#bunk gardner

The Mothers of Invention We’re Only in It for the Money [SACD] 2005 Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab ——————————————————————— Tracks: 01. Are You Hung Up? 02. Who Needs the Peace Corps? 03. Concentration Moon 04. Mom & Dad 05. Bow Tie Daddy 06. Harry, You’re a Beast 07. What’s the Ugliest Part of Your Body? 08. Absolutely Free 09. Flower Punk 10. Hot Poop 11. Nasal Retentive Calliope Music 12. Let’s Make the Water Turn Black 13. The Idiot Bastard Son 14. Lonely Little Girl 15. Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance 16. What’s the Ugliest Part of Your Body? (Reprise) 17. Mother People 18. The Chrome Plated Megaphone of Destiny ———————————————————————

Dave Aerni

Jimmy Carl Black

Paul Buff

Roy Estrada

Bunk Gardner

Gary Kellgren

Don Preston

Euclid James Sherwood “Motorhead”

Ian Underwood

Frank Zappa

Billy James: Necessity Is ... The Early Years of Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention (2001)

There have been countless books written about musical iconoclast Frank Zappa and I've read (almost too) many of them, but Billy James' Necessity Is … is the only one focused specifically on his original group, The Mothers of Invention.

Thus named because The Motherf***kers wasn't passing muster with record label A&R reps (and, as we know "necessity is the mother of invention"), the ever-expanding freaks who backed Zappa between 1964 and 1970 were, unlike most of his future groups, a lot more than sidekicks.

Rather, they were true Freak accomplices, who quickly evolved from basic rock and R&B combo to a free-form proposition able to play and improvise jazz, soul, doo wop, psychedelia, classical, and avant-garde music at their taskmaster conductor's beck and call.

At the same time, the band's irreverent approach to it all and Frank’s brutally cynical intellect were so innovative and unprecedented that their musical and personal antics influenced countless future bands and contemporaries -- even The Beatles, whose Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band The Mothers parodied, in turn, with We're Only in it for the Money, pictured above.

So, if names like Ray Collins, Roy Estrada, Jimmy Carl Black, Don Preston, Bunk and Buzz Gardner, Billy Mundi, Art Tripp, Euclid James 'Motorhead' (no umlauts) Sherwood, Ian and Ruth Underwood, Flo and Eddie, elicit your fond affection, this book is for you.

James interviews many of them, finally giving them a chance to tell their stories, their perspectives, and to reminisce about each album, each wild adventure, each other, and, of course, their brilliant and (now and then) beneficent dictator, Frank Zappa.

Featured Record:

The Mothers of Invention: We’re Only in it for the Money (1968)

The Mothers of Invention: Absolutely Free (1967)

There’s no question that 1966’s Freak Out! was a seminal debut that introduced the world to the twisted musical mutations of The Mothers of Invention and the iconoclastic vision of their leader, Frank Zappa, but I feel its breakthroughs were immediately improved upon by the next year’s Absolutely Free.

Released 55 years ago this month, The Mothers’ sophomore outing took Zappa’s pointed rock ‘n’ roll satire and jaundiced view of psychedelia to new extremes; a place where cynical, razor-sharp social commentary shared these vinyl grooves with absurdly titled songs like “Call Any Vegetable.”

The tracks themselves were recorded in just four days, in November of ‘66, but the mixing process stretched on for several months (not least because Zappa was simultaneously working on his ambitious solo debut Lumpy Gravy) as songs were blended and strung together to comprise two mini-suites:

On side one, this was dubbed Absolutely Free: #1 in a Series of Underground Oratorios and, on side two, The Mothers of Invention’s American Pageant: #2 in a Series of Underground Oratorios. 

In order to pull this off, Zappa augmented the original Mothers (himself on vocals and guitar, singer Ray Collins, bassist Roy Estrada, drummer Jimmy Carl Black) with second drummer Billy Mundi, keyboardist Don Preston, Bunk Gardner on assorted woodwinds and, replacing the departed Elliott Ingber, a guitarist named Jim Fielder who left so fast he wasn’t even credited on the LP.

Their contributions immediately raised the original group’s ‘game’ and permitted Zappa to flesh out his compositional palette on generally quite brief, but densely augmented tracks like “Plastic People,” “Status Back Baby,” and “America Drinks and Goes Home.”

Absolutely Free also contains some of Zappa’s loveliest melodies (don’t laugh) and most enduring musical themes: songs like “The Duke of Prunes” and “Brown Shoes Don’t Make It” (which producer Tom Wilson described as a “condensed two-hour musical”) that future iterations of The Mothers and even symphony orchestras would frequently revisit and reinvent.

And Zappa insisted on surreptitiously quoting his favorite avant-garde classical composers in cuts like “Amnesia Vivace,” “Soft-Sell Conclusion” (Stravinsky), and the album’s genre-fusing tour de force, “Invocation & Ritual Dance of the Young Pumpkin” (Stravinsky, Holst).

Oh yeah, and “Louie Louie.”

All this scared the living shit out of Verve/MGM, which decided to edit the album libretto without informing Frank (who was understandably furious), by changing lyrics like “I’d like to make her do a nasty on the White House lawn” with “I’d like to make her do the crossword puzzle on the back of TV Guide.”

And yet, Frank was only warming up his pen for The Mothers’ most revered musical statement of the ‘60s, We’re Only in it for the Money -- though I’d argue that Absolutely Free benefits from being a smidge less caustic than its more famous successor, which was sometimes just plain mean-spirited in its vicious, Age of Aquarius put-downs.

In any case, both albums are of course utterly essential to Zappa fans, and also mandatory coursework for any self-proclaimed students of ‘60s rock, who may not realize what a mind-expanding impact Frank’s work had on everyone from Lennon to Jagger to Clapton.

p.s. -- CD reissues of Absolutely Free added the now rare 7-inch single sides, “Big Leg Emma” and “Why Don'tcha Do Me Right?,” which Zappa joked were “an attempt to make dumb music to appeal to dumb teenagers.”