Friday Freak Out

Into the weeds & down a 60 yr.-deep rabbit hole.

Guest post: Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention's Verve/MGM albums (1966-1969): comparing mix variations

All sorts of trivia on variations of themes, but this was new to me.

There is also an alternate master of the original stereo vinyl mix, with brighter EQ, that has been bootlegged. This tape is a fascinating mystery, because we don’t have much information about it. First of all, except for tape print-through problems, where one can hear remnants of a previous recording, its fidelity is higher than that of the regular stereo version of the album. The track order is completely different: it’s unclear whether this is an early configuration or a compilation of mixes. Most importantly, though, it includes an uncensored “It Can’t Happen Here” and a different edit of “Wowie Zowie”, including a short section that was removed from the final master, possibly at MGM’s request (see below). This version of the album is still unreleased.

An early version of the album was done in April, with a different track order from the final sequence completed two months later. For instance, "Wowie Zowie" (which would eventually begin side two of the finalized sequence instead, and was described by Zappa as "harmless", "cheerful" and apparently liked by Little Richard was the original planned lead-off track rather than "Hungry Freaks, Daddy", "Trouble Comin' Every Day" (which was inspired by the Watts Riots that took place the previous year) was included on side one rather than side three, and "Who Are the Brain Police?" (acknowledged by Zappa himself as one of the scariest songs on the album) took up the middle of side two rather than the middle of side one, with only "Help, I'm a Rock" (dedicated to Elvis Presley) and "Cream Cheese" (retitled "The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet") taking up the same concluding places on the early sequence that they eventually would on the finalized sequence.

"Wowie Zowie" itself originally contained a musique concrète section between the bridge and third verse that would eventually be edited out of the song as it appeared on the finalized sequence, while the third section of "Help, I'm a Rock", called "It Can't Happen Here", contained two additional lines consisting of the word "psychedelic" during the self-pleasure sequence and of the words "...since you first took the shots" immediately following the "we've been very interested in your development" line. Tapes of the early sequence were eventually leaked to European collectors and bootlegged on vinyl as The Alternate Freak Out! in 2010, with long-time Zappa associate Scott Parker later describing the early sequence's track order as having more conceptual "integrat[ion]" and "a greater amount of weirdness sprinkled throughout" than that of the finalized sequence during a 2011 podcast.

The label eventually requested that the two lines in question be removed from the "It Can't Happen Here" section of "Help, I'm a Rock", both of which had been interpreted by MGM executives to be drug references. However, the label either had no objections to, or else did not notice, a sped-up recording of Zappa shouting the word "fuck" after accidentally smashing his finger, occurring at 11 minutes and 36 seconds into "The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet". From the 1995 CD reissue of the album onwards, the formerly three-part "Help, I'm a Rock" was reindexed as two separate tracks, with only the first two parts ("Okay To Tap Dance" and "In Memoriam, Edgard Varèse) remaining under the "Help, I'm a Rock" title but with "It Can't Happen Here" becoming its own track, as "It Can't Happen Here" had been on the 1969 vinyl compilation Mothermania, where the two previously censored lines were also reinstated.

Compare & contrast. (Hope this is the original mix.)[The Wiki]

P.S.: Better title: "The Mothers' Verve/MGM albums (1966-1969): Comparing mix variations".