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According to fighters who fought them, Wilder’s power is impressive, a true one hitter quitter - but he is not the single shot hitter Earnie Shavers was. The plain fact is Wilder, who has faced the worst competition of any heavyweight champion in history, has not knocked out a top ranked fighter (his best knockout was 197th ranked) while Earnie Shavers knocked out 3 of the top 100 fighters of all time!CREDIT PICTURE THE FIGHT CITYHistory’s greatest trainer used to sneer at KO percentages as a test of a fighter’s power. Jack Blackburn was quoted in Joe Louis as saying he could take a low level journeyman and get him to 20–0 with 20 early KO’s simply by booking him with cooks and cab drivers.Who has Deontay Wilder actually fought?Given that, let us take a long look at who Deontay Wilder has actually fought. Luis Ortiz is paraded as a good fighter - he is actually ranked the #197th best fighter of all time by Boxrec!Wilder is fighting a bunch of bums, (quite literally), and second, his 93% KO rate is not that much better than other great KO artists. Vitali Klitschko, who fought MUCH better competition, has an 87% KO rate. George Foreman, in his first career, had a 92% KO rate against infinitely better competition, including three Hall of Famers.Of Wilder’s opponents, only Fury is ranked in the top 100, and he got up and fought Wilder to a draw most people thought he won in their first fight, and stomped a mudhole in Wilder in their second fight.Tyson Fury summed up Wilder’s opponents other than himself:Tyson Fury said bluntly:“Wilder fought 35 bums…37 actually…Stiverne the first time he turned up came to fight…And then he’s fought Ortiz and Ortiz is 147 years-old, everybody knows that…But, he still gave him a good fight. So there’s two men, out of all of those men.”Tyson Fury: Deontay Wilder fought 34 bums, won’t want a rematch | WBN - World Boxing NewsGeorge Foreman said:“It's hard to say Wilder is the biggest puncher] of all-time. Joe Louis was the biggest knuckle-cruncher there is."George went on to say Mike Tyson and Joe Frazier hit harder than Wilder as well.Tyson Fury told Boxing News:“I’ve felt the power (of Deonaty Wilder), ain’t so bad. Ain’t so bad.Not only is Wilder not the hardest hitting heavyweight of all time, he isn’t the hardest hitting fighter today - a lightweight and a junior middleweight both demonstrated greater power than Wilder!Inside PBC Boxing decided to have Wilder take a punching bag challenge on a punching machine, and he registered a 927. Lightweight champion Gervonta Davis, also present, registered a 939 on the same machine.Junior Middleweight Jarrett Hurd scored 935 to Wilder’s 927.So Wilder doesn’t hit as hard as lightweight Tank Davis or light middleweight Jarrett Hurd, let alone hit as hard as Earnie Shavers or Sonny Liston.Tyson Fury, knocked down twice by Wilder dismissed his power, saying:“He can’t even keep a 50-year-old man off of his back…He can’t even keep a 50-year-old down."There is no comparing Wilder’s record to Earnie Shavers’ record favorablyLet us take a look at Wilder’s opponents as ranked by Boxrec, and compare them with Earnie Shavers, and the best way to compare eras is to use Boxrec’s computer rankings. Their system is not foolproof, it has flaws, but it is the best, most objective, attempt to rank fighters across time, factoring in quality of opposition, et al.Wilder has only five opponents, other than Fury, ranked in the top 1,000!#197 Luis Ortiz#251 Bermane Stiverne#414 Chris Arreola#580 Johnny Duplass#632 Dominic BreazealeWilder has fought one in the top 100, and did not beat him, let alone knock him out. Only five of his other opponents were even in the 1,000!Earnie Shavers competition:#1 Muhammad Ali (said he couldn’t move after Earnie hit him but beat him)#6 Larry Holmes (put him down but Larry managed somehow to get up and win)#26 Ken Norton (knocked him out)#42 Jerry Quarry (beat him)#42 Jimmy Ellis (knocked him out)#67 Jimmy Young (knocked him out first fight, Jimmy ran for his life in the rematch)Earnie fought 6 top 100 fighters, knocking out 3 of them!That beats the hell out of Wilder’s record.Anthony Mason, boxing writer, said:“I think the only way to fairly rank a boxer's place in history is by comparing their résumés. And that does not mean just wins and losses - it is too easy today to fight only has beens or never will be's, and run up the record.”And how many fighters has Wilder beaten in the top 100?ZERO.Wilder had fought, up until Fury, a bunch of bums, (quite literally).Lennox Lewis had this to say about Wilder, his bragging, and his competition:“My thoughts are that it’s easy to talk until you actually get in the ring…”There is a good reason Wilder is ranked #64 of all time - Wilder has fought the worst competition of any heavyweight champion ever. EVER, and he cannot boxHe has fought only one fighter in the top 100, and did not beat him. Only 5 of his other opponents are in the top 1000, and they are #’s 197, 251, 414, 580 and 632.I also don’t think most fans realize how historically bad his fundamentals are. His trainer was right when he said Deontay was worse fundamentally than he was when he was 11.What does Wilder have, since he has fought terrible competition, the worst ever for a champion, and he has extremely poor boxing fundamentals?Power, athleticism, and more power.Wilder, though not the best all time puncher the fanboys paint him, does have a legitimate one hitter quitter. He is long, with an 83 inch reach, quick, fearless, and can punch. That covers up a lot of flaws - until he runs into someone who can actually fight.Who was Earnie Shavers?In an interview, the retired Shavers said it himself::“Only God hits harder than me. Only God. That’s it.”Earnie Dee Shavers was born August 31, 1945, in Garland, Alabama, to a dirt poor sharecropping family. It was not a good time, Shavers used to recollect, to be born Black in the south.At five years old, Earnie and his family fled their sharecropping farm, and the town of Garland, Alabama, one hundred miles northeast of Mobile, to escape the Ku Klux Klan. Earnie doesn’t remember all of what happened, but the deadly and vicious reputation of the Klan forced his family to flee, after his father had gotten in debt to one of the Klansmen, and was unable to pay.Shavers would say in later years:“At five, we moved to Ohio. best thing that ever happened to me, [recalled Shavers in his book “Welcome to the Big Time.]”Shavers explained his power thusly:“I grew up on a farm and that’s what made me strong. Chopping trees increases your hand and back muscles, chopping wood for the winter, thousands of trees, tossing bales of wheat. Every young man should spend a few years on a farm.”Earnie did not start boxing until 22, and he never became much of a ring technician. But Lord, could he hit!What do other fighters who got hit by Earnie Shavers say? They say his power was unrivaled, period.There is always debate, but interestingly, the debate has never been among fighters, it has been among boxing writers, who love to parse records.What do real experts, fighters, say about how hard he hit? The ones best able to offer an opinion were the great fighters who had the joy of being hit by Shavers - what did they say? What did the great trainers say who had to prepare for him? What did the Hall of Fame writers and historians who watched him fight say?Hall of Fame and all time greats Ali and Holmes both said Shavers power, especially his one punch power, was simply unrivaled. But they, and others, also said a lot more...Earnie Shavers was a puncher, but he couldn’t always take a punch. He was punched out by Ron Lyle, Jerry Quarry, and Ron “The Bluffs Butcher” Stander, a Nebraska beer drinker who was more of a bar room brawler than a puncher. He was outpointed by two journeymen, Bob Stallings and Stan Johnson, and he had a 10-round draw with Jimmy Young not long after he knocked Young out senseless in their first meeting.So why was he so feared, and was he, the hardest puncher of all time?Angelo Dundee, the great trainer, said:“Earnie wasn't really a good boxer, but God, his power was amazing."Earnie Shavers himself said, chuckling:“Only God hits harder than me, Only God. That’s it.”Real fighters knew enough to avoid him. His incredible one punch power made him more than dangerous.Real fighters knew enough to avoid him. His incredible one punch power made him more than dangerous.George Foreman told him personally when Earnie lobbied for a fight:“Hell no."Joe Frazier told Shavers bluntly when Shavers asked him for a shot:“No way, Earnie.”And when fighters had to meet him, they left in awe.Tex Cobb said:“Earnie could punch you in the neck with his right hand and break your ankle, if a man hit any harder than Earnie I'd shoot him."Muhammad Ali said after his match with Shavers:“Earnie hit me so hard, he shook my kinfolk back in Africa"Ron Lyle:“Hey man, that's the hardest I've ever been hit in my life. And George Foreman could punch, but none of them could hit like Earnie Shavers did. When he hit you, the lights went out. I can laugh about it now, but at the time it wasn't funny."James "Quick" Tillis said:“Shavers hit so hard he turned horse piss into gasoline! He hit me so hard he brought back tomorrow. When he hit me… I was seeing pink rats and cats and animals smoking cigarettes. I was in the land of make-believe." He said when asked later about his comments, "the baddest motherf***er I fought was Earnie Shavers. That motherf***er can make July into June and made me jump over the motherf***in' moon. That motherf***er hit so hard, he'll bring back tomorow. He hit me so hard, I thought I was on the corner smoking cigarette and eating a spam sandwich. That's how hard that motherf***er hit."Larry Holmes, comparing Shavers to Tyson, said:“Earnie hit me harder than any other fighter, including Mike Tyson. He hit me and I was face down on the canvas hearing saxophonist Jimmy Tillis."Jimmy Young, who was knocked cold by Shavers in his first fight, but survived the second, said:“I was not gonna get tagged by him again, no sir!"Joe Bugner, in his book “Joe Bugner: My Story,” said that the hardest puncher he had ever faced was Earnie Shaver:“Nobody ought to be able to hit that hard, nobody.”Nor were fighters and trainers the only ones who saw and marveled at Shavers sheer overwhelming power.Hall of Fame sports journalist Jerry Izenberg said of Shavers:“Rarely did Earnie hit anyone below the neck; he was a headhunter and a good one. For me, Shavers was the greatest one-punch hitter I have ever seen. When he floored Larry Holmes (in his second fight with Holmes) I thought Holmes was dead.”The guys who were on the receiving end of Shavers power, Golden Age fighters of the best generation of heavyweights ever, said no human being ever hit any harder...and it was not overrated.Nor were fighters and trainers the only ones who saw and marveled at Shavers sheer overwhelming power.Hall of Fame sports journalist Jerry Izenberg said of Shavers:“Rarely did Earnie hit anyone below the neck; he was a headhunter and a good one. For me, Shavers was the greatest one-punch hitter I have ever seen. When he floored Larry Holmes (in his second fight with Holmes) I thought Holmes was dead.”The guys who were on the receiving end of Shavers power, Golden Age fighters of the best generation of heavyweights ever, said no human being ever hit any harder...and it was not overrated.After retirement, Shavers found the Lord and became a born-again Christian. He began speaking at rallies all over the world. Following his ordainment, he began ministering in the American Southwest and then moved to England.In 2013 Earnie wrote his second book, “Only God Hits Harder”: A Life of Earnie ShaversPreparing for the publication, Earnie said:“I thank the Lord a million times that I’m changed and in perfect health. I’m in great shape. Since I was 22, I’ve been taking care of myself. I’m even going to be a spokesperson for one of the best products I’ve ever used. All I can say is that it’s just for men. The next 90 days, there will be a lot of change in my life. And I’ve never felt this good since I was 22.”Earnie Shavers and Sylvester StalloneSylvester Stallone as he prepared to cast Rocky III asked Shavers if he would spar with him as part of the actor’s preparation for the movie. Stallone even flirted with the idea of casting Shavers in the role of James “Clubber” Lang.Shavers taught Stallone the difference between a real fighter and a movie fighter. At their first meeting, when Stallone asked him to spar, Shavers was careful not to hurt him, and only threw soft jabs. But Stallone, convinced he was really a tough guy, begin yelling at Earnie “to open up.” Shavers then threw one real punch to Stallone’s stomach, which sent him off to the bathroom vomiting.Earnie explained his experience auditioning thusly:“Stallone was a very nice guy. He kept saying, “‘You can’t hold back, make it look realistic. Open up. Open up, I want realistic.’ After he recovered, he flew me home, first class. His brothers were really good to me too.”In recent years, Shavers involved himself with children’s charities in England, where he lives, and lectured there to kids on the value of making right decisions.Finally, while Shavers tops Wilder, neither Wilder nor Shavers matches the pure brute punching power of Sonny ListonFighters who faced Sonny Liston described him with awe, Sonny was described as some sort of superman.Rocky Marciano said of Liston:“He isn't faking his toughness, and his strength is just something you got to see, and that jab, he can knock a man out with the jab!"Sonny Liston knocked out tough fringe contender Wayne Bethea in 1958 in 69 seconds of the first round. Liston dropped Bethea for the first time in his career, (he had slipped against Nino Valdes the fight before), knocking out 7 teeth, with 9 more broken! 16 teeth knocked out or broken with one punch!Bethea was never the same again. saying:“He must have hit me with a horseshoe in his glove!"Zora Folley, then #1 contender for the heavyweight title, said when Liston hit him:“The lights went out, when I woke up, I asked Sonny, what happened, and he said ‘I hit you.’”Foley said later:“I was lucky, Sonny didn't dislike me, so he just beat me up a little. Ain't a man that walks this earth stronger than Sonny Liston."Nino Valdes, as he lay dying from cancer, drugged heavily with morphine, was asked by his family if it hurt, and said:“Not as bad as getting hit by Sonny Liston!"Cleveland Williams, after almost dying from a police shooting, was asked how bad it hurt, and said:“Not as bad as fighting Sonny Liston! No human being hits as hard as Sonny Liston."When Sonny was getting ready to get out of prison in 1950, in order to showcase his potential - he had never had an amateur or pro fight - the prison athletic director, Father Stephens, arranged to bring in a rising St. Louis heavyweight named named Thurman Wilson, who was 5-2-1 as a pro, to showcase Liston's potential. Wilson expected no trouble with a man who had never had a sanctioned fight, amateur, or professional. The story is that after two rounds, (the exhibition was scheduled for 4) Wilson quit saying:“Better get me out of this ring, he is going to kill me."Thurman Wilson never fought again after the beating by Liston.Nor was that the only time Sonny hit men with unbelievable power that eclipse's anything anyone else has done - in the mid 60's, Sonny sparred with Ray Shoeninger in Denver, and he hit him with a jab so hard, the stitching in Ray's protective headgear literally tore and the headgear came apart with the blow, which getting through, knocked out three teeth!Sonny's first pro fight lasted 33 seconds: Liston leveled Don Smith with his first punch - which was a left jab, and Smith was out for 3 minutes!From February of 1959, to his march to the title, Sonny decimated the top ten ratings, knocking out 8 out of the top 10 contenders. Only Ingemar Johansson and Henry Cooper, of those fighters rated in the top ten during Liston’s prime years, escaped beatings by him - and they declined to fight him.Only Eddie Machen survived all 12 rounds, when asked how, he said in later years:“So I ran for my life.”His opponents during this period had a combined record of four hundred nineteen wins with only ninety-nine losses. (Bear in mind that thirteen of those losses came to Liston himself.)NO other fighter in history has destroyed the top 10 the way Sonny did.Ingemar Johannson later co-promoted Sonny’s fights in Sweden, after Ali 2. When asked why he never fought Sonny himself, Johannson quipped that he had no intention of ever doing so, but he would cheerfully promote other men getting beat up by Sonny.Floyd Patterson never, at any point, believed he actually could win against Liston.Patterson was so convinced he would lose he brought a disguise to the arena:“So I could get out of the place without anyone seeing how humiliated I was going to be."In fact, Patterson wore a fake beard and mustache while fleeing in shame from Comiskey Park and Chicago after his crushing defeat.Boxing writer Charles Farrell wrote that:“I asked Floyd (Patterson) who the hardest puncher he’d ever faced was. I thought I knew the answer. But Patterson surprised me. “Ingemar Johansson.” (Patterson said) “But Floyd," i said, "you fought Liston twice. Ingemar Johansson?” Floyd smiled sadly, according to Farrell. “Oh, but when I fought Ingemar, I thought I was going to win. And of course against Sonny…”Nor was Sonny’s incredible power reserved for the ring:Jonathan Eig recounted in Ali: A Life:“Sonny once started a fight with a cop, beat the cop senseless, snatched his gun, picked him up and dumped him in an alley,Eig recounted:“[Sonny] then walked away smiling, wearing the cop's hat."Arrested 19 times, in prison twice, Sonny once took a gun away from a police officer who was harassing him, beat the officer and broke his knee. On another occasion when he was again being harassed, an enraged Sonny took the officer, disarmed him, slapped him unconsicious, then literally picked him up over his head, and hurled him into a trash bin.Sir Henry Cooper, the European and British heavyweight Champion who twice fought Ali, and had a who's who of opponents in the 50's and 60's, had one name glaringly missing from his resume: Sonny Liston. When asked why, Sir Henry said:“I don't even want to see him walking down the street, let alone in a gym!"Now that is power….CREDIT TO:Boxrec for stats, records, rankingsAli: A Life by Jonathan EigBoxing legend Roy Jones Jr. takes issue with Deontay Wilder's reaction to defeatBradley and Ward: Where does Wilder go from here? Is Fury ready for Joshua?Breaking down Wilder-Fury II and what's next for the heavyweight divisionBy George by George ForemanCox’s Corner and Monte CoxGods of War by Springs ToedoHas Deontay Wilder been exposed? | DAZN News USFloyd Patterson: The Fighting Life of Boxing's Invisible Champion by W. K. StrattonJoe Louis by Joe LouisListon and Ali: The Ugly Bear and the Boy Who Would Be King by Bob MeesMuhammad Ali: His Life and Times by Thomas HauserSonny Liston - Skills - Reemus BoxingSonny Liston: His Life, Strife and the Phantom Punch by Rob SteenThe Arc of Boxing: The Rise and Decline of the Sweet Science: Mike Silver, Foreword by Budd Schulberg: 9780786493876: Amazon.com: BooksTony Bellew explains why he thinks Anthony Joshua would beat Tyson FuryTyson Fury: Deontay Wilder fought 34 bums, won't want a rematch | WBN - World Boxing News - Boxing News, Reports and InterviewsWelcome to the Big Time by Earnie Shavers

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

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