Free Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica by Kevin Courrier Page B

Magnet”), social protest blues (“Trouble Every Day”), and political advocacy (“Hungry Freaks, Daddy”).
    In 1967, the Mothers’ second album,
Absolutely Free
, was an absurdist oratorio. “We play the new free music—music as absolutely free, unencumbered by American cultural suppression,” Zappa explained. To pull it off, Zappa hired some highly gifted sight-reading musicians—Bunk Gardner on saxophone and Don Preston on keyboards—to augment the bar band veterans. The idea was to create an ensemble that dissolved the imposed boundaries between the “low culture” of rock and roll and the “high culture” of orchestral music. Zappa would follow up
Absolutely Free
with a solo orchestral album,
Lumpy Gravy
, a ballet score that resembled a cross between a
Mad
magazine collage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. The orchestral music, played by an ad hoc session group called the Abnuceals Emuukha Electric Symphony Orchestra, was continually broken up by snatches of random dialogue,
musique-concrète
, surf rock, and cartoon tone clusters suggestinga radio dial madly spinning across the network.
    Later in the year, the Mothers would reconvene to skewer the hippie utopianism of the previous Summer of Love on
We’re Only in it for the Money
, which used the Beatles’ sunny
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
as their point of parody; create a neo-classical appraisal of 50s doo-wop on
Cruising with Ruben & the Jets
, and begin
Uncle Meat
, the fullest design of the Project/Object. It was perhaps this particular record that would have a significant impact on Zappa’s production of
Trout Mask Replica
. Originally to be a soundtrack for the Mothers’ first film (which was incomplete due to lack of financing),
Uncle Meat
became a surreal scrapbook of personal and musical history. To play the difficult and complex scores, Zappa first added more highly experienced players such as Ruth Komonoff on marimba and Ruth’s future husband, Ian Underwood, on a variety of wind and keyboard instruments. The record combined clips of the band cutting loose (“King Kong”), audio-verité of band members complaining about poverty (“If we’d all been living in California”), performances of tricky electronic serialist scores (“Zolar Czakl,” “We Can Shoot You”), brilliantly dense cross-pollinations of doo-wop and serialism (“Dog Breath, in the Year of the Plague”), and ample samples of their stage absurdities like “Louie Louie” being played on the pipe organ at the Royal Albert Hall in London. In 1968, when Beefheart encountered him, Zappa was preparing an album that was essentially an anthropological musical study of the Mothers of Invention. It would not only serve as a documentary collage of the band’s progress;
Uncle Meat
would document and define theirplace in the lexicon of American popular music.
    Although Zappa was making huge progress as a composer, by the time of
Uncle Meat
, he was (like Beefheart) having contractual difficulties with his label. But unlike Don Van Vliet, Zappa was a businessman who thought of his work in terms of business. In December 1967, he discovered that Verve had made the mistake of not picking up the option on his contract with the label. So Zappa and Herb Cohen decided to use that as leverage to negotiate a deal to create a logo within the company. It was to be called—appropriately enough—Bizarre Productions. Their logo was a nineteenth-century picturesque engraving of a vacuum pump. Initially, Mothers’ albums on Bizarre would be released through MGM/Verve, until 1969, when Warner Brothers would acquire the production label. Zappa and Cohen formed Bizarre/Straight Records for Herb Cohen’s most unconventional artists. “We make records that are a little different,” Zappa made clear in his mission statement. “We present musical and sociological material which the important record companies would probably not allow you to hear.” He then added with caustic irony: