits. I just made it up on the spot. Duke of Prunes goes straight into two other tracks. Amnesia Vivarchie, a short free jazz freakout, including a quote from Stravinsky's Firebird, and Zappa saying, Duke, Duke, Duke, Duke of Prunes, as a reference to Jean Chandler's Duke of Earl, which then goes into a sped-up reprise of Duke of Prunes

before transmuting into Call Any Vegetable, the second major melodic theme of the side. The vegetables referenced in this track are of course a sneering reference to apathetic people, much like the plastic people of the beginning of the side. This is a song about vegetables, they keep you regular, they're real good for you. Calling if it's a bocule The vegetable will respond to you Some people don't go for prunes But I've always found it intriguing

That around the same time that the mothers were recording that The Beach Boys were recording the song Vegetables Which bears some slight resemblance to the mother's track And was co-written by Van Dyke Parks Who had recently been a temporary member of the mothers I know that you feel better when you send us in your letter and tell us the name of your favorite vegetable. I have no idea if it's in. example of convergent evolution, just ideas that were in the air at the same time,

or if one influenced the other. And if so, I don't know whether it was Brian Wilson hearing Zappa's song and doing a more naive version, or Zappa hearing the Beach Boys and parodying them. Both groups were aware of each other's work. Zapper later wrote in his autobiography. One of the most exciting things that ever happened in the world of white person music was when the Beach Boys used the progression 5-2 on Little Deuce Coupe, an important step forward by going backward, while Carl Wilson and Mike Love both praised Zappa in 1969, with Wilson saying cruising with Rubin and the Jets was really out of sight, man,

while Love said, if he keeps coming up with titles like that, he's going to have friends for life from the Beach Boy organisation. The tracks on the rest of Side 1 are extended semi-improvisory variations on the theme of Call Any Vegetable, along with a brief burst of Hulse's Plaret Suite. As with the Stravinsky, Zappa was mixing references to high and low. art. Side two starts with America Drinks, a parody of the kind of music Zappa had played when

he was starting out, playing cocktail lounges with a band called Joe Perino and the mellow tones. Interestingly, I've read in several places that the intro to America Drinks is a parody of loves my little red book, with Zapper himself saying so in at least one interview. I can sort of hear that after it's been pointed out, but it's not something I'd have thought of even though I've known both records for decades. But compare that intro. One, two, buckle my shoe. to the start of my little red book.

And you can sort of my little red book. And you can sort of see what was going on this. This is a recurring thing in Zappa's work as his career progresses. References and parody is that either so distorted or to such niche bits of culture that his audience can't possibly expect to understand them. Though possibly the parody of love might have been more obvious to the mother's local audience, as Love and the Mothers played the same venues and appealed to the same freak crowd. Status Back Baby, the second song on Side 2,

is a song that dated back to the musical I Was a Teenage Malt Shop, that Zappa had worked on with Captain Beefheart several years earlier. A version of the song had been recorded by the PALS studio band back when Zappa had been working with Paul Buff at PALS studios. The version on Absolutely free though continued the repurposing of 20th century classical music by including a great chunk of Stravinsky's Petruska as the instrumental break.

Uncle Bernie's farm, which follows, is a satire of commercialism. Then comes Son of Susie Cream Cheese, a piece of what Zappa referred to as conceptual. continuity. On the previous album there had been a line-a-note letter from a supposed teenager named Susie Cream Cheese, who disapproved of the mother's filth in decadence. Here, in another song inspired by Louis-Louis, Susie Cream Cheese becomes a portmanteau character with elements of several of the groupies on the sunset strip scene, who has taken too much

acid, got in trouble with the law on the strip, and moved to Berkeley to join the protest there. Zappa actually got his friend Pamela Zarubica to appear as Susie Creamchise for a while. in promotional appearances with the band. Ground Shoes don't make it, which comes next, is one of the most powerful things Zappa ever wrote and had to be recorded in many short sections and edited together. The group weren't capable of playing through it fluently enough, which is saying something given how good these musicians actually were.

It's also a truly disturbing song, and I have to be very careful about which bits I excerpt here, because there's some very upsetting material in it. It's about, fundamentally, the way that authoritative, in politics is driven by repressed sexual desires, usually ones that are societally unacceptable for very good reason. Some of these desires, particularly relating to father-daughter incest, are described in deliberately shocking ways. And while I think it's very artistically valid, and used to a much more serious purpose than some of Zappers later shocking or offensive

humour, I know of a few people who've had a very bad time listening to the track because it's brought up past traumas. To be very clear, I'm not being censorious here. There are some Zappa lyrics, particularly in the late 70s and early 80s, which, while I would defend his right to write them on free speech grounds, I wouldn't defend on their own merits. But Brown Shoes don't make it is not one of those. It's a very, very powerful piece of work, but precisely because of that power, it's a work that might reopen old traumas. And the album finishes up with a return to America Drinks, this time renamed two America Drinks and Goes Home. Well, it's about time to close.

I hope you've had as much fun as we have. Don't forget this jam session Sunday. Mandate attention will be by. Plenty's idle phone tree. Monday night's dance contest night. Swiss contest. We're going to give away peanut butter with jelly, Supposedly.

It really has been found. I hope we played your request. Supposedly, some of those crowd noises are by Terry Gilliam, though his memory of attending a mother's session and making noises, might instead refer to Return of the Son of Monster Magnus on the Freak Out album. I've seen the claim made about both tracks, and Gilliam has only ever talked about being at one mother's recording session in interviews I've seen. Zappa talked about the layers of invention that went into those crowd noises in his autobiography,

saying in part, We spent hours putting that together. Herbie Cohen was playing the cash register. We rehearsed at crowd noises. The talk track is funny because they are saying things like, I got a new Mustang, and the girls are saying, Sally, will you go with me to the bathroom?

You know, that stuff. The crowd mumble was carefully programmed, like choreographed. We had the crowd separated into two rooms. In the main studio, we had ten people sitting around the microphone doing these lines on cue, with the cash register over here and the glass on one microphone.

Then in the vocal booth off to one side we had Ray Collins and Jimmy Carl Black and Voy Estrada going through this number. We had Bunk Gardner trying to pick up two girls. You know, what's a girl like you doing in a place like this? All that stuff. And then Jim's an Okie wanting to beat up a Mexican who is Ray. Those things are so carefully constructed that it breaks my heart when people don't dig into them and see all the levels that I put into them. The album was mixed over Christmas while the group were in New York,

where they were booked in for a month-long residency at the balloon farm, the same venue where the Velvet Underground had made their name. It was a rather unhappy time for the group, who weren't used to East Coast winters, and who also discovered that their freaky apparel and long hair had not yet made it to New York, and they couldn't get any cabs to stop for them and had to walk back to the hotel in the snow after every gig. When they got back to L.A., Zappa commenced work on what was intended to be his first solo album. Unfortunately, things didn't work out as straightforwardly as he planned. Lumpy Gravy was originally conceived as a purely instrumental album,

and a way for Zapper to make some extra money. The Mothers of Invention were signed as a band to MGM Verve, but Zappa was only signed as a performer, and so he found a loophole that allowed him to work for another label. He signed a contract with Nick Venet at Capital to record an album of his orchestral works, on which Zappa would be composer, producer and conductor, but would not perform.

The performances instead would be by an ensemble credited as the Abnusiel's Amuka Electric Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, a group actually made up of normal Hollywood session, musicians like the Sid Sharp Strings and various members of the wrecking crew like Tommy Tedesco and Lyle Ritz. The only member of the Mothers of Invention to play on the album was Bunk Gardner, who may also not have been signed to Verve as he joined the group after the first album. Though John Balkin, who was a friend of Gardner's who often played free jazz with him, and who had also played on Absolutely Free, was also on the Sessions.

A small number of copies of the album were released on the four-track cartridge format, which Capital was briefly very keen on, and which, would soon be replaced by the eight-track cartridge, itself long obsolete. But then, troublestruck. While, as far as Capital were concerned, they had the rights to release an album of Frank Zappa's compositions because he wasn't the performer, MGM had different ideas,

and the album became a legal battleground between the two labels. The problem was eventually resolved by MGM paying capital the recording costs and getting the rights to the record, but the version of Lumpy Gravy that would be released on MGM Verve would turn out to be very different than the purely orchestral album that Capital had released and that original version of Lumpy Gravy would remain unavailable for more than 40 years until the release of the Archival Collection, The Lumpy Money Project Object, in 2009. There were also problems with the release of absolutely free.

Despite signing the MGM Records was always the most notoriously conservative of the record labels and there would be nothing but problems between Zappa and the label the entire time he and the mothers were with MGM. Zappa, for all his abstruse music, actually had a keen commercial instinct and an understanding of advertising, and he was at this point actually in the process of putting together an ad agency named Nifty Tough and Bichin, with Herb Cohen, to provide services to companies who wanted to advertise to the counterculture and underground.

That didn't go very far as it would turn out, but Zappa had very strong ideas of how to appeal to a particular. particular audience. The mothers were, for example, the first rock band to advertise in Marvel comics, at a point where superhero comics were just starting to be appreciated by college students. And in particular, he wanted to take control of his records packaging, and there were two issues with the packaging of absolutely free. The first was that the collage Zapper had created for the album cover included the slogan, War Means Work for All. The label objected to this, but eventually compromised and allowed it to be printed, so long as it was in a faint grey

rather than the original black. But the other sticking point was that Zappa wanted to include a copy of the lyrics with the album, something that had not been done in rock music previously. Oddly, these delays led to the album being released at the same time as Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band, the album that's generally considered to be the first major rock album to do exactly that. The problem with the label this time wasn't with the idea of actually printing the lyrics, it was with the content of the lyrics. MGM's legal department, rightly or wrongly, believed that the lyrics,

to the album were legally protected when performed as art, but that they would be considered obscene, it printed. They gave Zappa a long list of changes to the text. Some of these were just ridiculous but possibly defensible. Where Zappa had written magnificent instrumental ejaculation to describe a moment in the music, they wanted him to change the word ejaculation to climax. But they also insisted, for example,

on him editing the lyric, she's only 13 and she knows how to nasty, to remove the word 13. And, amazingly, the line, I'd like to make her do her nasty on the White House lawn, became, after MGM's censorship, I'd like to make her do the crossword puzzle on the back of TV guide. Eventually, a compromise was reached.

In the US, the lyrics would be published by Zapper, as a booklet which people could send their money off for, would the address to send the money published on the record sleeve. That way, the label itself would not be involved in publishing this obscene material. In the UK, the lyrics would instead be published in the underground magazine, in International Times, and the transcriptions would be done by Pauline Butcher, a secretary who Zappa met on a trip here to promote the album, and who had soon become his right-hand woman for several years.

But before that journey, the mothers were on their way back to New York. For the whole spring and summer of 1967, the Mothers of Invention played a residency at the Garrick Theatre, originally titled Pigs and Repugnance, but later changed to absolutely free when the album came out, though for some reason Zappa always claimed that it was just a coincidence that their show was named the same as the album. The support act for the first week or so

was another act managed by Herb Cohen, the folk singer Tim Buckley, who had been discovered by Jimmy Carl Black. Buckley wasn't the only folk act to perform as the support act for the mothers during that residency. There were several others, like Richie Havens, but the most impressive was one that wasn't actually billed.

Frank Zapper had met Paul. Simon at a music shop and had been invited to Simon's home for dinner where, after complaining that his tax bill that year was $600,000, something with which the relatively impoverished Zappa had little sympathy, Simon and Art Garfunkel, who was also there, had taken to reminiscing about their days as Tom and Jerry in the 50s. Zappa suggested to them that it would be fun of the two of them supported the mothers as Tom and Jerry, just playing their 50s material, and the two agreed. Then at the second row

The teacher's looking over So I got to whisper way down to Let's meet My school is over at a half-past four Baby when we're Then at the end of the mother's show They invited the support act out To do one last number for the encore

They performed The Sound of Silence And the penny dropped for the audience That they have been watching megastars One of the audience berated Zapper For mocking the duo like that which just confused him. In his autobiography, he talks about wondering if she had thought, that these two superstars had just dropped in out of nowhere,

and we had forced them to sing, ooh, Bopalucci Bash, she's mine. Sadly, the mother's shows at the Garrick were not audio recorded, which is a great shame as these shows were the most important thing to happen in the mother's career, with Gail Zappa comparing the group's time at the Garrick to the Beatles' time in Hamburg. At the start of their residency, as it was the Easter holidays, there were queues round the block for the group's show. But as the spring turned into the summer and the schools went back, the audience has dried up.

On at least one occasion there were fewer people in the audience than on stage, and the group decided to get the audience to be the band that entertained them instead. Another time there were only three people in the audience, and the band dressed up like waiters, served food and drink to those three people, and then spent the next hour and a half just talking to them personally. Each show turned into a unique event, sometimes more conceptual art than musical performance, such as one time when three marines in full dress uniform turned up to the show.

Zappa got them to come on stage and sing Dullan's Rainy Day women. He then brought out a baby doll and got them to pretend it was a Vietnamese baby and showed the audience what they did to Vietnamese kids and then displayed the dismembered body parts to the shocked audience while sombered. music played. During their time at the Garrick, the mothers went through various line-up changes. For a while, they were joined by the singer-songwriter Esra Mohawk, who was then known as Sandy Hervitz. She changed her surname when she got married, and chose to go by Esra as a more unusual abbreviation of her given name, Sandra, who became a full member of the band under the stage

name which would later be given to one of the band's albums, and as well as playing Zappas music, would perform her own songs like Archgodliness of Purpleful Magic. She was soon out of the band though. Depending on which version of the narrative you believe, she either decided she didn't want to be called Uncle Meat anymore and quit, or she and Zappa had been having an affair and it ended badly. According to some versions of the story, Zapper got his girlfriend Gail pregnant and chose to do the right thing and marry her,

and Mohawk didn't want to be sleeping with a married man. Another new member who joined in the middle of the New York run was a much more permanent fixture in the band, Ian Underwood was a Berkeley graduate with a master's degree in music who played keyboards and woodwinds. He had attended several shows and loved what he saw and had approached Jimmy Carl Black and then a few days later turned up to the studio.

Zappa had asked him, What can you do that's fantastic? And he'd displayed his proficiency on alto-saxon piano. Another musician who turned up for as many shows as she could and was devastated when the Garrick residency ended, Ruth Komenoff, would not join right then. but she would contribute precaution to some tracks they recorded towards the end of 1967, which ended up on the Uncle Meat album.

And after marrying Underwood and taking his surname, she would play with various line-ups of the mothers from 1969 through 1976. Living in New York for an extended period rather than touring, and playing two shows a day plus rehearsals, gave the newly expanded version of the mothers, who at this point consisted of Zappa, Estrada, Preston, Collins, Black, Mundy, Gardner, Underwood and Motorhead Sherwood, the latter on Baritone Sacks,

the chance to work up a lot of new music, and much of the material on the next few mothers' albums would be material that had been premiered during the Garrick run. During that run, the group also started work on what would generally be considered the best album by the original Mothers of Invention, were only in it for the money. What's there to live for?

Who needs the piece called? I'll go to Frisco, buy a wig and sleep on Houseley's floor, Walk past the wig's door, Instead of film more. Song for song, where only in it for the money, is not the group's strongest work, and certainly not its most musically adventurous. But what it does have is a satirical bite and coherence

and a genuine pointed anger, which is missing from most of Zappa's other songwriting. Generally, when Zappa was writing lyrics, there would either be mocking his own audience or people who are less hip, or more hip, or not the precise right amount of hip, than him. Or there would be sexual jokes or jokes about the music industry.

He would also write a lot of material with literally meaningless lyrics and whimsical story songs about talking mountains and smiley feet. Rather later, in the 80s, he would also make a lot of political attacks at the religious right. But in general, for someone with a reputation as a satirist, Zappa was not very interested in the kinds of topics that most people associate with satire.

But this album was different. Where only in it for the money set its sights on two very different but interlinked targets. These days what stands out the most is the attack on the hippie movement in San Francisco, people for whom Zappa had little but contempt, seeing them as people who could have chosen to change the world, but instead sat around in their own filth,

taking drugs that were destroying their minds, listening to terrible music, and thinking that they were doing something important by doing so. Deciding to mock the hippies would seem to fit Zappa's normal mode of attacking youth subcultures as they came along. But other songs were about the authoritarian right who were prominent in Californian politics at the time, people like Ronald Reagan, the then-governor, and they're far closer to the anger of a track right trouble every day from freak out.

You only have to listen to a concentration moon to hear the real anger in the song. American Way, how did it start? Thousands of Greeks killed in the park. Frank Zappa had a complicated set of political views, and for most of his life he was pragmatically a Democrat, though he supported mostly libertarian political standpoint and was quoted as saying he might have preferred to vote Republican if you could remove the pernicious influence of the religious right. Reading his autobiography and listening to his later work, he seemed to have had a tendency to a conspiracist worldview, and he talks about the possibility that AIDS was a bioweapon engineered to eliminate minority populations.

Nobody, of course, can know what he would think about the world today, and the political landscape has shifted a lot since his death, but his positions were all over the political map. As, truth be told, are those of most intelligent people for whom politics is not a primary interest, which had only tended to be for Zappa when it affected his own work. But that conspiracist tendency actually does him a favour when he's looking at the way the culture was changing, in the late 60s. Many of the specific things Zappa is writing about in the album,

things like rumours that concentration camps were being built in California to round up all the hippies, are paranoid nonsense. Given that, though, it's all the more notable that a song like Mom and Dad was written three years before the Kent State Massacre. Mama, Mama! The child was killed in the fun today, Shot by the cops say she wanted to learn By the side of the creep she knew

They killed her too As the same goes, Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. There's a fair bit of confusion about the credits for Worrell and it for the money. The photo for the intended front cover of the album shows a mother's line-up of Zappa, Estrada, Black, Gardner, Mundy. and Preston. The photo intended for the gatefold sleeve shows all of those plus Ian Underwood, and the original credits for the album list all of those plus Motorhead Sherwood,

who appears in the photo intended for the back sleeve but none of the other photos, and who is dressed in male clothing while all the other mothers are wearing dresses. But rather than crediting Preston with keyboards, he is credited as retired. Both Preston and Ray Collins, who was not on the album at all, had quit the band but soon rejoined. Preston was, by all accounts, out for less than a week. He quit the band, flew back to California, discovered his wife was living with another man, and flew straight back to New York and rejoined.

But in that time, the liner notes had been finalised. There's also a question of which of these people actually plays on the album. According to the liner notes for the archival release The Lumpy Money Project Object, most of the album was actually performed just by Zappa, Underwood, Estrada and Mundy, with most of the parts being played by Underwood, and while Black, Gardner, Preston and Motorhead all did contribute, they're barely on it.

That is, of course, possible. But it's also notable that in 1985, Black, Gardner, Preston, Motorhead, Collins, and Future Mother's percussionist Art Trip, all sued Zappa for non-payment of royalties, while none of the musicians named us playing major parts in the album did. Far be it for me to suggest that Gail Zappa would hold a grudge more than 20 years later and belittle the contributions of the musicians who'd sued,

but, while we're only in it for the money, is more listener-friendly than much of the mother's music. It's based for the most part around relatively short, conventionally structured songs, with few of the classical references and avant-garde sections of absolutely free. The music isn't the thing about the album that gets discussed the most. Generally, people focus on the cover, which parodies that of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band. Never want to shy away from controversy.

had had the band members dress up in drag. MGM were initially worried that the parody cover would cause legal problems with the Beatles and insisted that Zappa get permission from the Beatles to do this. Zappa spoke with Paul McCartney, who was a fan, but McCartney told Zappa he left all that stuff to business people and didn't get involved with business stuff. Zappa said after his frustrating conversation with McCarney that McCarty was,

disturbed that I could refer to what we do as a product, but I'm dealing with businessmen who care nothing about music or art or me personally. They want to make money and I relate to them on that level or they'd regard me as just another rock and roll fool. The eventual release had the albums intended in a gatefold, with the band in drag on a yellow background of the same colour as the one on the Pepper Gatefold, as the outside cover, while the parody of the Sergeant Pepper Outer Cover was placed in the gatefold, as a way to avoid legal action. Later CD reissues restore the intended front cover.

Most of the figures on the cover, created by Kalshenkel, A former boyfriend of Esra Mohoek, who was soon dating Miss Sandra of the GTOs and would have a long artistic association with Zappa, had their eyes blacked out in the style of scandal sheets. But while this was an artistic decision, it was also a pragmatic one. Picture rights for celebrities like Lyndon Johnson would be practically impossible to get, and this way they avoided some of the legal problems that kept delaying every mother's release. Rights issues weren't the only things that MGM's legal department had a problem with, though.

Some of the lyrics once again raised objections. deleting so of them was to be expected. There's a passage from the song Mother People that uses various words I also avoid using on my podcast, and with that Zappa agreed to take the passage and play it backwards in the runout groove. Similarly, in the song Harry You're a Beast, there is a section where Zappa references a famous routine by Lenny Bruce,

two is a proposition, commas a verb, in which Bruce riffs on the phrase, and its various meanings for several minutes. But don't come in me, don't come in me, mimmy, don't come in me, mimmy, don't come in me, mimi, don't come in me, mimi, don't come in me, mimi, don't come. I can't come. Because you don't love me, that's why I can't come. The middle section of Harry are a Beast, which again is one which may require a warning for some listeners of this,

listen to the playlist as it deals with sexual assault, had the lyrics, Don't Come In Me, in Me, Don't Come In Me, In Me, in In tribute to Bruce. MGM insisted that that to be reversed, and the result actually sounds better to my ears. But there were other cuts that MGM made to the album was released, at least in some territories, which Zappa wasn't even notified about until after the release, and some of these were frankly absurd. One line that was cut out by MGM legal, Zappa always pointed out as particularly egregious, was in the song Let's Make the Water Turn Black. I'll believe you when I tell you that my song is really true. I want everyone to listen and believe it's about some little people from a long time ago.

And all the things the neighbors didn't know. Early in the morning, Daddy Dinky went to work, selling lamps and chairs to San Bernardino squares and I still remember Mama with her apron and her pad feeding all the boys at its cafe whizzing and pasting and pudding through Did you hear the horrendous offensive line that's MGM insisted be cut? The sick filth in question was that foul, depraved, unspeakable line and I still remember Mama with her apron and her pad

feeding all the boys at Ed's cafe. MGM legal decided that rather than a normal description of a waitress taking orders, the word pad must actually refer to a used satry napkin, which Mama was feeding to all the boys, and deleted it without telling Zapper, who later said that he didn't hear the edited version until he was collecting an award for the album, at which point he said he shouldn't get the award, and it should instead be given to the person who butchered it. Perhaps it's becoming clear at this point that the mothers are invention, the most outrageous and unconventional of the major rock artists of the period,

and MGM, the most conservative of the record labels, were not a great fit for each other. realistically it was not a relationship that was going to last much longer Mike Kerb was in talks to merge MGM records with his own label and MGM Verve would soon become Kerb records Kerb was himself a musician but his group the Mike Kerb congregation are best known for singing backing vocals on Sammy Davis Jr's version of the Candyman and performing It's a Small World for the Disney attraction

Kerb would go on to sign the Christian rock artist Larry Norman drop any artist from Kerb records that he thought were promoting drugs, and become a Republican politician. As of this writing, he is the last Republican to be elected Lieutenant Governor of California. While that was going on, Zappa was working in the background on the MGM version of Lumpy Gravy. That would become a very different beast to the version that had been semi-released on Capitol. While the Capital version had been purely orchestral, Zappa's new conception of the album changed it dramatically. The orchestral music itself was all the same as it had been. But instead of being several distinct orchestral tracks, the album was split into

two side-long movements, and the orchestral music was interspersed with dialogue, with various people who were around at the time, members of the mothers, Gail Zapper, studio personnel and others, all putting their heads inside a grand piano so their voices would make the strings resonate, and improvising dialogue about concepts that Zappa told them to talk about. Zappa then edited this, the orchestral music and various bits of older music, a 1963 demo of the song that became Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance on Warholing It for the Money and a bit of a surf track that he recorded around the same time

which he also included on Warhol and In It for the Money into a collage. She went out and then tore up the engine and the trans and her and her and her girlfriends get in there and booze it up and tear up the seats. Just ripped the seats completely out. So, uh, I got a 56 old, which was this one chick that was going with.

And we used to drive that all the place and ponny she got rid of that. And I got another pickup. Lumpy Gravy was still released as a Frank Zappa album, while Barone for the Money was by the Mothers of Invention. But the two albums were promoted as connected. On the cover of Waroni In It for the Money, there's a speech bubble by Zapper's photo saying, is this phase one of Lumpy Gravy,

while the cover of Lumpy Gravy has him asking, is this phase two of whirl in it for the money? And the one-two punch of those albums established Zappa as a major creative force in rock music. Incidentally, Zappa's credit on the MGM version of Lumpy Gravy originally read Francis Vincent Zappa. Zappa believed that was his birth name because his dad had been Francis Zappa.

He says in his autobiography, up until the time I had to get a passport for the first European tour, I thought my name was Francis, a name I had always hated. In order to get the passport, I had to present my birth certificate, a mysterious document I had never seen before. My mother mailed it to me from California and on it,

much to my delight, was a name other than Francis. Well, it wasn't that good. Frank isn't much of a bargain, but I had thought for years, even thinking it on album covers, that I was Francis Vincent Zappa Jr. How could I be such a fool? This version of the story doesn't actually make chronological sense.

Zappa released the MGM version of lumpy gravy months after his first trip abroad. But Zappa did later update the cover to read Frank Vincent Zappa instead of Francis. That first European tour was undertaken right after Zappa and Gail got married, using a ballpoint pen as a substitute for a wedding ring. The Zappa's first child was born two weeks after the start of the tour, with Zappa telling his wife, if it's a girl name her Moon Unit, if it's a boy name him Motorhead. The girl was indeed named Moon Unit, with the unit part of her name apparently meant to signify that they were now a family unit. That tour is most famous for their performance at the

Royal Albert Hall, where Don Preston climbed the Hall's gigantic organ and played Louis-Louis on it, commemorated on one of their next albums. Let's hurry again for the London film our money for this. I say one of their next albums, because when they got back to the US, the mothers started work on two albums at the same time, and once again it was with a slightly different band lineup. Billy Mundy had left to join a supergroup, rhinoceros that had been put together in part by Frasian Mohawk, Esra Mohawk's husband, and featured members of Iron Butterfly, the Daily Flash, and the Electric Flag. Rhinoceros were not a success, though their track Apricot Brandy was used for a while as a theme

tune on Radio One. Mundy was replaced by Art Tripp, a classically trained percussionist who had given solo performances of works by Cage and Stockhausen. Along with Tripp, Ray Collins returned to the band, in part because the next album to come out, one of the two they were working on at the same time, was far more to Collins's taste. Cruising with Ruben and the Jets is an album of do-what pastiches recorded in the persona of the band Ruben and the Jets. Though, contrary to some myths about the album, they weren't exactly subtle about letting people know who it really was. Carl Schenkel's cover for the album,

a drawing depicting the band members as anthropomorphic animals in 50s clothing and hairstyles, inspired by the Donald Duck comics of Carl Barks, has another speech bubble, this one saying, Is this the Mothers of Invention Recording under a different name

in a last ditch attempt to get their cruddy music on the radio? So despite the various stories, including a pervasive myth that DJs played the album until they realised who it actually was, they were definitely given more than a hint. incidentally if you want to buy the album Cruising with Rubin and the Jets as it was actually released in the 1960s

you should not buy the current issue of cruising with Rubin and the Jets but should instead buy an album called Greasy Love Songs In the 1980s Zepa released remixed and partially re-recorded versions of War Only in It for the Money and Rubin in the Jets with the bass and drums replaced with some fairly ghastly 80s-s-s-s sounding ones by members of his 80s band The current CD of We're Only in It for the Money is, thankfully, the original 60s mix. Ruben and the Jets, however, is the 80s remix and re-record and sounds bizarre.

Very few fans actually prefer the revised version, and for decades they complained vociferously about the unavailability of the original version. Finally, in 2010, Zappa Records released the third in their Project-Series of archival versions of early Zappa and Mother's albums. Lumpy Money had covered We're Only in It for the Money and Lumpur. bumpy gravy. Mofo had covered freak out, and greasy love songs featured the full original mix of Rubin and the Jets, along with other things like single mixes, early mixes and so on. Cruising with Rubin and the Jets is unique in the discography of Zappa and the Mothers for how many

songs on it have songwriting contributions by people who aren't Zappa. Almost all of Zappa's studio albums, both under his own name and under the mother's name, consist entirely of solo Zappa compositions. Very occasionally there would be the odd song where a band member co-wrote, like George Duke co-writing Uncle Remus on apostrophe, or Howard Kalan co-writing Magdalena on just another band from LA. But these would be few and far between. There would also very occasionally be a cover version of an old blues or doo-wop song. But the total songwriting credits for people who aren't Zappa probably amount to 1% of the total. On Rubin and the Jets, though, Ray Collins in particular gets to write several songs, two of them

even without Zapper. Desiree, which we just heard, had been written by Collins and Paul Buff back in the Palin Studio Z days, and the two had recorded a version of it back then. Collins also co-wrote two songs, Love of My Life and Fountain of Love, with Zappa. And wrote one song, Anything, entirely solo. The rest of the album was entirely Zapper compositions, a mixture of du-op-style remakes of songs from Freak Out, and tracks which, unlike Collins' contributions,

make no pretence of having the kind of lyrics that would actually have made a doo-wop record in the late 50s. Zappa explained his thinking behind the album in 1979, saying, I'll tell you there's a very scientific reason for the existence of Ruben and the Jett. The closest relationship between that album as an artistic event and another event from a different field that you can compare it to would be the point in Stravinsky's career in which he decided he was going to write neo-classical music. He started doing stuff like Pulcinella, writing music in his day and age, but using forms that were thoroughly out of style

and frowned upon by the academic establishment. You have to remember that the American people don't have much going for them in the way of taste. I mean, taste is something that's inflicted on the American public by other outside forces. So if somebody tells you that something is cool, well, you'll think it's cool and you'll go out and buy it. To make an album like cruising with Rubin and the Jets

at that time in history in 68 was very unfashionable. And everybody went, Oh, I can't own that, it's not cool, it's not acid rock, it's not fuss tone, it's not psychedelic, who needs this? I didn't do it just to be arbitrary, I like that kind of music and I wanted to have some examples of that style in my total catalogue output. There are Stravinsky references on the record itself too. Like at the end of Fountain of Love, you can hear the opening notes of Right of Spring. While there was an artistic reason for the creation of the Rubin and the Jets album, there was also a very pragmatic one.

Ruben and the Jets was a very quick album to record, and Zappa wanted to get something to MGM quickly to complete his contractual obligations to the label. Lawyers at MGM had forgotten to send out the required forms to pick up on the group's option in March 1968, and Zappa wanted to take advantage of that to free himself from the contract and start his own label. Knowing that he still owed MGM two more albums on the existing contract, though, he delivered them Ruben and the Jets, and a compilation titled Mother Mania. Stravinsky comparisons may all be very well, and Ruben and the Jets is a worthy addition to Zappa's canon,

and one I think anyone who enjoyed my early episodes on Do Whop and Vocal Group R&B would enjoy. But Zappa wanted his next major work to be one that wouldn't be subject to the kind of nonsense that he'd been dealing with from his old label. MGM were not people he could work with. Herb Cohen, Zapper's manager, helped Zappa co-found a new label, actually a pair of labels named Bizarre and Straight, though they usually refer to as the compound Bizarre Strait these days. Those two labels would be distributed by Repre's records,

a subsidiary of Warners that have been founded by Frank Sinatra for himself and his Rat Pack friends, and their children like Nancy Sinatra and Dino, Desi and Billy, but which by 1968 had pivoted to rock acts like Neil Young and Jimmy Hendricks. because reprees had been started by an artist to put out work by his own close friends and family the label had a much fairer attitude towards things like artists owning their own catalogue

than other major labels and it would soon be the distribution partner of choice for many artists who wanted to put things out through their own labels bizarre straits as we heard in the episode on the GTOs would put out a whole range of artists some of them truly excellent between the two labels they put out music by

Jerry Yester and Judy Hensky Captain Beefheartened Devil Prunes To stop and to start Her Nance made up of the Skyny's edge wine Neither

Noor Time of Day Hell Billis Arthur I cannot go back To your frown Lab

Beers made up of the ocean And the sky And the sun In the moon Alice Cooper Tim Buckley And it's a happy time

When a melody does fine around Says to me I'm coming home to stay And they put out the debut album by Ezra Mo Hawke Still under her maiden name Sandy's album is here at last produced by Ian and many more. But in particular, they were put out recordings by the Mothers of Invention and Frank Zappa solo projects. The first of these was a double album titled Uncle Meat, which was created as the soundtrack for what was planned to be a film starring the mothers,

for which a few sequences were shot around this time, but which wasn't actually finished until 1987, when Zapper created a new framing sequence around the unfinished footage and released it on VHS. It's never had a DVD release, though you can find it on YouTube if you really want to. Much of the footage for that film was documentary footage by a man named Ed Seaman, who had first started working with Zappa when Zappa had branched out into advertising. Zappa had created a soundtrack for an animated commercial for Ludens' cough drops, which Seaman had directed. That actually got an award for the best music in a commercial,

and for a short while it looked like Zappa might have a lucrative career in advertising music. He dropped the idea, though, after the rejection of another ad he was asked to make, this one for Remington Mazers. cleans and cleans you clean your hair, may even keep you from getting busted. The vocal on that, incidentally, is back you, incidentally, is banged you a closer shake, cleans you, may even keep you from getting busted. The vocal on that, incidentally, is by another of Herb Cohen's artists, Linda Ronstat. While Uncle Meat the film wasn't to be finished for nearly 20 years, Uncle Meat the album stood alone as one of the mother's best albums.

Uncle Meet was the last of what one might think of as the mother's New York period, the period of time where they had long residencies at the Garrick Theatre and recorded in Apostolic Studios. And while the four albums worked on in that time period, lumpy gravy, were only in it for the money, cruising with Rubin and the Jets, and Uncle Meat, of all very different in style. Zappa always claimed to have conceived of them all as part of the same work, saying later, it's all one album.

All the material in the albums is organically related, and if I had all the master tapes and I could take a razor blade and cut them apart and put it together again in a different order, it still would make one piece of music you can listen to. Then I could take that razor blade and cut it apart and reassemble it a different way, and it still would make sense. I could do this 20 ways. The material is definitely related.

Some of these relations are not in the actual compositions but in the packaging, and in some cases just in the minds of Zappa and the people he was working with. For example, part of the story of the unfinished Uncle Meat film was meant to be about a mad scientist turning a teenage band into people with dogs nought. But when Kalshchenkel drew an illustration of this, that illustration became the cover of cruising with Rubin and the Jets. Where Lumpy Gravy had been orchestral compositions and tape-manipulated speech, were only in it for the money sing-along ditties and biting satire,

and Ruben and the Jets do what pastiche, most of Uncle Meat was what we would now think of as jazz rock. Not all of it was. There were live excerpts like the recording of Louis Louis at the Albert Hall we heard earlier. And there were also spoken word sections, including recordings that Zappa had made of the band members complaining about how little money they were making. If we'd all been living in California, it would have been different.

If it all been living in California, it wouldn't work at all. That's true. Well, we're not working now anyway. We're worked one gig this month, Frank. What's wrong with getting two months in a row of this good money? Or three months in a row. Then we can afford to take three or four months off, and everybody can...

After the first month, I can get just enough ahead. But if I had two more months, man, I'll get ahead. Because I'm not living very extravagantly. But huge chunks of the album were made up of the mothers playing instrumental music. Large parts of this were actually originally written for Run Home Slow and The World's Greatest Sinner, the films that Zappa had scored years earlier. Zappa took these pieces written for a small orchestra, and, after cutting basic rhythm tracks with the core group of the mothers,

got Ian Underwood and Bunk Gardner to spend days overdubbing parts, using apostolic's then-cutting-edge 12-track recorder. He explained, what we tried to do was play all the individual lines in this orchestral score. We had two wind players who could read, that was Ian and Bunk. And so they would be playing these parts two at a time, and we'd be stacking them and bouncing them together. And then we added the percussion and the woodwind and the other stuff. It took days just to do a few seconds of music that way. But it was an experiment that needed to be done. Zappa explained in the liner notes to the CD reissue of the album.

The weird middle section of Dog Breath, after the line ready to attack, has 40 tracks built into it. Things that sound like trumpets are actually clarinets played through an electric device made by Maestro with a setting labelled obo dom ore and sped up a minor third with a VSO, variable speed oscillator. Other peculiar sounds were made on a Kalamazoo electric organ. The only equipment at our disposal for the modification of these primary sounds was a pair of Pultec filters, two Lang Equalisers and three Melcore compressors built into the mixing console.

The board itself is exceptionally quiet and efficient, the only thing that allowed us to pile up so many tracks, and is the product of Mr. Lou Lindauer's imagination and workmanship. Uncle Meat is a particularly interesting album for those interested in Zappa as a composer, because it's the first mother's album to be largely instrumental, and to see him making use of an augmented rock group to play the instrument. textures that would become signatures of his work. Zappa's music had several characteristics that make it very distinct. One is his use of odd meters.

He liked five, sevens and even thirteens, rather than the normal three, four or six beats to the bar of most rock music. He also had unusual tastes in instrumental timbre. He liked woodwinds, particularly bassoon, and saxophones which honked and scrunked rather than playing more melodiously. And he liked tuned percussion. Most of his albums thus heavily feature instruments like vibraphone or marimba, which are unusual in rock music. He was also, surprisingly for someone who has often talked about as an

atonal or dissonant composer, though he was only rarely either in actuality, very focused on melody to the exclusion of harmony or counterpoint. Often he would have multiple different instruments with different timvers playing the same melody, either in unison or harmonised at a nod interval like a fourth, rather than the normal third or fifth, and with minimal harmonic support, as in the start of the piece on Uncle Meat that would become its best known, the jazz piece King Kong, which had first heard early on as a prelude. There usually are chords under the melody, but in different performances and arrangements of the pieces,

the chords could change wildly, but the statement of the melody never would. This is closer to the way modal jazz and Indian classical music would base pieces around a scale or set of intervals, as we talked about back in the episode on 8 miles high, then it is to the normal pop song, where customarily the chords and melody are closely entwined and moved together. With King Kong, for example,

after hearing the abrasive prelude version we just heard, we later get a much smoother studio version with much more sense of a harmonic underpinning. There are several reasons that Zappa wrote this way. Part of it, of course, is that he simply liked that kind of music. But there may be other reasons too. For example, he often talked about how he had never actually learned to play rhythm guitar. While most rock guitarists start with strumming a few chords

and only later play melodies, he had started out playing blues solos and didn't learn chords until much later. And the chords he did use were chosen for the melodic freedom they allowed. He often used suspended chords, as he did in King Kong. Explain to Paul Zollo in the late 80s that, I started writing my own music in which the thirds were omitted from the chords. That seemed to give me more latitude with the melody, because if there's no third in the chord,

then you're not locked into an exact statement that your harmonic climate is major or minor. If you have a root a fourth and a fifth, or a root a second and a fifth, your ability to create atmosphere and imply harmony by having a variety of bass notes that will argue with the suspended chord, gives you, for my taste, more opportunities. Then the melody line can go back and forth between major or minor and Lydian or whatever else you want with ease. You have more flexibility. There is also, oddly, another comparison that comes to mind with some of Zappa's work, one that's far from the free jazz and classical references that

usually get talked about when people make comparisons. A composer who trained with Darius Miho, one of the most important 20th century modernist composers, who wrote metrically a regular melody lines with the same kind of unusual intervals that Zappa used, and who wrote those melody lines first and only harmonized them, often with surprising unexpected chords, after completing the melody. Bacharack might not be the composer you think of first when you think of Zappa. But when Zolo asked Zappa in that same interview about songs by anyone else at all he liked, he said that he liked subterranean homesick blues, paperback writer and I Am the Walrus, but no other Dylan or Beatles songs,

and Louis Louis. That he preferred the stones to the Beatles, quite liked them with Van Morrison, but that the other thing that I really enjoyed were the early compositions of David and Bacarack. I thought that they were so good because prior to that time there had been little of bi-turnal or polyturnal harmonic implication in American pop music, and we are to thank them for providing that through those early Dionne Warwick recordings. For someone like Zappa, who rarely praised another artist in general, rather than praising a specific piece of work by them, that's high praise indeed. And while this isn't the place for it and I don't have the skill to do it anyway,

I think there is probably a whole musical logical thesis to be written on the similarities between Zappa and Bacca Rack as composers. But these characteristics, the music based on melody rather than chords, the odd rhythms, the instruments in unison, the tuned percussion, the use of suspended chords where chords are used at all, are all there from the very opening of Uncle Meat, just titled Uncle Meat, main title theme. As with the previous two mothers albums, the version of Uncle Me that was released on CD in the 80s is significantly different from the original album. In this case, though, the original recordings haven't been tampered

with. But at the start of the second CD, before what was side four of the vinyl, Zappa included 42 minutes of dialogue excerpts from the film, and an entirely unrelated song, Tengo Namingia Tanta, recorded in the 80s. If you want to hear the album as originally released, you have to either skip the first three tracks of disc two of the current release, or get hold of a copy of Meat Light, the Uncle Meat Project Object Audio documentary, a three-disc set which includes the original release mix in full, as well as a longer vintage alternate sequencing of the album and various outtakes and live versions of songs. Now Zappa owned his own label, he started consciously to move away from the political material that characterised a lot of his earlier work. Writing in the liner notes to Uncle

Meat, the words to the songs on this album were scientifically prepared from a random series of syllables, dreams, neuroses and private jokes that nobody except the members of the band ever laugh at, and other irrelevant material. They're all very serious and loaded with secret underground candy rock psychedelic profundities. Lyrically, songs like Mr. Green Jeans or Dog Breath in the Year of the plague are a far cry from the kind of social commentary that Zappa was known for. You'll look in vain for any defiance of encroaching fascism, instead getting something closer to the more jokey parts of absolutely free. Seemingly, Zappa had been freaked out,

if you'll pardon the expression, on travelling to Europe and realising that he and the mothers were being greeted as avatars of some coming revolution. On some of their European tours, students had tried to get the group to organise revolutionary uprisings. And on the later mother's album, Burt Weeny Sandwich, you can hear Zappa arguing with an audience member in London, who was complaining about the presence of uniform security guards. Everybody in this room is wearing a uniform and don't kid yourself. You'll hurt your throat, stop it! Maybe more to the point, and barely mentioned in discussions of this change in Zapper's lyrical priorities, is the split from Tom Wilson, who had produced the first two mother's albums,

and who appeared on the cover of We're Only In It for the Money. Verven Wilson had parted ways at the end of 1967, with Wilson going on to form his own production company, Rasputin Productions. Despite Wilson's previous stellar track record, he produced almost nothing of note after the split with MGM, and it's likely that the only recording anyone listening to this will have heard from the rest of Wilson's life, before his untimely death in September 1978, is Don't Bogart Me by the Fraternity of Man, which we heard earlier. The Bogart that joint, my friend, plass it over to me.

Don't Bogart that joint, my friend, class it over to me. The fraternity of man not only, featured Elliot Inber, but three members of The Factory, the band Zapper had produced a few months earlier, Richie Haywood, Warren Klein and Martin Kibby. And their various Zapper connections meant that they got to record a Zappa song before the mothers released their version. Oh No, titled on the Fraternity of Man's album, Oh No, I Don't Believe it, is a theme that had first been heard on Lumpy Gravy. Zappa said around the time of Uncle Meek's release, I feel bad about the words sometimes,

I enjoy writing the music more. Unfortunately, the last, the last, level on which an artist communicates with the audience is still pretty much limited to the verbal. Instrumental music is a coming thing in pop, but for years if you didn't sing a song you didn't make a record. I'm forced to write words to put on a piece of music in order to make it accessible for an audience. I'm not going to deny anything I've said in my songs, but my main interest is in composing music. If I wanted to be a lyricist, I'd write books. Because of the corporate problems getting out of the MGM contract, and the sheer amount of music Zapper and the mothers were creating,

Uncle Meat was not released until April 1969, even though the material on it was mostly recorded by February 1968. Nobody was waiting around for it, though. We're only in it for the money, lumpy gravy, cruising with Rubin and the Jets, and Mother Mania, The Best of the Mothers, were all released in the time between the completion of the studio elements of the album and its release. Recording also continued after the end of the studio sessions. Parts of the album were recorded during the group's live shows between March and July,

including performances in LA, Copenhagen and Miami. Delays like this would become very common for projects that Zappa was involved in, as with the mingling of live and studio elements on the same album, something that started with Uncle Meat but would soon become Zappa's standard operating procedure. Sometimes this would be a way to amortise the cost of performances. Touring was becoming more expensive as the mothers were becoming a larger band, and some of the shows would be even more expensive. Zappa hoped, for example, to release a live recording of the mother's show at the Royal Festival,

Hall in London in October 1968, because that performance included orchestral musicians from the BBC Philharmonic, and a record would be the only way to make the show turn a profit. However, the recording quality was very poor, and while parts of it were used for the Uncle Meat film, itself not released until nearly 20 years later, the eventual album, ahead of their time, didn't get released until 1993. Another planned live recording, made in mid-1969 at the Ark in Boston, was recorded on good multi-tracks, but then the masters of the planned album were stolen from Zappa and it was bootlegged, much to his anger. Later, in the late 80s, he would release a series of recordings titled Beat the Boots, in which he literally bootlegged the bootleggers, putting the records they

released out in identical packaging without even listening to them to make sure that they were what they said they were, on the basis that if there was a market for them, it might as well be him making the money rather than thieves, and that the buyer beware. As a result, that recording did eventually get an official release, as the Ark, in the first Beat the Boots set. Uncle Mead would be the last album released by the original Mothers of Invention while the group were together, though two more albums would come out after they split, again because of the huge backlog of material they were recording. It also continued the tradition of having credits that didn't match the personnel on the album. In this case, it credited Lowell George, the former

guitarist from the factory, who joined the group in November 1968 as the latest rhythm guitarist, though really he was primarily hired as a vocalist, because with Ray Collins once again having left the band, they had nobody to take the lead vocals other than Zappa, who didn't think of himself yet as a lead singer. George wasn't in the band for very long. He'd left by the time of that 1969 show we just heard. But he did contribute a small amount of guitar to the two following mother's recordings. He also co-produced an album on bizarre records for the groupie collective of the GTOs, with Zappa and Russ Titleman, and co-wrote some songs on it. Different stories have been told about why Lowell George left the Mothers of Invention only a few months after joining. He would later say,

the band at that time was very much like the Lawrence Welk of rock and roll. Frank wrote all the charts, everything was very prescribed. There was no room at all for any emotion. The band felt very hurt and ripped off because Frank was living in a hundred thousand dollar house in Beverly Hills. and they were all still down in the valley. Frank would write piece after piece after piece and they would all have to play it exact. They were hurt by the fact that he was making more money, but more than that they became more alienated

by the fact that he would overwork and become totally inhuman. Knowing what we know about George's career though, it actually seems more likely that his departure from the band was, as other sources have claimed, due to his drug use. Cannabis use was something that Zappa frowned upon in his musicians, partly because it made them sloppy players in rehearsals, but also because he believed himself, with some justification, to be under surveillance and didn't want to get busted. George was a regular user, and some sources say he left the band because of his use,

while others have said it was specifically because he wrote a song about it. I've been from Tucson to Tucum Carried, a hatchet made a ton of bar, driven every kind of rig that's ever been me, driven the backwards so I won't get weed, and if you give me wheat, White and wine And then you show me a sign I'll be willing

Maybe both were true to different extents But either way, George was out of the band Within a few months Despite this, he remained on good enough terms with Zapper that his new band, Little Feet, named after a joke that Jimmy Carl Black had made about George's shoes and soon to feature Vistrida on bass

At one point looked likely to sign to Bizarre straight Though they ended up going elsewhere. No albums actually featuring George came out while he was in the band but he has featured on a few that came out later. He's most audible as the German guard on Did You Get Any On You? The opening track on Weasels Wip My Flesh.

Years ago in Germany, even I was a very small boy. There was a lot of people standing around on the corner asking questions, why are you standing down the corner, acting to where you act, looking like you look, why did you look that way?

Because I asked me, and I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I'm going to do. But the mothers would split up shortly after George left the band, and the event that precipitated that split was one of the first gigs the group played after his departure. The show that started it was, by all accounts, a great one. The mothers were booked to play at the Boston Globe Jazz Festival,

a festival organised by George Ween, who also organised the Newport Jazz and Folk Festivals, as we've heard in previous episodes. On the same bill as the mothers was Rassan Roland Kirk, the great jazz sax and flute player. Zappa was a great admirer of Kirk and invited him to join the mothers on stage for their set. Musically, this turned out to be a great decision. The mothers had enough jazz experience among their horn and keyboard players

that they were able to play comfortably with Kirk. Some thought of their performance together as the highlight of the festival, with Downbeat's reviewer saying, All stops were out, Kirk wailed, the mothers dug it and responded with uncanny support, Kirk sounding as raspy and earthy as he ever has, Zappa instantly picking up on Kirk's concepts and playing telepathic guitar counterpoint. The audience was close to berserk.

Ween had to close the curtains, turn up their houselights and beg them to leave, which they ultimately, happy sadly, did. And... That particular set is lost forever, but Kirk and Zappa are crazy if they don't make a record together. Crazy they may have been, but they never recorded together. They did, though, go on a package tour together organised by Ween. Kirk, the mothers, vibraphone player Gary Burton and Duke Ellington. Newport-on-Tor's style bills like this have been done before, of course.

We heard about them when talking about Joe Boyd's early career. But this was hoped to be more successful because the mothers would bring in the youth audience. Frank Zappa, though, saw something on that tour which directly led to the end of the original mothers of invention. Remembering it decades later, according to the author Neil Slavin, Zappa still sounded angry. By this point, all of the mothers were on a salad. and got paid whether they worked or not by Zappa and Herb Cohen's bizarre productions. The mothers at this point in time were Zappa, Jimmy Carl Black, Roy Estrada, Bunk Gardner,

Gardner's brother Buzz on trumpet, Motorhead Sherwood, Don Preston, Art Tripp and Ian Underwood, a nine-piece band. And it had often recently been ten pieces, with either Ray Collins or Lowell George. And all of those musicians were on salaries. Zappa was losing money. And for a while he'd been telling himself that it was going to get better. but then he toured with Duke Ellington. Ellington, for those who were unaware, was probably the single greatest jazz composer of the 20th century. He'd led the greatest big band in the world for more than 40 years,

and he was still artistically vital enough that just a year before he'd recorded what many consider the best album of his career, an album of compositions by his late collaborator and right-hand man, Billy Strayhorn, recorded in tribute entitled, And his mother called him Bill. Ellington was a big name, and he was a true great. but to quote from Zappers' autobiography, before we went on, I saw Duke Callington begging,

pleading for a $10 advance. It was really depressing. After that show I told the guys, that's it, we're breaking the band up. We've been together in one configuration or another for about five years at that point, and suddenly everything looked utterly hopeless to me. If Jew Callington had to beg some George Ween assistant

backstage for ten bucks, what the... And here he uses a word I can't use and keep my clean rating. Was I doing with a ten-piece band, trying to play rock and roll, or something that was almost rock and roll. You can understand his frustration. Frank Zappa was someone who had three incompatible aims he would try to balance for the rest of his life. Rather than go into a recording studio, he always preferred to perform live if he could, because he found studios sterile.

The second aim was that he wanted to have his music played exactly as he wrote it, which required a large band, or indeed on occasion, a full symphony orchestra. And along with both of those, he also wanted to make money, ideally a large amount of money. Logically though, he could have any two of those three but not all three at the same time. Sometimes he could perform live and make a lot of money by having a slim down band.

Or he could have a large band perform his music exactly how he wanted and make money from it by having them just make a record and not perform live. Or he could perform his music accurately live with a large band and lose money hand over fist. At different times in his career, Zappa would choose different combinations of these options and would remain unsatisfied with all of them.

But in 1969, he chose to retreat to the studio. There were two more mother's albums to come out in the next year or so after the group split up. Burned Weenie Sandwich is named after one of Zappa's favourite snacks, but the name also refers to the way the music is sandwiched. The opening and closing tracks are both cover versions of old doo-wop songs. WPLJ was originally recorded by the Four Deuces in 1956. White porcelain, white lemon juice, white for a lemon juice, while Valerie was originally by the starlight's from 1960.

Both tracks are performed by the mothers in a slightly more shambolic fashion than the pastiche on Rubin and the Jet, allowing for a little more discord than the smooth greasiness of the earlier album. Even though the rest of the album was instrumental music, those weren't the only looks back to Zappa's formative R&B influencers. Johnny Otis, who had inspired Zappa so much that Zappa's trademark beard and mustache were copies of Otisers, had got involved in the sessions for what became burnt weenie sandwich, which mostly happened directly before the group split.

Otis actually conducted the mothers, while Zappa was in the control room, when they recorded Overture to a holiday in Berlin, a piece of music that had its origins in Zappa's score for the world's greatest sinner. While Otis was working with Zappa, Zappa asked him what had happened to Don Sugarcane Harris of Don and Dewey, the great R&B duo that had inspired the righteous brothers and who Otis had worked with. Otis told Zappa that Harris was in prison at the time, and Zappa bailed him out so that Harris could add electric blues violin to a little house that I used to live in. Sugar Kane Harris would also appear on the final album by this

line-up of the Mothers of Invention, another record compiled from various sources, this one titled Weasles Rip My Flesh. On that, Harris was again playing electric violin, but also sang lead on a cover of Directly From My Heart to You, a little Richard song whose original version had been produced by Otis. Getting to play with Zappa reinvigorated Harris's career, and he would shortly afterwards go on to play violin and sing on Otis's album Coldshot, which also featured Otis's son Shuggy. Later, he would join John Mayol's latest band.

Playing violin but not singing, he appeared on USA Union. with guitarist Harvey Mandel from Canned Heat, and bass player Larry Taylor, who had also been in Canned Heat, as well as playing bass on several of the Monkees' hits. Remarkably, given Mayol's frequent turnover of band members, Harris would play on all Mayol's studio albums through 1976. Mayol was at this time a good friend of Zappa and had stayed in his house for a while the previous year, writing a song about it on his blues from Laurel Canyon album, where he named Check the GTO's, Pauline Butcher, Miss Christine, and Zappa's daughter Moon. Sugarcane Harris would also go on to record a whole series of albums as a bandleader himself,

which straddled the line between blues, jazz and rock. But before all these mothers' projects were released, though after they were recorded, Harris was involved in the album Zapper Made after he decided to retreat to the studio. Hot Rats, the second album released under Zappa's name rather than by the mothers, is, like burnt weenie sandwich and weasels ripped my flesh, largely instrumental. But where those had been the world, of a band, largely performing live. Hot Rats was the product of endless overdubbing. There was a fairly consistent rhythm section on the album. Other than the opening track,

Peaches and Regalia, which featured Shuggy Otis on bass and Otis's drummer Ron Selico, all the bass was played by the jazz session player Max Bennett, and the drums by the John Gwaring, who would go on to play with Bennett in LA Express and Joni Mitchell's band, or Paul Humphrey, who played for everyone from Jerry Garcia to Lawrence Welk. And these basic rhythm tracks were mostly completed in a couple of sessions right before the mother's last tour. Other than some violin parts from Harris on two tracks, and from the French jazz violinist Jean-Luc Ponte on one other, all the other instrumentation was by either Zappa or Underwood. Indeed, if you were to credit the album to its primary performer, as is normal in rock music, rather than to

its composer and bandleader, as happens in the jazz and classical worlds, Hot Rats would probably be regarded as an Ian Underwood album. Nowadays, Zapper is regarded as one of the good. great rock guitarist of all time. But as we've seen in the earlier part of this episode, in the 60s he didn't regard himself as particularly impressive as an instrumentalist, and nor did the people he played with. Guitar solos then were a comparative rarity in Zappa's 60s output, and while there are a handful on Hot Rats, for the most part the music is Ian Underwood multi-tracked on keyboards and read instruments. When asked later by the writer Neil Slavin, if there had been much opportunity to jam on the album, Zappa explained, I don't like playing in

the studio, I hate it. The real reason for Hot Rats was to do the overdubbing, because I don't think there have been anything outside the early experiments of Les Paul where there was that much overdubage applied to a piece of tape. We were using a primitive, maybe even a prototype, 16-track recorder for that, so it was the first time we could really pile on tracks. I think that that album is more about overdubbing than it is about anything else. Recording like this meant that Zappa could create something that was remarkably slick, and which sounded like the work of a full big band, fuller even than the line-up of the mothers that had just split up, with just a handful of musicians.

There is only one track with vocals on Hot Rats, Willie the Pimp. Singing lead vocals wasn't something that Zappa felt comfortable doing to any great extent yet, any more than he felt comfortable highlighting his guitar playing, and he was also not ever particularly interested in writing lyrics. Lyrics were, to his mind, at best, a necessary evil, something that was demanded by unsophisticated audiences before they would pay any attention to what the musicians were doing. So for the one vocal track on the album,

Zappa wrote some relatively perfunctory lyrics inspired by a story told him by a couple of groupies and got in his old friend and rival Captain Beefheart, who he had recently signed to bizarre straight records to sing the vocals. Willie the Pimp was unusual for the album in various ways. Most of the record could best be described as jazz rock, but Willie the Pimp is blues rock, and was covered soon after its release by the moderately successful British blues rock band

Juicy. And it also has one of the comparatively rare 60s guitar solos by Zappa on it. That solo is much more straightforward than Zappa's later guitar playing, and contains few of the hallmarks that would define it. There's little rhythmic complexity, and in most ways it's a perfectly standard blues rock solo. But a good one, and one that has often made lists. of the greatest guitar solas of all time. But Willie the Pimp was made primarily by Beefheart's vocals,

and thanks to the release of the massive Hot Rats Sessions box set a few years ago, you can now hear his isolated vocals, and hear that they were double-tracked, a rarity for Beefheart who was rarely able to sing the same song the same way twice. Man in a suit with a bow-tieckin'allie chick, and on the porch of the leader hotel, flusies in the lobby love the way I sell. Hot meat?

Hot rats, hot cats, hot rits, hot ruts, hot ruts, hot suss, hot suits, hot sys. And that box set also allows us to follow the evolution of the album's most famous track, Peaches Emigalia, which became something of a signature tune for Zappa, and also became a minor jazz standard in the decades after its release. You can hear it developed from a piano demo, through a discarded prototype version, Through the rhythm track with Shuggy Otis on bass, Ron Salico and drums, and Underwood on piano, to the final mix with many layers of overdubbed keyboards and woodwind by Underwood and some extra percussion by Zappa.

Well, I call that the final mix, and it's the version that was released on the original vinyl, and which you'll hear if you buy the album on CD or digitally these days, but this is another of those albums which Zappa remixed in the 80s, though this time there was no re-recording involved. But Zappa had always been somewhat dissatisfied with the original mix of the album, It was recorded on one of the first 16-track machines in the US, and it was state-of-the-art technology at the time, but because of that there had to be various compromises made in the mixing stage.

Elements that were recorded but got left out of the mix due to technical issues. Zappa's 1987 mix of the album, which for about 20 years was the default CD version, but which is now only available as part of the Hot Rats Sessions box set, restores a lot of those elements, making for a very different listening experience. Much of the reaction to the album in the US was muted, with Robert Crisgau, for example, comparing it unfavourably to George Harrison's music for Wonderwall. Though Lester Bangs, who had been somewhat unimpressed with the recent mother's albums,

wrote a rave review, saying, The new Zapper has dumped both his Frankensteinian classicism and his Pachuco rock, he's into the new jazz heavily, same as Beefheart, and applying all his technical savvy until the music sounds a far and purposely ragged cry from the self-indulgence of the current crop of young white John Colch reigns. Ian Underwood's readwork, in particular, is far more advanced than anything he did with the mothers. The album's instrumental highlight comes on the gumbo variations, spotlighting the wildest most advanced piece of free-form electric violin playing I've ever heard,

who is Sugarcane Harris, a slithery performance that sings with the rusty purity that only the most corrosive music can muster. And the album was a big commercial success outside the US, going top ten in several countries, including the UK, and being one of a small number of Zappa's albums to consistently make best albums of all time lists. It also became probably Zappa's single most influential album, being one of the recordings most responsible for the birth of the fusion genre.

It's also got one of the most distinctive covers of any of Zappas albums, with the recoloured photo of Miss Christine of the GTO's poking just her eyes and hands over the edge of a pool, being instantly recognisable. Six weeks after the end of recording for Hot Rats, and just a few days before the album came out, Zappa and Underwood were back in the studio with Jean-Luc Ponte, the violin player who had performed on the last track to be recorded for the album, it must be a camel, making another jazz rock instrumental album. King Kong, Jean-Luc Ponte plays the music of Frank Zappa, consisted of one composition by Ponte, three re-recordings of old mother's tunes, including the title track from Uncle Meat, and two new pieces by Zappa.

20 small cigars, which Zappa would record himself a few months later for his next solo album, Chunga's Revenge, and the 20-minute music for electric violin and low-budget orchestra. Zappa would not record a version of that himself for many years, at which point it would be revised and retitled, appropriately enough, revised music for guitar and low-budget orchestra. Like Hot Rats, Ponte's album also gave Zappa a chance to shine on the guitar, though oddly the only track on which he plays is the lone Ponte original, How would you like to have a head like that?

Recording for King Kong was much less intense than for Hot Rats and only took a couple of days, because while Hot Rats had been an experiment in overdubbing by a small number of musicians, King Kong was much more straightforward, being made the old-fashioned way by musicians playing in a room together. Hot Rats drummer John Gwerin returned for four of the six tracks, with Art Trip from the Mothers playing on the other two tracks.

The rest of the musicians on the album, other than Underwood, who played sax on the title track and conducted music for electric violin and low-budget orchestra, were session players, and for the most part hadn't played with the Mother's or Zappa previously. However, the keyboard player on all the tracks soon would. George Duke, who at the time was performing regularly with Ponte, would join Zappa's live band in 1970, leave for a while,

but then return and be a constant member of Zapper's touring lineups through the mid-70s on keyboards and vocals. Not only that, but he was one of the few musicians to actually be a collaborator with Zappa, co-writing Uncle Remus on Zappa's 1974 solo album, Apostrophe. Back in 1969, though, many of Zappa's friends and fans were annoyed about how he dumped his whole band, other than Underwood, and a lot of people who'd worked with him argued that they deserved better. When Captain Beefheart was asked about it, for example, he said, If he does make some money, I hope he does look back at some of those people like

Jimmy Carl Black and Roy Estrada and slips them a parcel of loot under their doors, because he's used those people to get as far as he got. It's safe to say that that wasn't what Zappa did, though he would work with both Black and Estrada again on brief occasions in the 70s. As Zappa succinctly put it 20 years later, I'd done everything that I could, but there's no logical way you can expect any employer to just keep shoveling out money for no services rendered. And that was the fundamental thing.

Zappa saw himself as an employer and the group as his employees, who he could hire and fire at will, while the group saw themselves as a band. This is probably especially true of the two people Beefheart mentioned, Estrada and Black, because they had been in the Soul Giants,

the band that became them withers, even before Zappa had joined, and they had been with the band throughout while the other members had joined more recently. It's actually quite easy to see both points of view. The change from them being a band, working together, albeit a band with the leader, to being a group of employees, obviously gave the band members more financial stability, right up until it didn't, but it must have been

difficult psychologically to adjust to. Apparently at the band's last meeting, they met up to divide up the amplifiers and other equipment and to receive their share of the band's profits, only to be told by Herb Cohen that the band had been losing money for eight months and was $20,000 in debt. Zappa offered to keep all the equipment and write off the debt, leaving the band members with nothing at all. From this point on though, the deal was clear to any musicians Zappa worked with. He was the boss, he paid them, they did things his way or they were out and they would no longer be paid. When Zappa put together a new live band for a couple of solo gigs, at first it was a much smaller four-piece band with a standardish rock band line-up.

Drums were played by Art Trip, keyboards by Underwood, and based by a musician called Jeff Simmons, who Zapper had recently produced a solo album for. Guitar was of course by Zappa himself. Shortly after that, Tripp stopped working with Zappa and joined Captain Beefheart and his Magic band. Performances for the next few months were sporadic, but featured a version of the band that played on Hot Rats, Underwood, Sugarcane Harris and Max Bennett, with either Ed Green, a session drummer who is best known for playing on all Barry White's major records, or Ainsley Dunbar, formerly of the Jeff Beck Group on drums. Zappa also played at least one show with this line-up with Captain Biffart on vocals.

Maybe this band could have continued, but then Zappa got the opportunity to work with the LA Philharmonic and conductor Zubin Mehta. Mata was putting together a series of concerts called Contempo 70, 20th century music, How It Was How It Is. And that series involved performances of many pieces Zappa was an admirer of. Pierre Boulet, one of Zappa's heroes, was going to conduct one show, performing pieces by Schernberg, Weber and Stravinsky. And there were also going to be other performances of pieces by Veiburn, Morton, Subotnik, and Barton. Zappa had been a guest lecturer at a music class given by David Raskin at USC. Raskin had also brought him Mandy Newman and Henry Mann-Signor's guest lecturers,

and this led to him being introduced to Mata, as Zappa later explained. I was with David Raskin, he was going to introduce me to Mater because I'd been pissing and moaning about how hard it was to get a piece of music played by an orchestra, so he just sort of undertook to help me get that to happen. I met Mata and Fleischman during this radio interview that was in progress at KPFK, and we went in there and joined them and started yacking it up on the air. After it was over, I talked to Mata for about ten minutes, during which he probably won't remember.

He commissioned me to write a piece of music for the 1971 season, just sort of offhand. I said, well, I got this other thing that's been sitting around for a while. Do you want to take a look at it? He was too busy to look at it, but Fleischman looked at it, and he liked the score very much, and he sort of got Zubin to check it out. We had another meeting, and we've been meeting for about three months trying to figure out whether it is financially feasible

to actually go ahead and do it, because the cost is way up there. Eventually they did perform the piece, which Zappa titled 200 motels, because it was mostly written in motel rooms while on tour. But there was one condition that had been placed on the performance. Knowing that Zappa was known as a rock musician and wanting him to bring in a younger audience, the organisers of the event insisted that the performance include the mothers of invention. Since the mothers had split up already, this presented something of a problem, but Zappa put together a one-off new line-up of the mothers. Royer Strada and Lowell George were off being in Little Feet. Art Tripp had joined Captain Befart and his Magic Band, while Jimmy Carl Black and the Gardner Brothers had formed her own hard rock

band, Geronimo Black, with Che Cantrelly of Love and guitarist Denny Wally, who would later play with both Zapper and Beefhards. However, five former members of the mothers were available for the show. Don Freston, Billy Mundy, Ian Underwood, Motorhead Sherwood, and, oddly enough, Ray Collins, who had quit the band several times before and would later make clear his general distaste for the music the mothers had played, saying he'd always wanted to sing beautiful music instead.

Preston and Underwood would continue working with Zappa off and on for several more years, and Sherwood would be a friend of Zappers until the mid-80s lawsuit and would occasionally contribute to his projects in the 70s. But this would be the last performance for Mundy or Collins as mothers. You can hear this performance on a low-quality bootleg of the show, and it's fascinating as a transitional performance, because it's the last performance by one set of mothers,

but the first for a new set. That performance also saw a performance of Zappa's adaptation of Edgar Varezz's piece on Tigral. It was meant also to include the premiere of Immobiles, a piece for Tape and Orchestra by Mel Powell, who had started out as a piano player with Benny Goodman's band before becoming an avant-garde composer under the influence of Scherneberg. Unfortunately, Powell was so offended when he got to the venue and discovered that there was a rock band also on the bill,

that he took his tapes home with him, and so that part of the programme had to be dropped. Making their debut as members of the Mothers of Invention were three musicians Zappa had done some work with previously. Bass player Jeff Simmons, keyboard player George Duke, and drummer Ainsley Dunbar. Simmons and Dunbar would become the permanent rhythm section for the next line-up of the mothers. Well, for the next five or six years, there would usually be two keyboard players for the Mothers of Invention, and Underwood, Duke and Freston would play musical chairs as to which of them was in the band at any given time,

with another keyboard player, Bob Harris, occasionally also being involved for the next few months. This new, much smaller version of the Mothers of Invention, just guitar, bass, drums and two keyboards, still needed a singer, though, and Zappa wanted to satirise the pop music business. And to do that, he needed a bona fide pop star as his lead vocalist.

Initially, he had offered the job to Mickey Dolans of the Monkeys, who was both a friend and a Laurel Canyon neighbour, but Dolan's was unable to get out of the monkey's contract at the time Zappa asked and so wouldn't have been able to record. Though by the time of this show he'd actually just completed work and what was to be the final Monkeys album of that contract, but presumably Zappa asked him before that point. But then two actual pop stars came backstage after the gig,

Mark Vulman and Howard Kalin, the vocalists for the Turtles. Their own group had split up literally weeks earlier because of their own record company troubles, and they were looking about for something, anything, to do. Kalan had actually been offered the job of lead singer with another band that were starting up at the time, but Steely Dan only wanted him, not Volman, and so out of loyalty he'd turned them down.

Remembering that Volman and Kalan had initially played saxophone in their surf group The Crossfires, Zappa offered them the job of singing sax players with his new line-up, until the first rehearsal, when he realised that they were not going to be able to play his music. Nevertheless, they were able to sing it, and the two became the lead singers of a version of the Mothers of Invention that would be very different from any of the previous lineups.

That version of the group became the most popular line-up of the mothers to date, and would help redefine Zappa in the eyes of the public, not as the political revolutionary some saw him as, but as a purveyor of sexual and scatological humour. Problems with the Turtles Record Company meant that Volman and Kaelin had lost the rights to their own names for a while, and had to perform as the fluorescent Leach and Eddie, later shortened to Flo and Eddie.

Despite that, this version of the mothers was so popular that Volman and Kalin would become far better known as Floinetti than they ever were under their original pop star names. Gone, however, were the original mothers. Members of 60s lineups would continue to play with Zappa, obviously Underwood and Preston, but also both Estrada and Black would appear occasionally, usually as vocal guests, on future albums and shows.

And Black, Preston and Motorhead would appear in Zapper's film 200 motels. but the mothers of invention as a band which had started as the soul giants with the rhythm section of Jimmy Carl Black and Roy Estrada and with Ray Collins on vocals were no more. In their place was an artist businessman and his employees, a composer who owned his own record label and who hired and fired the people to help him make those records.

And next time we'll hear more about that record label and about the most important single albums that have produced for it. A history of rock music in 500 songs is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. With every episode, and sometimes between episodes, Patreon backers will get a short bonus podcast. This episode is on Song to the Siren by Tim Buckley. Visit patreon.com slash Andrew Hickey to sign up for as little as a dollar a month. Two books based on the first 100 episodes of the podcast are now available. with a third coming soon.

Search Andrew Hickey 500 songs in your favourite online bookstore. This podcast is written and narrated by me, Andrew Hickey, and produced by me and Tiltorizer. No generative AI has been or ever will be used in the writing, research or recording of this podcast. Visit 500Songs.com. That's 5000, the numbers, not the letters, songs.com. to read transcripts and liner notes and get links to hear the full versions of songs excerpted here. If you've enjoyed the show and feel it's worth reviewing,

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