March Home-Made Music Party - The Folk Project: Fill & Download for Free

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An infinitely amazing resource.Or just have fun (Deepak Recommends)#1: Amazon Kids (for people without Prime Subscription) — Amazon Unlocks Batch of Kids’ Shows Free to Stream for All CustomersThe content, previously available only to Prime Video customers, includes Amazon original series “Just Add Magic,” “Pete the Cat” and “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie” and select seasons of PBS Kids shows including “Arthur,” “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood,” “Odd Squad” and “Wild Kratts.” In Europe, third-party content includes “Peppa Pig” and “Ben & Holly’s Little Kingdom.”To access the free kids’ titles, users must sign in with a valid Amazon account, which is free. The shows are available to the company’s customers worldwide, with availability of titles varying depending on location. Amazon set up a landing page for the free children’s programming at this link.#2: Battlestar Galactica (all 4 seasons + mini-series)Can be watched directly on Syfy.com. 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At this time, the free deal will last until the end of March, though it could very well be extended and even add in more titles at the same time. As of this writing, America To Me, American Gods, Wrong Man, Magic City, Party Down, Ash vs Evil Dead, Da Vinci's Demons, Flesh and Bone, Dancing on the Edge, and The Girlfriend Experience are just a sampling of some of the shows available.#8: SHOWTIME30-day access. Show catalogue includes stuff like Vice and Homeland.#9: Internet ArchiveSurprisingly, Internet Archive does not only offer free books and papers, but public-domain movies too. Here’s their catalogue — Free Movies : Free Download, Borrow and Streaming : Internet ArchiveHas an incredible collection of old B&W classics — His Girl Friday, Reefer Madness, Phantom of the Opera, Gulliver’s Travels, etc.#10: Montreux Jazz Festival: Enters Quarantine Mode, Releases 50+ Full Performances for FreeOn the live music steamer, Qello, the festival uploaded more than 50 sets from iconic musicians, including Marvin Gaye, Nina Simone, James Brown, The Wu-Tang Clan, Isaac Hayes, Run DMC, Nile Rodgers & Chic, and more. All of the performances are available for free for 30 days with an access code. You can read up on how to dive in here.#11: All of PokemonAmazon Japan letting people watch various Pokemon anime series' for free as part of a coronavirus quarantine effortOnly for Amazon Japan users.

The Beatles’ 1967 album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is, in my opinion, the pinnacle of their achievement as a band: their most fully achieved work, and the most coherent and characteristic album that they ever issued. It also contains in my opinion the greatest song that they ever wrote and recorded.It has the hallmark of a classic: it continually invites reinterpretation, and it never seems to go away. Just when we think we know everything about it, there turns out to be another way to look at it. This review will be an attempt to show how it does that.Be warned, kids: this review is so long that it has a goddamned contents page.Here it is:BackgroundRecordingCommentaryReception and InterpretationBackgroundBy 1966 the Beatles were in a car that was going downhill very fast. This is not to say that their career was going downhill; but they were a media juggernaut that was increasingly out of their manager Brian Epstein's control--and everyone else's for that matter. It wasn't so much that somebody was pressing the accelerator too hard; it was that nobody had their foot on the brake.-George MartinDuring the summer of 1966, a shadow was growing over the Beatles.Crowd control at their concerts was becoming a nightmare. A two-gig engagement in the Philippines turned into a debacle, when First Lady Imelda Marcos elected to ignore the fact that the Beatles had turned down an invitation to a televised party she was hosting.In March 1966, Lennon had made his ‘more popular than Jesus’ comment, and by August, it had been widely reprinted in the US in the September issue of Datebook magazine, just in time for the band to go on its Summer US tour. Death threats were issued against the band. The Ku Klux Klan nailed a Beatles record to a cross.The Memphis, Tennessee city council voted to cancel the Beatles’ 19 August concert, but the Beatles decided to perform anyway. During the concert, a lit firecracker was thrown onstage and the band thought that someone had tried to shoot at them.The Beatles had been talking about not touring any more. McCartney was the holdout, insisting that it was good for them. On 21 August—two weeks after a civil rights march in Waukegan, Illinois led by Dr Martin Luther King had been attacked by thousands of white counter-protesters hurling bottles, bricks and cherry bombs—the band played a midday concert in Cincinnati, then flew to St Louis to play an evening show at the Busch Stadium.It was pouring with rain. Water was dripping onto the amplifiers. The stage was as badly built as anything they’d ever played on. After the gig, the band was herded into a steel-lined van for the trip back to the hotel—McCartney remembered it as being like a removal van.That was the moment when he agreed with the others: you were right, that’s it, after this tour, it’s over.Eight days later, they played their last official concert at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. Lennon set up a camera on the stage to photograph the occasion:They took a break.Lennon went to Spain to play Musketeer Gripweed in Richard Lester’s How I Won the War. McCartney wrote the score for the film The Family Way, or rather played a couple of tunes to George Martin, who turned them into variations. Harrison delved into Indian music and spirituality. Starr bought a house.In the rest of the world, Star Trek began screening on TV.Riots continued across the USA, in San Francisco, Atlanta, and Hollywood. The Sunset Strip Curfew riots inspired the Buffalo Springfield song ‘For What It’s Worth’.Albert Speer was released from Spandau prison.The Black Panthers were founded.LSD was banned in the USA.Ronald Reagan was elected Governor of California.On 10 November, the newspapers contained the first reports that the Beatles would not be touring any more. It was widely speculated that they might be about to split up.On 19 November 1966, the band members reconvened for the first time since August, at Abbey Road studios, to make their next album.Before Sgt Pepper, the track, not the album, was regarded as the standard pop/rock recording. I use ‘track’ rather than ‘song’ to emphasise the fact that the track is the recording of the song, not the song as a purely musical entity: the track is the realisation of the song in performance and production.Albums were regarded as collections of tracks, not as coherent artistic achievements in themselves. Tracks could be issued as singles, or they could be stand-out tracks on albums, but albums were not expected to have any sort of overall coherence or conceptual or musical unity. This is why so many albums before 1967 struggle with the matter of ‘filler’: tracks a band had to record in order to fill up the space on the album. The Who’s first album My Generation has two tracks that we today regard as being classic Who tracks: the title track, and ‘The Kids Are Alright’. The rest is more or less OK filler.In the highly compressed evolution of rock music between 1965 and 1967, more and more bands began to play with the notion of extending beyond the boundaries of the three-minute song. Pete Townshend deserves credit for this, in his mini-song cycle ‘A Quick One, While He’s Away’ from 1966’s A Quick One (US title: Happy Jack). But A Quick One the album is still not any kind of unified artistic achievement.The Beatles’ retirement from touring in late 1966 meant that there was a lot of speculation about what they were going to do next. This speculation built and built until, by the time Sgt Pepper was released in May 1967, it was one of the most anticipated albums of all time.RecordingThe first four songs recorded for the new album were ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, ‘Penny Lane’, ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ and ‘A Day in the Life’.The first two of these songs didn’t end up on the album. But for a long time they were regarded as being part of the project that ultimately issued in Sgt Pepper, so they deserved to be considered along with it.‘Strawberry Fields’ was written by Lennon while on location in Spain for How I Won The War, although it took a lot of demos and takes before finding its ultimate shape.‘Penny Lane’ was written by McCartney after he first heard ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, although he’d been talking about writing a song about Penny Lane as far back as October 1965. Another inspiration for McCartney was Dylan Thomas’ quasi-hallucinogenic recollection of childhood, ‘Fern Hill’:And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barnsAbout the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,In the sun that is young once only,Time let me play and beGolden in the mercy of his means,And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calvesSang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,And the sabbath rang slowlyIn the pebbles of the holy streams.Both ‘Strawberry Fields’ and ‘Penny Lane’ are constructed, lyrically speaking, as imaginative returns to a simpler childhood, but they’re very different songs.Lennon’s song is written as an invitation to the listener to accompany him to ‘Strawberry Fields’, where there’s ‘nothing to get hung about’.Remember the death threats in the southern USA, a few months earlier? Lennon had faced the darkest consequences of his fame: people could actively hate him for the things he said. (This would eventually, of course, have him killed.)No surprise that he was longing for a simpler time in his life, when he could go to the annual garden party in the grounds of the Strawberry Field orphanage in Woolton in Liverpool.In the song, Strawberry Field gets transformed into ‘Strawberry Fields’, an image of Eden.But one of the most noticeable things about the song is the way it gets darker and stranger and more disturbing as it goes along: as in a bad dream, the closer Lennon tries to get to Strawberry Fields, the more it seems to pull away from him, with the light folk-rock texture of the beginning of the song turning into a harsh soundscape of brass, dissonant cellos and hammering percussion, before the song descends into atonal burbling from the Mellotron and muttered phrases (‘Cranberry sauce…’) As for how it does this, see here: Alex Johnston's answer to Which songs from the Magical Mystery Tour by The Beatles is your favorite or your least favorite and why?In ‘Penny Lane’, by contrast, McCartney isn’t striving to go back to his childhood—he magically and effortlessly transports himself there, the song being as bright and cheerful as a sunny Saturday morning, fuelled by angelic, sighing backing vocals and a bubbling piccolo trumpet solo, blending the Beatles’ own mid-tempo swing with the Beach Boys and Bach. Harrison would say, in a 1967 interview, ‘We are not only involved in pop music, but all music.’ It sounded at the time like arrogance, but he was simply telling the truth.The writer Ian MacDonald has claimed that ‘Penny Lane’ is as hallucinogenic, in its own way, as ‘Strawberry Fields’, citing the fact that in the song it’s simultaneously sunny and raining, but all I can say is that, as a Scottish resident, the weather in the northern part of the island of Great Britain can be funny like that.The Beatles started to think of the next album as having a theme of childhood.The band worked on through Christmas 1966 and into January 1967, finishing these three songs. On January 19, Lennon brought a new song into the studio: 'A Day in the Life'.It was around this time that Capitol Records, the Beatles' US label, insisted that there had to be a new Beatles single. Epstein was already upset that the Beatles' release schedule had slowed down, so 'Strawberry Fields Forever' and 'Penny Lane' were issued as a double A-side. Epstein had a policy that Beatles singles couldn't be album tracks, so that nixed those two outstanding songs as far as the next album was concerned. Only a few weeks into recording, and the 'songs about childhood' concept was already looking shaky.But with Lennon made passive and easygoing by his heroic acid consumption, the Beatles' most normally dominant member was, for once, happy to go along with whatever the other guys wanted. And there was at least one member of the band who really wanted the next album to be a good one.During the band’s break in autumn 1966, Paul McCartney had become the last Beatle to take acid.It didn’t have quite the earthshaking effect on his robust psyche as it had on Lennon’s more fragile one, but it did fill him with a sense of renewed possibility. He was listening to the albums coming out of the USA, notably the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and the Mothers of Invention’s Freak Out!, and was determined that the Beatles had to at least match the level of creativity on these albums.Flying back from a November 1966 trip to Kenya with the band’s assistant Mal Evans, McCartney was thinking about how the Beatles 'were fed up with being the Beatles':We really hated that fucking four little mop-top approach. We were not boys, we were men. It was all gone, all that boy shit, all that screaming, we didn't want any more, plus, we'd now got turned on to pot and thought of ourselves as artists rather than performers.McCartney's curiosity and outward-looking approach (as opposed to Lennon's introspection) made him fascinated with the then-current trend for surreal, faintly Edwardian band names that were becoming popular: Quicksilver Messenger Service, 1910 Fruitgum Company. (In the Anthology video, remembering years later, he busked the fictional name ‘Colonel Mustard’s Medicinal Compound’, referencing the hit ‘Lily the Pink’ by his brother Mike’s band Scaffold.)Observing Evans fiddling with the salt and pepper on his meal tray, McCartney dreamed up Sgt Pepper. Scribbling on a napkin yielded Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.A band playing music for a club composed of lonely-hearted people. What a metaphor.McCartney had always been the most sociable and outgoing Beatle, and the one who’d written their most compassionate song thus far, ‘Eleanor Rigby’, with its bleak portrait of an unloved spinster dying and being forgotten. (Lennon tended to feel sorry for himself; McCartney, more resilient by nature, tended to feel sorry for other people.)But in November 1966, this remained a vague idea in McCartney's mind. He didn't yet have anything to show for it.At some point—Beatles chronology is, however minutely detailed, a mish-mash of meticulous studio records and fallible personal recollection—the idea of a childhood-themed album was no longer on the table.But what was still on the table was the notion that, if they weren’t going to tour any more, they would have to up their game and deliver an album that was a bit more unusual.At some point, McCartney suggested to the others the idea of recording the album as the Sgt Pepper band. McCartney later talked about how he thought the idea that the band could literally pretend to be other musicians would be a 'freeing element', a sort of tongue-in-cheek Liverpudlian prefiguring of Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies, in which suggestion cards prompt the musician to approach a piece of music from a new angle.Maybe McCartney's idea did prompt a new level of creativity, and maybe it didn't. They certainly didn’t record more than three songs as if they were that fictional band: tracks one, two and eleven. But their confidence was at a high, and the band was working together.After a a long period of development, 'A Day in the Life' was in the can by 22 February.Then, it was a matter of the other songs.Like all the Beatles' albums up till that point, Sgt Pepper had to be finished in a hurry.CommentaryMcCartney's ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ took the nascent sound of heavy rock music being developed in London clubs by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and blended it with the Edwardian brass band music that the band members had heard in childhood. (In my own childhood in Dublin in the 1970s, a park across the road from my grandparents’ house had a bandstand, and Sunday afternoons in their garden would often be accompanied by the sound of an unidentified brass band playing tunes on that bandstand.) It was a fine, striking opening, a self-conscious 'Welcome back' to the listener. Maybe McCartney's weedy lead guitar tone on his Fender Esquire lets it down, a little. But in its fusion of heavy rock and brass band music, it was unlike anything else anyone was doing at the time.It segued neatly into 'With A Little Help From My Friends', the obligatory Ringo vocal, which didn't tease or play up to Ringo's comic persona (as previous Ringo songs like 'Act Naturally' and 'Yellow Submarine' had done) but brought him into the circle as a full and valued member of the band.Again, check out how Ringo subtly varies his drum part from verse to verse. The lines 'What do you see when you turn out the light? / I can't tell you but I know it's mine' have, as McCartney acknowledged, a superficial suggestion of furtive masturbation, but they also suggest something a little deeper and more mysterious. By the end of the song, Ringo's vocal has merged with the backing vocals. It's the ultimate Ringo song: simple, touching and heartfelt.Lennon's 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' was, as we all know, inspired by a picture that Lennon's son Julian had made in school, but its Lewis Carroll-ish imagery of newspaper taxis and journeying into a strange new world reflects the Beatles' own sense of moving into a new land. It can be heard as a more benign take on the same experiences that had prompted 'Strawberry Fields Forever'.'Getting Better' is an example of how the Beatles smuggled dark material into pop songs: its bright sound belies the fact that it's about breaking away from painful and damaging experiences. McCartney has talked in interviews about his lifelong disinclination to do whatever he's told, no matter who was telling him to do it. Lennon's interjection 'It can't get no worse' is said to have been improvised by him on arriving at the studio while McCartney was running through the song for the others; it certainly gives the song weight, and the final verse, a confession about abusing one's partner, could arguably be said to be true about any of the band, all of whom were less than perfect lovers and husbands at various times of their lives.Musically, it's a more taut variant on the kind of song 'Penny Lane' is, with those measured fourth-note guitar/piano chords, deepened and darkened by Harrison's use of the tambura in the final verse. It's not as cheerful as its reputation suggests: it wants to be cheerful, but is forced to be realistic.'Fixing a Hole' was inspired by McCartney's repairs to his newly purchased Scottish farmhouse on Kintyre, but it's also about the freedom to dream and play, something that was clearly on the band's mind, given their newfound freedom from the grind of unsatisfactory touring. It's notable for, among other things, Harrison's guitar solo, played (unless my ears deceive me) on his dayglo Fender Strat. Unlike almost all guitar solos of the period, it starts high on the instrument and works its way down to the bottom. Eric Clapton has said that one of the bases for his friendship with Harrison was that he recognised that Harrison wasn't just a Beatle who happened to play guitar, but an individual guitar stylist. Nobody else played solos like this back then, least of all McCartney.'She's Leaving Home' is, I think, persistently underrated, even by some fans of the band.As a construction, it's beautiful. The structure is wonderfully economical, and the basic situation, of a young woman leaving her family home because she can't communicate to her parents and has found the possibility of love elsewhere, is the kind of thing that only McCartney, of all the members of this band, could have come up with. It was inspired by a real life news story, but I personally think that the conventional interpretation, in which the protagonist of the song is a very young woman, lacks weight. The line 'She's leaving home after living alone for so many years' suggests to me a protagonist who could well be in her late twenties, or even older. The phenomenon of unmarried women continuing to live with their parents until early middle age wasn't unknown in Britain then, and is still commonplace in other parts of the world. I think that if we hear the protagonist of 'She's Leaving Home' as being over thirty, the song gains more force, especially as even as an adult, she can't write a note that would explain as much as she wants to explain.The fact that the song is written and played like a 19th century parlour song with a late 20th century sensibility only points up how original it is. Lennon's contribution is wonderfully McCartneyesque: he wrote and sings the parents' interjections in the chorus, inspired by the kind of thing his aunt Mimi would say.'She's Leaving Home' is about what the protagonist of 'Eleanor Rigby' would have done, if only she'd had the courage, or been less beaten down by life.The origins of Lennon's 'Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite' are well known: he took the words from a Victorian circus poster he'd bought. The actual song is a charming novelty number, but apart from its retro appeal, it makes sense as the end of side one, the obligatory commercial for local attractions in the intermission.The silly novelty song on a Beatles album was usually Ringo's job, but here, it's as if Lennon is taking one for the team, another hint at the generally collegial nature of the album. The song is not without darkness, though: on the Love album, the version of this song segues from the line 'And tonight, Mr Kite is topping the bill!' straight into the nightmarish final section of Abbey Road's 'I Want You (She's So Heavy)'.Harrison's 'Within You Without You' I've written about at length elsewhere: Alex Johnston's answer to In what ways did the Beatles song Within You, Without You combine aspects of Eastern and Western music? Suffice it to say that it's the first truly successful fusion of Indian classical music with Western pop song structure. Harrison's intensive study of Indian music with Ravi Shankar really paid off. Lyrically, it's a lecture, but it's urging us to love one another. You can have worse lectures.While still working on ‘Strawberry Fields’, and at a point where they were considering recording an album full of songs about childhood, the band had recorded McCartney’s ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’, a song that McCartney had written years earlier, when he was 16.‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ is routinely dismissed by rock purists as an example of McCartney’s ‘granny music’, but I think that if we don’t understand why it’s on Sgt Pepper, we will never get the point of the album.In late 1966, the Beatles had for the first time experienced the world turning on them, and refusing to be taken in by their charm and their tunes and their wit. ‘WI64’ is one of those English 60s pop songs like the Kinks’ ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’ and the Small Faces’ ‘Lazy Sunday’ that uses the music-hall style of early 20th century British popular music to depict a realistic scenario.But the Kinks and the Small Faces were still focused on themselves: ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’ is a satire on the kind of sharp-dressed guy that the Kinks were. ‘Lazy Sunday’ was actually inspired by Steve Marriott’s arguments with his neighbours, and in the song, he’s still himself:Wouldn't it be nice to get on with me neighboursBut they make it very clearThey've got no room for raversThey stop me from groovin', they bang on me wallThey doing me crust in, it's no good at allThe way Marriott half sings, half snarls ‘Lay-zee Sun-day after-noon-ah!’ was a direct influence on John Lydon’s vocal style in the Sex Pistols.‘When I'm Sixty-Four’, however, is flat-out pedestrian Northern realism, presenting the most mundane details of everyday life as if they were something to aspire to:I could be handy, mending a fuseWhen your lights have goneYou can knit a sweater by the firesideSunday mornings go for a rideDoing the garden, digging the weedsWho could ask for moreThis is the truly subversive and invisibly strange thing about Sgt Pepper: at a time when the Beatles’ generation was asserting its difference from their parents’ generation, the Beatles offered up this song as one that their parents could play for each other. It contributes to the general feel of Sgt Pepper as being holistic: everyone is being included.Let’s hear it for Ringo’s immaculate drumming on this song, by the way, especially his exceptionally nimble ride cymbal work at 1:50–1:57.It was recorded in the key of C major but was sped up a semitone to Db, partly because McCartney wanted to sound younger but also to make it more ‘rooty-tooty’. Lennon plays finger-style electric guitar in the last verse, and at 2:23 his stylistically inappropriate folk-blues picking makes McCartney audibly smile while he’s singing.McCartney's 'Lovely Rita' was inspired by his being given a parking ticket by a female traffic warden, Meta Davies. Initially the title character was a negative one, but Lennon and McCartney agreed that 'it'd be better to love her.' The result was one of the horniest songs the band had written since 'I Saw Her Standing There', with McCartney's narrator evidently turned on by the fact that Rita's uniform 'made her look a little like a military man'. Harrison's characteristic guitar styling makes for the opening acoustic lick; the song devolves into panting and grunting, as if Rita and the narrator 'made it' on the sofa after the sisters had gone to bed. It's hardly the strongest Beatles song ever, yet the underlying idea—take the characteristic establishment hate figure of the traffic warden, and make her into a love object—is somehow characteristic of the Sgt Pepper vibe.Lennon's 'Good Morning Good Morning' is one of the most fantastically earthy and rhythmically irregular songs the band ever did. The verse switches between bars of 5/4, 4/4 and 2/4 and Starr makes it seem completely natural by treating the song on a beat-by-beat basis. The underlying narrative, of a guy who sets out in the morning in a foul mood but who by evening is 'in gear' and hoping to check out girls, is entirely in keeping with the basic positivity of the Pepper band. The feel of the song is great: crunchy, dirty and visceral. It tails off into animal noises—supposedly arranged in such an order that each animal could be eaten by the succeeding one, but whatever. During editing, George Martin noticed that a last chicken squawk ‘rhymed’, musically speaking, with the twang of a guitar being tuned, helping to create one of the band’s most thrilling segues……a continuous tapping noise leads us, via various bits of echoey studio talkback, into McCartney’s last count-in: One, two, three, four—Lennon throws in a sly Byee!—And then Ringo kicks off 'Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)', one of the band’s best rock & roll songs. Fast, tight, tough and grimy, it's a true band performance, and the increased tempo makes the original version sound plodding by comparison. A slick modulation half-way through raises the level of excitement.McCartney almost always gave the count-in on Beatles songs—he’d done it on track one, side one of their first album, although the actual count-in on ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ (One, two, three, FAW!) was from a different take than the one that they ended up using. The fact that they left the count-in on this song, as well as Lennon’s laconic farewell, creates a sense of closure that links this song not only the title track of the album but also to the very beginning of their recording career.This is the end of part of their career.The mono version comes with extra incoherent raving from McCartney in the song's closing seconds, but as the applause and cheers ring out, it's an exhilarating finale to an album.Except that, as we’re about to realise, it isn’t.'A Day in the Life', as Allan Moore observes, starts before the previous song has even stopped. Lennon's pensive strummed guitar (Gmaj, Bmin, Emin, Emin7, Cmaj, Gmaj) is in sharp contrast to the previous song's drive.There's something about the way 'A Day in the Life' emerges sombrely out of the whooping and cheering of the Reprise that makes me think of smoke clearing. It’s subtly disturbing.It's as if the party’s over, the veil is being lifted, and now we're coming face to face with reality.And the song itself reinforces that, being one of the most casual-sounding intros to a Beatles song: just a guy strumming a guitar and singing about something that he saw, in a thin, rather melancholy, echoing voice.I read the news today, oh boyAbout a lucky man who made the gradeAnd though the news was rather sadWell I just had to laughI saw the photographThis is weird. Hardly even bothering to rhyme. And what does 'made the grade' mean, and since it sounds like a good thing, why is the news sad?He blew his mind out in a carHe didn't notice that the lights had changedA crowd of people stood and staredThey'd seen his face beforeNobody was really sure if he was from the House of LordsNow we're getting more: some hints of a road accident, although 'blew his mind out also suggests' suicide and drugs...what happened, exactly?We don't know. We're not told.It's just something the singer read in the news. Whatever.You have to laugh.Note the way that, although there are at least three Beatles playing now (Lennon on guitar, McCartney on piano and Starr on drums), the effect as if there's only one person: the accompaniment is confined to effects (McCartney's booming piano chords, Starr's perfectly timed, improvisatory slack-tuned drums) that emphasise the solitariness of the singing voice.It doesn't feel like a group. It feels like a guy alone in a room.I saw a film today, oh boyThe English army had just won the warA crowd of people turned awayBut I just had to lookHaving read the bookJust another stupid war film, then. Most people aren't even interested. But our man has to look, to consume the sight of it, because he knows how it's supposed to end.I'd love toTu-u-u-u-u-u-u-rn you-ou-ou-ou-ou-ou-ou-ou o-o-o-o-o-onnnnnnn...And all of a sudden the bottom seems to drop out of the music, we're left hanging, while the singer tantalisingly suggests that he wants to do something to us, anyway, but we don't have time to wonder what, because apart from the steady, mechanical pulse of a piano and a faint voice counting numbers in the distance there's OH FUCKING HELL WHAT THE HELL IS THAT NOISE...A slowly building wall of discordant noise, the sound of what it feels like to feel sick, or mad, or so removed from your surroundings that you can't take the outside world seriously, and it's building and building and building and getting louder and louder and louder and adding on overtones and more sounds until it's a giant wall between us and the song, and just when we think oh please no come on I can't take it anymore it's louder still, and louder, until it's the only sound in the world......and then it explodes into a chord, and is over, and there's just the piano, playing that same chord, and we're back, and an alarm clock goes off.And an entirely new song starts, sung by someone else, right up in our ear.It's a dark morning bedroom. You can almost smell the unwashed sheets.Woke up, fell out of bedDragged a comb across my headFound my way downstairs and drank a cupAnd looking up, I noticed I was latePause for some heavy breathing: our (new) man? His dog, eager to go for a walk?Found my coat, and grabbed my hatMade the bus in seconds flatFound my way upstairs and had a ssssmokeAnd somebody spoke, and I went into a dream--There's something deliberately provocative about the way McCartney forces the 's' in 'smoke'.But we're no sooner with our harassed everyman than we're back in the original song, now winding its way through a mighty chord progression with the original singer wordlessly ahhhh-ing in the background. What is going on? Is our man falling back asleep?The orchestra we heard before is back, but it's behaving itself, playing titanic chords to accompany our dream.Then, with a huge, decisive, five-note phrase, we're back to where we were, except now the song is more brisk, the drums pattering away underneath:I read the news today, oh boyFour thousand holes in Blackburn, LancashireAnd though the holes were rather smallThey had to count them allNow they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert HallThere's something mocking about the way that last line seesaws between two notes a semitone apart for most of its length.But oh shit, we've been here before, haven't we, and yes:I'd love toTu-u-u-u-u-u-u-rn you-ou-ou-ou-ou-ou-ou-ou o-o-o-o-o-onnnnnnn...It's back, that hellish noise, and it seems to be getting louder faster, and once again we seem to be receding from the world we know, the world of pianos and guitars and words and meanings, into a world of pure chaos and noise and abstraction where we can make nothing make sense except that whatever it is it's getting worse, and the noise builds and builds and builds and builds, seeming almost to throb as if it's alive, until we are lost inside this vast dark cloud of meaningless noise--Dah!CLANNNGGG!Two chords, one from the orchestra, one from what sounds like the biggest fucking piano in the world, and it takes forever to die away, as we listen in relief to the growing silence.And we feel...what, exactly?I always hear the piano chord at the end of 'A Day in the Life' as a kind of bow that the magician delivers to the audience, a musical equivalent of the choreographed bow that the band used to give its audiences on the prompting of Brian Epstein. Mach schau, boys, mach schau, their German employer Bruno Koschmider used to tell them, imitating their earliest manager Allan Williams: Make show, boys, make show.The piano chord is the band saying: That's it. See ya.As we sit there, disoriented, feeling rather like someone who's just been subjected to the most intense fucking of our lives, going: What did you just do to me?And the piano fades and fades to nothing, and then silence.Nevercouldbeanyotheritnevercouldbeanyotheritnevercouldbeanyotheritnevercouldbeanyother...Reception and InterpretationWhen the Beatles first appeared on the music scene, there was no other group quite like them.They looked alike. This wasn’t unusual among British groups, but the usual format was a singer and his backing band. The Beatles’ smart, showbiz-minded manager Brian Epstein recognised from the start that the band didn’t fit the usual format. No one of them stood out as the obvious leader. Lennon was funny and sharp and sarcastic, but abrasive; McCartney was cute and charming and friendly, but less funny; Harrison was dry and laconic and watchful; Starr was the kind of guy who says nothing for minutes and then drops a well-placed remark. They were a group. That was the point.Epstein’s ambition was to make the Beatles as big as Elvis. He did this by tailoring their outward image, to make them as appealing as possible, to as broad an audience as possible.Before the Beatles, the image of rock and roll music had been rebellion: leather and sideburns and motorbikes and snarling at the older generation. Elvis had had a natural element of that, which he’d turned into a marketing tool by appearing in bland movies. The Beatles themselves had dressed all in leather once. The Rolling Stones wouldn’t wear leather, but they did adopt the rock & roll rebel posture of not smiling in pictures, and flattering their audiences into thinking themselves bold and brave for being consumers of the music.Epstein’s genius move was to persuade the Beatles—I think, rightly—that this image was old hat.That, in 1961, if you wanted to get somewhere, you had to think ahead.The only way to be bigger than Elvis was to be unlike Elvis. To not pretend that you were a teenage delinquent.Cliff Richard, the British pop musician who’d been the biggest thing before the Beatles, had practised looking broody and curling his lip like Elvis, but it was all bullshit. He was an immaculately behaved young man named Harry Webb. The Beatles—who were, in their early years, far from immaculately behaved young men—didn’t want to be like Cliff.They didn’t want to look like a secondhand knock-off of the musicians they revered. (The only reason Elvis isn’t on the cover of Sgt Pepper is that they respected him so much that they couldn’t place him in the company of lesser mortals.)The Beatles were forced to be themselves.Contrary to legend, Epstein never changed their sound, only their look. He got them to stand still on stage, instead of jumping around and laughing. He put them in suits. He had them photographed in cool black and white, rather than garish colour.The Beatles didn’t sound like anyone else, but they looked different from everyone else, too. Epstein said that their appeal lay in the fact that they were ‘a blend of tragedy and comedy’.They were all things to all people. Kids liked their songs because they were tuneful, teenagers adored them because they were idols, adults were intrigued by them because they appeared not to take their celebrity seriously.Their fame happened because people clustered round to see what the fuss was all about, and stayed because the music had the power to keep their attention.And then, in 1966, when they had been at the top for so long, it started to go sour.Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was their response.Sgt Pepper was not, at the time, universally recognised as some sort of transcendent masterpiece. At least one review in the UK press was positive but run-of-the-mill. Richard Goldstein in the New York Times wrote a strongly negative review, saying ‘the overall effect is busy, hip and cluttered’ and criticising what he heard as over-production. But even Goldstein was disarmed by the epic ‘A Day in the Life’:It has nothing to do with posturing or put-on. It is a deadly earnest excursion in emotive music with a chilling lyric. Its orchestration is dissonant but sparse, and its mood is not whimsical nostalgia but irony. With it, the Beatles have produced a glimpse of modern city life, that is terrifying. It stands as one of the most important Lennon-McCartney compositions, and it is a historic Pop event.But the majority of reviewers were agreed that Sgt Pepper was something new, and received it as such. Tom Phillips in the Village Voice called it ‘the most ambitious and most successful record album ever issued’.And there were features about the album itself, that conveyed the strong impression that it was a coherent statement.One was the packaging. The spectacularly expensive gatefold cover was the first ever to print the lyrics on the back. It unfolded into a photo of the band smiling into the camera, and included a card insert with cutouts of Sgt Pepper, a cardboard moustache, etc., as if the listener was being invited to play at being in the band.(The insert card)Another was the sequencing. The sequencing makes the listener feel that some kind of statement is being made, even if it’s hard to say exactly what. Placing ‘A Day in the Life’ outside the continuity of the Pepper band’s performance, practically forces the listener to hear it as a comment on that performance, or as an alternative perspective on it.But the sequencing of Sgt Pepper was not a carefully thought-through statement by the band.The title track had to come first, obviously. 'With A Little Help from My Friends' had to come after it, because they segued into each other. George Martin liked to stack the first side of an album with what he considered stronger cuts, and have the last song on side one be a stand-out, which is why the widescreen circus fun of 'Mr Kite' is the last song on side one.The reprise of the title track obviously had to come at the end. But you couldn't possibly put anything after something so titanic as 'A Day in the Life', so the reprise of the title track had to go before it.And so, because of numerous factors, some of them outside the band's control, the album finally assumed the shape that it took.This is partly how Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band creates the impression of being ‘organically conceived’, even though it wasn’t, and as being in some way coherent.It's as extraordinarily stylistically diverse as their last album Revolver, but it's far more coherent in its emotional generosity. There's a generally positive and warm tone of the songs: there are sad songs and serious songs on Sgt Pepper, including ‘A Day in the Life’ itself, but that song is hugely ambiguous—by turns melancholy, disturbing, dry and ironic.But there are no songs as purely bleak as 'Eleanor Rigby' or as purely downbeat as 'She Said She Said'. The album radiates warmth. Sgt Pepper seemed to want to welcome everyone, at least until you get to ‘A Day in the Life’, where it becomes a lot less clear what, exactly, we’re being welcomed to. Was it a last-minute afterthought, a kind of disclaimer? No; as we’ve seen, it was one of the first songs on the album to be recorded. For almost all the process of making the album, they’d already recorded its final track.The word ‘love’, and notions of love and togetherness and community, recur through the album, from track to track:You’re such a lovely audience, we’d like to take you home with us, we’d love to take you homeWould you believe in a love at first sight? Yes, I’m certain that it happens all the timeIt’s getting better since you’ve been mineWe gave her most of our lives, sacrificed most of our livesWith our love we could save the worldWill you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m sixty-fourLovely Rita, meter maid, where would I be without youSomebody needs to know the time, glad that I’m hereWe’re sorry but it’s time to goSgt Pepper’s lonely, Sgt Pepper’s lonely, Sgt Pepper’s lonely, Sgt Pepper’s lonely,I’d love to turn you onBut I think that it was this emphasis on love and generosity and togetherness that doomed the album to failure with a certain kind of listener. Because, in the summer of 1967, not everyone wanted to welcome everyone, and they still don't.Sgt Pepper was the moment on which the Beatles truly, heroically blended tragedy and comedy.Nobody had ever issued a pop/rock album which gave such an overwhelming impression of being a coherent artistic statement. Despite the somewhat haphazard circumstances of its making, in that respect, it was a game-changer for popular music, just as much as Beethoven’s Third Symphony was one for the music of its time.As to what that statement actually is…Well, that’s why we've been arguing about it for the last 50-odd years.Thanks for reading.(The Beatles at the launch party of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Photo: future vegetarian food magnate Linda Eastman.)AfterwordOn reading this answer back, it occurs to me that some readers might be thinking: That’s all very well, Johnston, but Do you like it?My answer is: That’s not important. I don’t write answers this long about albums that mean nothing to me, obviously. Sometimes I want to listen to Sgt Pepper on repeat; other times, months go by when I don’t think about it at all.What I wanted to do was talk about Why it got made the way it did, and Why it seems important. I wanted to write a review that would persuade people that they can’t just dismiss it.Hopefully, that was achieved.Cause now I don’t want to have to think about it again for a while.(Sources:Cambridge Music Handbooks: Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Allan E. MooreSummer of Love: The Making of Sgt Pepper, George MartinRevolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties, Ian MacDonaldThe Complete Beatles Chronicle, Mark LewisohnAnthology, The BeatlesThe Beatles Reader, ed. Charles P. NeisesTwilight of the Gods: The Beatles in Retrospect, Wilfrid MellersRead the Beatles, ed. June Skinner SawyersThe Beatles as Musicians: Revolver through the Anthology, Walter EverettMany Years From Now, Barry MilesMagic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History, Devin McKinney)

Warning: answer contains deliberately misleading image.There’s one band that routinely gets left out of most accounts of ‘classic rock’.I wonder if some people will argue that they weren’t classic rock at all.In fact, I will argue that very the idea of ‘classic rock’ is flawed.This answer is long.So, please don’t complain that it’s long. I know it’s long. It’s supposed to be long.Thank you. I hope you enjoy it.You’ve been a lovely audience. You have. You’ve been a lovely audience.Let me know where you’re working tomorrow night—and I’ll come and see you.—John Osborne, The EntertainerThe whole idea of ‘classic rock’ ought to be viewed with some suspicion.I suspect it’s a bit like the word patriot.Like ‘patriot’, ‘classic rock’ is not a neutral, descriptive term for a particular, well-defined object that exists independently of the observer.‘Classic rock’ is a term loaded with value judgement. To call something ‘classic rock’ is, essentially, to make a claim about the value of that thing.‘Classic rock’ seems to mean whatever music, from a certain period and within certain boundaries of production, fan sociology and style, that the observer chooses to dignify with that term.The period is roughly from the mid/late 1960s to around the late 1970s.The production, fan sociology and style are those that can be loosely grouped within the concept of ‘rock’: small group electric music made by musicians who were playing their own instruments and creating their own material—but perhaps excluding certain stylistic signatures, such as a focus on long instrumental passages in a quasi-symphonic or pseudo-classical style (‘prog-rock’). Or perhaps not.However, while the band I have in mind certainly played a lot of instrumental music, it can’t really be called prog-rock. Few of its members had formal musical education, and none of its original members had much to speak of, beyond a few desultory lessons and—in one case—a lot of self-study.Moreover, the sociological status of the term ‘classic rock’ has come to have precedence over its strictly musical meaning.Classic rock, like most if not all genres of popular music—hell, let’s just say ‘all’—is a concept that came into being after much of what we call ‘classic rock’ was actually made.It is, in part, a function of the way people think about those times. To the extent that there is a sort of popular idea of the late 60s and early 70s as a time of freedom and exploration (socially, musically and maybe even sexually speaking), classic rock is, to some extent, the soundtrack to that idea.In this respect, one of the defining classic rock bands is actually a fictional band: Stillwater, from Cameron Crowe’s movie Almost Famous, with Billy Crudup as the Visionary Lead Guitarist and Jason Lee as the Disgruntled Singer.Stillwater, with their heavy, bluesy, soul-inflected, hard rock sound, bundle up numerous classic rock tropes into one big ball.They combine bits of the Allman Brothers, Led Zeppelin, Bad Company, Free and maybe (in terms of their internal politics) the Beach Boys, and have the convenient extra factor of never having existed in the first place. (There was actually a 70s band called Stillwater, but this isn’t them.)But if the fictional Stillwater are so convincing a representation of what we think of as ‘classic rock’, it’s maybe because their music, or what we hear of it, slips down so relatively easily. It rocks, it’s fun, it’s relaxed yet energetic, and it hits exactly what the listener wants and expects to hear.Reader: This is all very amateur rock critic, Skippy. When are you going to get to the band?In a minute, child. In a minute.Classic rock, then, is defined in part by its familiarity. If it sounds kind of like we’ve heard it before, that’s partly why it’s classic.But that spectrum of familiarity has a tendency to narrow over time, as our memory of that period fades and becomes less nuanced.And so, the definition of ‘classic rock’ comes to exclude bands and musicians who were, at the time, perceived as being musicians on the scene like everyone else, but who, thirty or forty years later, don’t fit our purple-tinted sense of who, of that era, was ‘classic’, and who wasn’t. Even if, at the time, they were perceived by other musicians as being their peers and colleagues.Prologue over.It’s time to get to the music.The band I have in mind was 100% a product of the American scene. They couldn’t possibly have happened anywhere else.And yet most people who pride themselves on liking ‘classic rock’, especially if they were born after the era of classic rock, seldom if ever mention them.Their music doesn’t show up in the soundtracks of movies about the Vietnam war, or about middle-aged boomers reckoning with themselves in the 80s.There have been no hagiographical biopics, as with The Doors.No best-selling biographies. Few scandalous tales of rock excess, like The Who or Led Zeppelin.No tragic deaths at an early age, like The Beatles and The Who and The Doors and Led Zeppelin and Lynyrd Skynyrd and, well, you name it.(There is actually an early death associated with this band, but it falls outside the band’s own timeline.)They did not live on as a beloved cultural institution, like the Grateful Dead.They did not morph into an MTV-era hit machine beloved of supermarket radio, like what happened to Jefferson Airplane/Starship.The general cultural nostalgia that we associate with classic rock has somehow failed to glomp onto this band, and that’s why it has not turned them into instant signifiers of their time.Nor are they Aerosmith.I deliberately designed this answer so that the image in this answer that showed up in previews would be Aerosmith, partly in order to tease Aerosmith fans who thought that this answer would be about them, and partly in order to deflect attention away from the band this answer is really about.Ain’t I a stinker?No: this answer is about a band that most people have at least heard of, but very few casual fans of classic rock listen to.And yet, they were—for my money—one of the very greatest bands of their time.Certainly one of my top three favourites.So who were they?This unsavoury-looking bunch:The Mothers of Invention.There they are, outside the Whiskey a Go-Go in Los Angeles, on what was clearly a very wet day.Left to right: Roy Estrada (bass/vocals), Frank Zappa (guitar, vocals), Henry Vestine (guitar), Ray Collins (vocals), Jimmy Carl Black (drums).This is only one of the MoI’s many lineups.Henry Vestine didn’t last. He was hired in October 1965 and stayed for a few months, but by the time the band recorded its first album in March 1966, he had been replaced by Elliot Ingber. From the state of the weather in this picture, I assume it was winter ‘65–’66.This answer is about this band, not the various later iterations of the Mothers that Zappa fielded from 1971 until the mid-70s. I’m talking about the core of the original group, which consisted of Zappa, Estrada, Black and (to a great extent) Collins. That band was a unit from 1964 to 1969.That core group was soon augmented by other members: Ian Underwood (keyboards and sax), Bunk Gardner (woodwinds), Don Preston (keyboards), Art Tripp (drums and percussion), Billy Mundi (drums and percussion), James ‘Motorhead’ Sherwood (sax and general fooling about), but the guitar and rhythm section remained constant.This is the band that recorded the classic albums of the original Mothers of Invention, from 1966–1971: Freak Out!, Absolutely Free, We’re Only In It For The Money, Cruising with Ruben & The Jets, Uncle Meat, Burnt Weeny Sandwich and Weasels Ripped My Flesh.This is the band that, in my view, deserves to be removed from the more niche-y consideration of Frank Zappa music, and restored to people’s general sense of music history.The story of how the Mothers of Invention got together has been told and retold. But since this answer is for people who don’t know much or anything about them, here goes:The Soul Giants were a southern California bar band, playing covers in various dives in and around LA in the early 60s. Black and Estrada were the drummer and bassist.Their singer was Ray Collins, who had a fight with the band’s guitarist. The guitarist quit. The band needed a new one, so Collins approached a guy he knew who was working as a producer, songwriter and general music-maker, a tall, dry, sardonic misfit named Frank Zappa. Collins had worked with Zappa on a few unsuccessful singles.Zappa had started out as a marching band drummer in high school, and had then discovered modern classical music. He’d taught himself to compose by borrowing books from the library. His earliest efforts in modernist music had been studious but not very original. In the mid-50s he took up the guitar, inspired by a love of the spikier and more aggressive blues guitarists of the era: Guitar Slim, Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson.In the very early 60s, he worked for a while in an ad agency, to pay the bills.He wrote scores for a couple of low-budget movies, The World’s Greatest Sinner and Run Home Slow—and by ‘write scores’ I mean he wrote music and gave it to musicians to play. In 1963 he appeared on the Steve Allen Show, playing the bicycle, and put up with Allen’s incredulous mockery with deadpan good humour.(His brief first marriage dates from around this time.)He ran and indeed lived in a recording studio, Studio Z, where he learned the skills of recording, producing and tape editing. In 1965 he was prosecuted for conspiracy to create pornography—he’d actually faked the sounds of a sex act with a female collaborator, in response to a sting by a vice cop, and he served ten days in jail. He lost many recordings, became unable to pay the rent, and was evicted from the studio, which was torn down. He was left with a lifelong distrust of cops.In late 1965, he got the call from Collins to become the Soul Giants’ new guitarist. After inspecting the band, Zappa decided that they were ‘pretty good’, and set about convincing the other members that they should stop playing covers and start doing his songs.The sax player was the only member that refused and quit. Zappa renamed the band The Mothers, from the slang word motherf***ers, meaning that they were good musicians.Cultural & Historical Context, 1965:February: Assassination of Malcolm XMarch: ‘Bloody Sunday’: State Troopers attack civil rights protest marchers in Selma, Alabama; Operation Rolling Thunder commences (sustained US aerial bombardment of North Vietnam)August: Watts Riots in Los Angeles; Beatles, Shea Stadium concert; Cigarette advertising is banned on British TVMusic: Bob Dylan, Bringing It All Back Home; Beatles, Help! and Rubber Soul; The Who, My Generation; John Coltrane, A Love Supreme; Burl Ives, Have a Holly Jolly ChristmasLiterature: Philip K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch; Norman Mailer, An American Dream; Frank Herbert, Dune; Sylvia Plath, ArielFilm: The Sound of Music; Darling; What’s New Pussycat?; The Bedford Incident; For a Few Dollars MoreThe very earliest incarnation of the Mothers is captured on the posthumous album Joe’s Corsage, released by the Zappa family in 2004, but consisting of tapes of the Mothers of Invention recorded between c. 1964 and 1966:The Vestine-era recordings reveal a jangly garage band, tight and tuneful but not exactly world-beating. One song, ‘I’m So Happy I Could Cry’, is a conventional love ditty with a memorable melody but banal lyrics. It was actually based on an instrumental Zappa had recorded in 1961, as a Latin jazz number. Much later, he would rewrite the words.The earliest Mothers of Invention were something that Zappa would very quickly learn not to be: rather tentative and conventional. Zappa was trying to make commercially appealing music, but hadn’t yet figured out how to inject his own personality into it, let alone those of his band.Apparently it was less their music than their general demeanour that made them stand out. In 1967, Zappa recounted how, when the band first moved to L.A. in search of work, they expected to find a more vibrant scene than they actually found. Instead, most of the other bands were happy to ape the then-dominant style of San Francisco’s music:They were just plastic, folk rock, teenage, puker bands, but they were making a lot of bread. We came on the scene, we were loud, we were coarse and we were strange, and if anyone gave us any trouble we told them to fuck off. And we made our reputation doing it that way.And so, the band came to be discovered by producer Tom Wilson (Bob Dylan, Velvet Underground), who signed them to Verve.Cultural & Historical Context, 1966:April: Soviet probe Luna 10 becomes first manmade object to orbit the moon; Leonid Brezhnev becomes General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR;May: Pirate radio starts in UK; Moors Murders trial in UKJune: Vatican abolishes the Index of prohibited booksSeptember: Star Trek premieres on American TV; LSD is made illegal in the USAMusic: Beatles, Revolver; Bob Dylan, Blonde on Blonde; Beach Boys, Pet Sounds; Rolling Stones, Aftermath; John Coltrane, Ascension; Wayne Newton, Wayne Newton—Now!Literature: J.G. Ballard, The Crystal World; Bernard Malamud, The Fixer; Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49; Barbara Garson, MacBird!; Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin Vol. 1Film: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; A Man for All Seasons; Georgy Girl; Born Free; The Good, The Bad and The UglyFreak Out! (1966)Verve couldn’t release albums by a band called ‘The Mothers’. For some reason, they thought that ‘The Mothers Auxiliary’ would be a better name.Zappa had an inspiration. Out of necessity, as he put it, we became the Mothers of Invention.Freak Out! was their first album, and Zappa took the opportunity to emphasise how…different the band was, from all the other bands.For a start, the Mothers of Invention were not good-looking. Elliot Ingber was the most conventionally handsome member. He was fired by Zappa shortly after the album came out, after he went onstage stoned, and forgot to turn on his guitar amp.Zappa used his ad agency experience to highlight in the cover artwork the weirdness of the band; but the songs inside had also become stranger.The MoI’s main rivals on the LA music scene were the Doors, but the Doors in their marketing maximised the sex appeal of Jim Morrison, and their debut album was constructed so as to build to the trippy Oedipal raga-rock of ‘The End’.Freak Out! doesn’t have those kind of songs. The opening track, ‘Hungry Freaks, Daddy’, is a menacing slab of garage rock, with a riff that’s like the doomy minor-key cousin to the Stones’ louche ‘Satisfaction’:Mister America, walk on byYour schools that do not teachMister America, walk on byThe minds that won't be reachedHowever, this anthemic call to arms is undercut somewhat by the presence of a ‘horn section’ played entirely on kazoos.Further tracks created the impression that the music of this band wasn’t designed to slip down easily. ‘Go Cry On Somebody Else’s Shoulder’ was a lovingly crafted doo-wop song which seemed to be completely uninterested in getting back together with the girl to whom it was addressed—at least, until you got to the coda, where Zappa launched into a whiny monologue in a faux-Hispanic accent: Baby, I love you so much, darling…Why don't you dig me? I dig you, but you don't dig me…I don't understand what it is…I had my car re-upholstered…I got my hair processed…The rest of the songs were split between rather ominous, bad-tempered numbers like ‘I Ain’t Got No Heart’, ‘How Could I Be Such A Fool’ and ‘I’m Not Satisfied’, and crowdpleasing, chirpy, quasi-novelty songs like ‘Motherly Love’, ‘Anyway The Wind Blows’ and the kid-friendly ‘Wowie Zowie’. Zappa’s sleevenotes checked a whole bunch of his personal cultural heroes and sarcastic remarks about the material: This song is very greasy. You should not listen to it. You should wear it in your hair.The song that got them signed in the first place, ‘Trouble Every Day’, was a tumbling, electric-Dylanesque portrait of L.A. during the Watts riots, in which Zappa’s observations about social breakdown were interrupted by his piercing spoken comment You know something, people? I’m not black, but there’s a whole lots of times I wish I could say I ain’t white.The last two tracks, ‘It Can’t Happen Here’ and ‘Return of the Son of Monster Magnet’, were weird soundscapes set partly over skeletal grooves, in which the band seemed to be mumbling and joking and singing tunelessly at random. In fact, the latter was supposed to be an epic sound collage, but the record company refused to pay for the necessary overdubs.Freak Out! is, by Zappa’s later standards, a curiously homogenous album. It has a governing mood and sound: raucous, clanging guitars, a strangely unsettling combination of sung and spoken vocals (Ray Collins would sing the words and Zappa would speak them at the same time), a big, echoing sound. It was nominally produced by Wilson, but Zappa ran the session.It’s not hard rock, because hard rock hadn’t really been invented in 1966, but it is confrontational, in a way that other albums of that era really weren’t. ‘Satisfaction’ is a song that could be a soundtrack to a lifestyle: ‘Hungry Freaks, Daddy’ is more like a recruiting song to a totally different lifestyle. (‘Satisfaction’ is about me; ‘Hungry Freaks’ is addressed to you.)Freak Out! highly impressed rock fans and musicians. Paul McCartney would describe the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper, begun later the same year, as ‘our Freak Out!’But things were only going to get weirder.Absolutely Free (1967)Freak Out! had been a weird rock-pop record.Absolutely Free came across as a tightly segued montage of batshit insanity.Anybody else might have looked at Freak Out’s relative lack of commercial success in the US and played down the strangeness, and gone for hit singles. Zappa went in the opposite direction.The opening song, ‘Plastic People’, begins with an announcement that the President is about to speak. My fellow Americans, Ray Collins begins, and then he haltingly sings the riff from the Kingsmen’s perennial garage-rock hit ‘Louie Louie’: Doot doot doot. Doot doot. Doot doot doot.He’s been sick, Zappa informs us. His wife is going to bring him some chicken soup.And then we’re off. ‘Plastic People’ is like ‘Louie Louie’ turned into confrontational, Dadaist theatre:Take a dayAnd walk aroundWatch the nazisRun your townThen go homeAnd check yourselfYou think we're singing'Bout someone elseIn fact, in its earliest versions, ‘Plastic People’ actually was ‘Louie Louie’ with different lyrics. By the time of Absolutely Free, it’s become a stop-start, abstracted version of the earlier song, highlighting the drama rather than the groove.‘Duke of Prunes’ takes up much of the first side of the original vinyl, and features a soaring tune recycled from Zappa’s movie work, setting a bizarre lyric that mixes up love with prunes, sung by Ray Collins with wonderful open-throated sincerity:A moonbeam through the pruneIn JuneReveals your chestI see your lovely beansAnd in that magic go-kartI bite your neckThe song winds its way through another love song to vegetables before returning to the basic theme, and it starts to become clear that Zappa is taking the piss out of love songs:And I know(I think)The love I have for youWill never end!(Well...maybe)But what makes the song work is that the tune doesn’t mock the sentiments involved. ‘Duke of Prunes’ is a great melody, it just happens to be used in a song that can’t make up its mind how it feels about love.The album continues until this vein until its penultimate track, ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’, one of Zappa’s most full-on attacks on the psychosexual pathology of the American male.‘Brown Shoes’ is a rock & roll mini-oratorio about sexual repression in the kind of male specimen who fully accepts what American society offers him: Be a loyal plastic robot / For a world that doesn’t care, another Zappa lyric set to a heroic, overarching melody.As the song edges towards its protagonist’s grubbiest and most secret fantasies, the mood gets sweatier and nastier and the music more and more disjointed and atonal, until, when the protagonist’s innermost desires finally burst forth……in an inspired stroke on Zappa’s part, the music turns into a banal lounge-band boogie, with the most deliberately clichéd chord changes and a wonderfully smarmy performance from Collins on vocal, with the whole band cheerily singing along.And then the protagonist snaps out of his fantasies, and back to reality: Time to go home/Madge is on the phone/Got to meet the Gurneys and a dozen gray attorneys…It ends on the gloriously triumphant (but in context, deeply sinister) line, Life is such a ball / I run the world from city hall!The album as a whole ends with ‘America Drinks and Goes Home’, with Collins crooning a lounge ballad over the sound of a crowded bar, with talk and a pinging cash register. The singer works the crowd, as the whole spectacle of strangeness and creepiness on this album is shown up to be just another kind of entertainment:Monday night is the dance contest night: the Twist Contest...we're gonna give away peanut butter & jelly & baloney samwiches for all of ya. It really has been fun. I hope we've played your requests...the songs you like to hear...Absolutely Free is musically more varied than Freak Out!Zappa had recruited woodwind players, and the album is littered with quotes from previous music, and is more stylistically diverse than its predecessor. Sometimes it sounds like movie music played by a rock band; at other times it’s got echoes of Kurt Weill, and lounge jazz, and even straight-ahead rock. It’s the sound of a band that’s come a long way from its first album.It was recorded in November 1966, around when the Beatles were sequestering themselves in Abbey Road and working on what would become Sgt Pepper.The summer of love was coming.And Zappa would have to scramble to catch up.Cultural & Historical Context, 1967:April: Mass demonstrations in NYC and SF against the Vietnam War; Military coup in Greece leads to a right-wing military government; Expo 67 opens in Montréal, Canada;May: Six-Day War in Middle EastJuly: Riots in Newark, Minneapolis and DetroitAugust: Thurgood Marshall becomes first African-American Justice of the Supreme CourtNovember: President Johnson insists that the US is ‘making progress’ in the Vietnam WarMusic: Beatles, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; The Doors, The Doors; Jefferson Airplane, Surrealistic Pillow; Miles Davis, Miles Smiles; Duke Ellington, Far East Suite; The 5th Dimension, Up, Up and Away; Andy Williams, Love, AndyLiterature: S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders; Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America; Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock; McGough/Patten/Henri, The Mersey Sound; Desmond Morris, The Naked ApeFilm: Bonnie and Clyde; The Graduate; Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner; You Only Live Twice; Camelot; Billion Dollar BrainWe’re Only In It For The Money (1968)In early 1967, the Mothers decamped from L.A. to New York City and took up a residency in the Garrick Theatre, playing shows that combined music, Dadaism, comedy and theatre.During the Garrick period, the band tightened up its musicianship and the show became one of the things that people had to go and see. Jimi Hendrix came along one night, where Zappa reportedly introduced him to the wah-wah pedal.One night, early on, there were only three people in the audience, so the band dressed as waiters, obtained drinks and snacks from a nearby cafe, and talked to the audience for an hour and a half.Another night, there were about a dozen people in the audience. The Mothers of Invention asked them if they’d like to be the band for the evening. The audience was up for it, so the band gave them their instruments and sat in the stalls and let the audience entertain them.Another night, some US Marines came into the band’s rehearsal, wearing full dress uniform. Zappa asked them if they’d like to sing with the band. They said yes, so he told them to go and have a few drinks and come back at show time. They did, whereupon he got them onstage to sing Bob Dylan’s ‘Rainy Day Women ♯12 & 35’, with its chorus Everybody must get stoned.He then said ‘Why don’t you show these folks what you do for a living?’ handed them a large baby doll and said ‘Suppose you just pretend this is a “gook baby”.’The Marines tore the doll to shreds, and Zappa showed the doll parts to the audience.Nobody laughed.When not performing, Zappa spent the early months of 1967 working on a large project, part of which would become his first solo album Lumpy Gravy, and the other part of which were songs meant for the next Mothers of Invention album.But in May, the Beatles released Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.Zappa’s closest collaborator at this period was multi-instrumentalist Ian Underwood (see above, on the right), a brilliant keyboard and sax player who would continue to work with him well into the 1970s. Underwood recalled that Zappa’s reaction to Sgt Pepper was to immediately decide that he wanted to make some sort of answer record.The result, recorded over the course of the summer of 1967, was We’re Only In It For The Money, an album that did indeed turn out to be Sgt Pepper’s darker cousin.The relationship between them was made clear in the original artwork for Money:Zappa had the Mothers wear dresses, instead of the Beatles’ archly day-glo faux-military uniforms, and they posed in front of a collage that was more nightmarish than the Beatles’ pantheon of culture heroes. President Lyndon Johnson was represented twice; Lee H. Oswald is up in the top right, in the act of being murdered; the sky was a storm instead of a sunny day, etc.The band’s discoverer and former producer Tom Wilson is on the left, his hand inside his shirt; Jimi Hendrix, who was friends with Zappa, posed on the right. This artwork was deemed by the label to be inappropriate, and ended up on the inside of the album, after Zappa tried and failed to get Paul McCartney to give his personal blessing to the idea.I sometimes think that the best way to hear Money is the original mono mix on the CD boxed set Lumpy Money, played back on a cheap CD player to emulate the sound of the original album being played back on a cheap record player.We’re Only In It For The Money is Zappa’s response to the idea of a summer of love.Where Pepper is about love, Money is about self-delusion.The opening song ‘Who Needs the Peace Corps?’ features a monologue from Zappa, adopting a nerdy, milquetoast, college-freshman-type voice in character as a would-be hippy:First I'll buy some beadsAnd then perhaps a leather band to go around my headSome feathers and bells, and a book of Indian loreI will ask the Chamber Of Commerce how to get to Haight StreetAnd smoke an awful lot of dopeI will wander around barefootI will have a psychedelic gleam in my eye at all timesI will love everyoneI will love the police as they kick the shit out of me on the streetBut the whole album is not merely a relentless deflation of hippy naivety. ‘Mom and Dad’ is Zappa’s take on the general subject area of the Beatles’ ‘She’s Leaving Home’, being a sombre ode to the parents of a girl who’s been killed by the police.In the summer of 1967, the authorities in America hadn’t actually started shooting young people yet. That would happen a few years later (see below.) Zappa anticipated it in songs like ‘Mom and Dad’ and ‘Concentration Moon’, also from Money.Money is a strange, skittery album, with memorable songs but also loads of effects such as sped-up voices, which give it a peculiar air of nervous agitation. ‘Flower Punk’ is like ‘Hey Joe’ on cheap speed. In place of the Beatles’ epic anthem of transcendence ‘A Day in the Life’, there was a scorching piece of musique concrète, ‘The Chrome Plated Megaphone of Destiny’.Zappa wasn’t given to offering glimmers of hope and reassurance, but in the naggingly catchy ‘Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance’, he offered one of his few visions of a happier future:There will come a time when everybodyWho is lonely will be freeTo sing and dance and loveThere will come a time when every evil that we knowWill be an evil that we can rise aboveWho cares if you're so poor you can't afford to buy a pairOf Mod A-Go-Go stretch-elastic pantsThere will come a time when you can even take your clothes off when you dance‘Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance’ was what ‘I’m So Happy I Could Cry’ finally turned into. Same music, different words.And yet, for all the sharpness of its satire, and the impressive coherence of its overall sound and approach, We’re Only In It For The Money is the sound of Zappa reacting to something.He had temporarily lost the initiative: he was still operating with a mindset where it was important to take a stand on the issues of the day. This was not his natural tendency, which was to be off to one side, doing his own thing.We’re Only In It For The Money, recorded in 1967, wasn’t released until the following year, by which time the mood in America had darkened to the point that Zappa no longer looked like a party-pooper, more like a chronicler.He would deal with this in what would become a characteristic way: he moved sideways.Cultural & Historical Context, 1968:January: Tet Offensive in VietnamMarch: My Lai Massacre in VietnamApril: Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr; President Johnson signs Civil Rights Act; UK politician Enoch Powell makes ‘Rivers of blood’ speech, prophesying racial warJune: Assassination of Robert KennedyAugust: RNC nominates Richard Nixon for Republican presidential candidateOctober: Apollo 7, first manned Apollo missionDecember: Led Zeppelin play their first US showBeatles, The Beatles; Miles Davis, Nefertiti and Filles de Kilimanjaro; Sly & The Family Stone, Dance to the Music; Johnny Cash, At Folsom Prison; The Band, Music from Big Pink; Peter Brötzmann, Machine Gun; The Osmonds, The Wonderful World of the Osmond BrothersCruising with Ruben & The Jets (1968)Ruben & The Jets would later be described by Zappa as ‘my neo-classical album’.He was thinking of Stravinsky, who in the 1940s and 50s began to write music (e.g. the Dumbarton Oaks concerto) that emulated the general sound of classical-era music without being written the same way, or sounding quite like that music. (Somebody once said that Dumbarton Oaks sounded a bit like somebody had cut up the scores of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos and stuck them together again at random.)1968 was the year that blues-rock began to be a big thing, and rather than play the blues, Zappa went back to one of the other forms of popular music he’d loved as a teenager, namely doo-wop.Ruben & The Jets is a whole album of MoI-style neo-classical doo-wop, including some of the Mothers’ own earlier songs (‘You Didn’t Try To Call Me’, ‘I’m Not Satisfied’, ‘How Could I Be Such A Fool’) re-recorded in that style.The fact that the end result is highly enjoyable is because Zappa genuinely loved doo-wop, and understood it. He made full use of Ray Collins’ soaring tenor and bassist Roy Estrada’s eerie falsetto, himself supplying the bass voice and ‘low grumbles’. Some of the songs, such as ‘Fountain of Love’, are so eerily deadpan that it’s quite hard to spot the comic cracks in the facade. The last song, ‘Stuff Up The Cracks’, is a parody of doo-wop anguish that’s so straight-faced that it’s genuinely haunting: Stuff up the cracks, turn on the gas / I’m gonna take my life.Many years later in the 1980s, Zappa took Money and Ruben and re-recorded the bass and drum parts, replacing the plodding and earthy playing of Estrada and Black with the rich upright bass of Arthur Barrow and the more nimble drums of Chad Wackerman. He was unrepentant about this, claiming that the result just sounded better, but the fans were pissed off.The 90s CD re-release of Money restored the original parts, but Ruben had to wait till a special edition of the original 1968 version was released in the 2010s as Greasy Love Songs. The result is, to my ears, far superior than the ‘standard’ CD release: Estrada’s plunking bass and Black’s solid drumming have more character than their 80s stand-ins, and Ruben, in my opinion, is an album that shouldn’t sound too polished.The deliberately grubby and dishevelled air of MoI albums is one reason why they haven’t become slick accessories for 60s nostalgia: they’re too full of inconvenient reminders of the life behind the music-biz facade.But the ultimate facade-dropper was to come next.Uncle Meat (1968)In the summer of 1968, the band returned to L.A., where it recorded Uncle Meat.IMO the masterpiece of this lineup, Uncle Meat combines the best aspects of the foregoing albums in one rich, strange, exhilarating and disturbing package.It has bubbling instrumentals like the title theme and ‘Pound for a Brown on the Bus’, which would remain in Zappa’s repertoire for years.It has songs. Despite the title, ‘Dog Breath in the Year of the Plague’ is one of the happiest things Zappa ever wrote, a song you could actually put on while cruising around with your buddies.It has frantic, sped-up guitar solos; strange honking passages of abstract noise; a furious sax solo from Ian Underwood; ‘Louie Louie’ played on the Albert Hall pipe organ before an ecstatic London crowd; and crowning the whole thing, it has the epic blowing number, ‘King Kong’, in which the whole band, or at any rate the woodwinds, keyboards and guitar, get to blast the hell out of a naggingly catchy two-chord vamp in 3/8 time. ‘King Kong’ would later become the vehicle for some of the Zappa band’s most epic improvisations, but here it’s at its dirtiest and rawest.Uncle Meat was perhaps the first Mothers album that was widely regarded as a masterpiece. Ironically, it also showcases the band’s tensions—and when I say ‘showcase’, I don’t mean that if you know what to listen for, you can decipher certain hidden information.I mean that one track, ‘If We’d All Been Living in California…’, consists of a recording of an actual band meeting,where Black complains bitterly to Zappa that the band is ‘fucking starving, man’ and isn’t earning enough money, while Zappa responds by unhelpfully pointing out that they aren’t always going to earn the same money from one month to the next. Zappa was also the principal composer, meaning he took home more money than the rest of them, a fact he doesn’t address in the conversation—although the fact that he put it on the album at all is characteristic of his deadpan insistence on presenting the mundane truth about being a musician, rather than the glamorous image purveyed by most bands of the time.From the same period came Ahead of Their Time, a live album from the Royal Festival Hall in London in 1968, which wouldn’t be released until 1993.The first part was a sort of extended playlet, ‘Progress?’ that was half-written by Zappa and half-extemporised by the band themselves, in which half the band decide that they’re leaving to play serious music, while the other half angrily reject them.It included some comic vignettes that are still pretty funny even when you can’t see what’s going on. Jimmy Carl Black decides that he wants to go in search of girls. Zappa informs him Here in London you're not gonna get any pussy unless you look like a pop star, and duly has him decked out in Mod jacket…frilly mod neckpiece…Jimi Hendrix wig, whereupon Black gleefully plunges into the audience.This is followed by Roy Estrada coming onstage dressed as the Pope and throwing candy to the audience while chanting in Latin. He goes on to announce that he doesn’t feel like he’s qualified to be in the band: I think I’m holding the group back because I’m a Mexican. (Zappa confirmed in the liner notes that this was something that Estrada genuinely used to worry about.) Eventually the whole group comes together to sing Zappa’s anti-Nixon anthem ‘Agency Man’, and the rest of the album is a fine document of what a (Zappa phrase) ‘rocking teen combo’ the original Mothers of Invention could be.Ahead of Their Time shows how Zappa incorporated the group’s real interests and concerns into their performances: he sent them up, but he also let them be themselves.In November 1968, Ray Collins, who had quit before and come back, left for the last time. Zappa was disenchanted with Collins’ drug use, just as Collins was disgruntled by Zappa’s lack of interest in drug use.Cultural & Historical Context, 1969:January: Richard Nixon is inaugurated as President of the USAMarch: Eurovision Song Contest results in a four-way tie between Spain, Netherlands, UK and FranceJune: Stonewall riots in NYC, beginning of modern gay rights movement in USAJuly: Apollo 11 lands on MoonAugust: Vietnam War peace negotiations begin and are soon abandoned; Manson Family members kill Sharon Tate and others in Los Angeles; British troops are deployed in Northern IrelandOctober: Monty Python’s Flying Circus debuts on BBC TVDecember: Boeing 747 makes its first passenger flight; Hell’s Angels murder an audience member at the Rolling Stones free concert at Altamont Speedway in CaliforniaBeatles, Abbey Road; MC5, Kick Out the Jams; Glen Campbell, Galveston; King Crimson, In the Court of the Crimson King; Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin; Miles Davis, In a Silent Way; The 5th Dimension, The Age of Aquarius; Rolling Stones, Let It BleedThe band continued to play and record through 1969.But towards the end of that year, Zappa fired the remaining members of the original lineup. He had grown tired of their limitations as musicians, and with paying them a salary when they weren’t performing.In 1970, two more Mothers of Invention albums emerged from Zappa’s ever-increasing vault. (Like Duke Ellington, Zappa was always writing and recording. He seems to have never taken holidays.)Burnt Weeny Sandwich (1970)The title came from a snack that Zappa would prepare for himself during long nights in the studio: a hot dog cooked (indeed, scorched) over the open flame of a gas burner, and then eaten between two slices of bread. (Apparently his preferred brand was Hebrew National kosher beef franks.)The album is mostly studio, mostly instrumental: a rich and enjoyable display of Zappa’s increasing compositional skills. Most of side two is taken up by the epic ‘Little House I Used To Live In’, which would be heavily cannibalised for the live show of future versions of the Mothers. It’s also adorned by the scorching electric violin of the great Don ‘Sugarcane’ Harris, who would briefly become a Zappa collaborator at this period.Cultural and Historical Context, 1970:April: Apollo 13 experiences an onboard explosion and successfully returns to Earth without landing on the moonMay: Kent State shootings: four students killed by National Guardsmen at Kent State University in Ohio; Jackson State shootings: two students killed by city and state police in Jackson State College, MississippiJune: US ground troops withdraw from CambodiaSeptember: Death of Jimi HendrixOctober: FLQ in Canada kidnaps UK diplomat James Cross and Quebec minister Pierre Laporte, beginning ‘October Crisis’December: The North Tower of the World Trade Center is completed; Beatles split upMusic: The Jackson 5, ABC; Deep Purple, Deep Purple In Rock; Funkadelic, Free Your Mind…And Your Ass Will Follow; Carpenters, Close To You; David Bowie, The Man Who Sold The World; The Partridge Family, The Partridge Family Album; Miles Davis, Bitches BrewLiterature: Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye; Ted Hughes, Crow; Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch; Robin Morgan (ed.), Sisterhood is Powerful; Maurice Sendak, In the Night KitchenFilm: Love Story; Airport; Tora! Tora! Tora!; Patton; Little Big Man; Zabriskie PointAfter that came an album that’s very close to my heart, as it happens to be the first Mothers album that I bought (in 1994 or so):Weasels Ripped My Flesh (1970)If Burnt Weeny Sandwich was the Mothers being disciplined players of complex and beautiful music, Weasels was in large part the sound of them going flat-out bonkers onstage.‘Didja Get Any Onya?’ features Ray Collins’ replacement, future Little Feat founder Lowell George, telling a bizarre and inconsequential story in a fake German accent, interspersed with strange cries and groans from the other members, frantic riffage, odd silences. A cover of Little Richard’s ‘Directly From My Heart To You’, sung and played by Don Harris on vocals and violin, is one of the most devastating late 60s blues ever recorded, with Harris’ scratchy but virtuosic violin a must for anyone who’s ever had enough of blues guitar.The whole album is a fantastic mixed bag of live unpredictability and studio polish. ‘The Eric Dolphy Memorial Barbecue’ is one of Zappa’s more delicate, balanced compositions, and its title belies the common misconception that he had no time for jazz: Dolphy, who was fascinated by the same composers as Zappa, was a musician who could very well have sat in with the Mothers.‘My Guitar Wants To Kill Your Mama’ is a funny and anthemic teen-rock number. The last three tracks are a fitting farewell to this version of the band: ‘Oh No’ is like an afterthought to Money, Zappa’s answer-song to Beatles numbers like ‘Within You Without You’ and ‘All You Need Is Love’, a plangent but serious plea for a little more realism about what you need to do to change the world, beautifully sung by Ray Collins:Oh no, I don't believe itYou say that you think you know the meaning of love?You say love is all we needYou say with your love you can changeAll of the fools, all of the hateI think you're probably out to lunch‘Oh No’ segues into an instrumental, ‘The Orange County Lumber Truck’, recorded months later and in another country, and they fit together so well that Zappa almost always played the two numbers together in future.Finally, the title track is two minutes of blistering feedback, live onstage in Birmingham, UK: a suitable kiss-off for a band that always aimed to challenge its audience.After it abruptly cuts out, Zappa says, with an audible smile, Goodnight, boys and girls…thank you for coming to our concert, as we would tell nearly every audience at every show for the rest of his career.After breaking up the original band, Zappa went on recording (including his highly-rated second solo album Hot Rats) and reformed the Mothers, keeping only Underwood but adding two new singers: Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan, formerly of the Turtles (‘Happy Together’):Volman and Kaylan brought an exuberant, pop-star energy to the job, but that band lies outside the scope of this answer.The new Mothers toured extensively throughout 1971 until disaster struck, twice.In a gig at the Montreux Casino, a fan fired a flare pistol, setting the venue on fire. It was evacuated without anyone getting hurt, but the band’s equipment was destroyed. A few days later, playing at London’s Rainbow theatre on rented gear, Zappa was performing away when a fan clambered on stage and—for no very convincing reason—shoved him into the orchestra pit. Zappa suffered multiple broken bones and a crushed larynx, noticeably dropping the pitch of his singing voice.He was off the road for over a year.Zappa would revisit the original Mothers of Invention years later, with the first disc of his 1992 live compilation, You Can't Do That on Stage Anymore, Vol. 5. It gave an expanded look at how experimental and playful the band could be.Since Zappa’s death in 1993, his family has released various CDs of original mixes and extra material. The MoFo Project-Object is basically ‘The Making of Freak Out!’, just as Lumpy Money is a similar look at Money and Zappa’s dazzling first solo album Lumpy Gravy, and Greasy Love Songs and Meat Light do the same for Ruben & The Jets and Uncle Meat respectively.The death in 2015 of Gail Zappa has not noticeably slowed down the release of posthumous Zappa material. But really, the casual listener who wants to hear how Zappa first unleashed his music on the world only needs to listen to the above six albums—because, beyond that, it’s a matter of picking and choosing.There was originally a bit, here, about what became of all the original Mothers of Invention.I cut it, because all stories end in death (or disgrace) if you make them go on long enough, and it seemed too downbeat a note to end on.This was supposed to be an answer that celebrated a band, not a lament for them.The Mothers of Invention were a band that challenges our ideas of what classic rock could be.They didn’t conceive their music as music to get high to, and yet that’s exactly what many people did with their music. (In London in the late 60s, Zappa was supposedly handed a bag of marijuana by a fan: he stared at it, puzzled, until one of his entourage took it off him. Zappa’s favourite drugs, by far, were caffeine and nicotine.)They may have begun in a rather conventional way, offering mildly ironic ditties for the kids to groove to, but they soon became something quite different. They opened up a window on their time, in a way that few other bands of their time attempted to emulate.Rather than lull people into a trance with bludgeoning blues-rock riffage, or ritual worship of the Lizard King, or cosmic explorations of directionless jamming, or songs about how groovy everything could be if only people were more groovy—rather than sound like most of what we think of as classic rock—they tried to wake people up.On the track ‘The Little House I Used To Live In’, from Burnt Weeny Sandwich, there’s a snippet from a UK live show. Zappa has just introduced the next song, when an irate man in the audience starts yelling about the security guards in ‘uniforms’ stationed in the auditorium.Zappa pauses and then dryly comments:Everyone in this room is wearing a uniform, and don’t kid yourself.Don’t kid yourself might have been Zappa’s motto as a musician and as an entertainer.There were times, perhaps, especially later in his solo career, when he took a certain sadistic relish in rubbing people’s noses in the dirt. The 1981 album You Are What You Is is mostly four sides of relentless snark, with none of his melodic genius or improvisational freedom or leftfield strangeness. (As the Reagan era kicked in, Zappa was jolted out of his early 80s torpor and began making scalding music again.)But the Mothers of Invention, the original vehicle for his aspirations and a unique and singular bunch of dudes, never made a bad record, and never made a record that sounded like any of their other records. Or like anyone else’s records, for that matter.In literature, ‘classic’ used to mean (and sometimes still means) not stuff we really like to the point where we can’t be critical of it, but stuff that should a model/example/inspiration for how to do this kind of thing.It’s in that sense, the sense in which we still haven’t taken on board what the MoI did, that I offer, for your consideration, as the ultimate underrated classic rock band,Ladies and gentlemen, for your consideration, from Los Angeles, California:The Mothers of Invention.Back row, l to r: Billy Mundi; Pamela Zarubica (friend of the band whose spoken word is on some of their albums); Roy Estrada; Ian Underwood; Jim Black; Ray Collins. Front row: Don Preston; Frank Zappa; Bunk Gardner.Thanks for reading.Sources:Frank Zappa and Peter Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, Picador, 1989Ben Watson, Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play, Quartet, 1995