Captain Beefheart - It Comes To You in a Plain Brown Wrapper

Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band –

It Comes To You in a Plain Brown Wrapper

(soniclovenoize reconstruction)

Side A:

1.  Trust Us

2.  Mirror Man

Side B:

3.  Korn Ring Finger

4.  25^th Century Quaker

5.  Safe As Milk

Side C:

6.  Moody Liz

7.  Tarotplane

Side D:

8.  On Tomorrow

9.  Beatle Bones n’ Smokin’ Stones

10.  Gimme Dat Harp Boy

11.  Kandy Korn

This was a long-overlooked follower-request from a few years ago and I was recently reminded to do it!  This is a reconstruction of the unreleased 1968 double-album It Comes to You in a Plain Brown Wrapper by Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band.  Originally scrapped with half of the material re-recorded and infamously “psychedelicized” for the album Strictly Personal and the other half released as 1972’s Mirror Man, this reconstruction attempts to cull all the originally intended material for the double album that was supposed to be their sophomore release, more successfully bridging the gap between 1967’s Safe As Milk and 1969’s Trout Mask Replica.  Some tracks have been crossfaded to make a continuous side of music (notably Side D) and the most pristine sources are used for the best soundquality, including a vinyl rip of an original pressing of Mirror Man. 

 

After a prominent rise of notoriety upon the release of Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band’s psychedelic-blues debut Safe As Milk in 1967, the group stood at a crossroads of how to proceed: continue being a cutting edge cult act or expanding their horizons?  After a disastrous warm-up performance for their scheduled 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, it seemed that breakthrough success would elude the riotous bunch.   To make matters worse, Don Van Vliet’s band had been damaged by lineup changes due to members who had had enough of The Captain’s drug hallucinations and erratic behavior.  Prodigal guitarist Ry Cooder vacated to be replaced briefly by Gerry McGee, who was in turn replaced by Jeff Cotton. 

Despite the troubled waters, Don reunited with a Magic Band that consisted of Cotton, Alex St. Clair Snouffer, Jerry Handley and John French in the fall of 1967 to record their follow-up to Safe As Milk.  The album was planned to be a double album and was to follow the contemporary fad of extended improvisational jams, as well as featuring a more “live” feel as compared to the first record.  The album was to be called It Comes To You In A Plain Brown Wrapper, in reference to an ambiguous parcel containing either narcotics, drug paraphernalia or possibly pornography.  The cover art was to feature exactly that as well, a plain brown wrapper marked ‘strictly personal’! 

This parcel was never delivered however, as the recording sessions came to a halt.  No reason was ever given, but it has been suggested that their label Buddha Records had pulled the plug out of disinterest.  A consolation was offered by the producer of the Plain Brown Wrapper sessions, Bob Krasnow, who convinced the band to rerecord some of the material and release it on his label Blue Thumb.  Recorded in April and May of 1968, Don & his crew recut the more ”commercial” tracks from the Fall 1967 sessions at a much more abbreviated length (“Mirror Man” was cut from the original 15 minutes down to 5!).  In a move that angered Beefheart fans for ages, Krasnow took the liberty himself (allegedly) to overdub numerous faux-psychedelic effects onto the newly-recorded album, even completely burying the mixes under unlistenable phasing.  The released album—Strictly Personal—was a commercial disaster and The Captain disowned the album, claiming the effects were added without his permission.  Some speculate that was untrue and Don had given his approval only to later turn on the album after its failure.  Either way, this folly of questionable truth is just simply a part of the Captain Beefheart mythos, as was everything else. 

After the critical success of the seminal experimental and Frank Zappa-produced rock album Trout Mask Replica (not to mention its respectable follow-up Lick My Decals Off Baby), Buddha Records wished to capitalize on Captain Beefheart’s renewed cult status and artistic credibility.  Going back to the original fall 1967 Plain Brown Wrapper tapes, they compiled a single-disc of material, primarily focusing on the extended live improvisations.  1971’s Mirror Man showed the world (or at least the few who were listening) what Strictly Personal was supposed to sound like, to some extent.  But it was not without its own short comings: not only was it merely half of the original Plain Brown Wrapper album, but it featured anachronistic cover art, improper musician credits and Buddha falsely claimed the album was recorded in one night in 1965! 

Years passed before fans were able to piece together the Plain Brown Wrapper album, beginning with questionably-legal British import I May Be Hungry But I Ain’t Weird in 1992.  Suffering from the same fate as other early Captain Beefheart CD reissues of poor mastering and use of inferior mastertapes, it wasn’t until 1999 when Buddha Records released The Mirror Man Sessions, essentially a properly-mastered Mirror Man with five outtakes from the Plain Brown Wrapper sessions included as bonus tracks.  Seven more outtakes (presumably the rest of the listenable material) were included as bonus tracks on their remaster of Safe As Milk.  Finally, Sundazed Records collected all the non-Mirror Man outtakes and one more additional track in their own vinyl-only 2008 reconstruction of It Comes To You in a Plain Brown Wrapper (which made no attempt to literally reconstruct the lost album, unlike my own reconstruction).

While all the pieces are now available to recreate It Comes to You in a Plain Brown Wrapper, we still have the task to wrap it all up as one.  The layout of my reconstruction was rather simple: each of the four sides would feature one of the lengthy live jam sessions, with one whole side following Side B of Strictly Personal as close as possible (giving one an alternate and more authentic take on the album).  I also used a pristine needledrop vinyl rip of Mirror Man by Euripides for those tracks, as it features the album’s original EQ and mastering parameters that has since been lost, deeper bass and crisper highs.  It is of note that the Sundazed vinyl utilized the same mastering as the 1999 Buddha remasters, so it was not used here as source material.  I also chose to exclude the instrumental tracks that Captain Beefheart had never gotten around to recording vocals for (“Big Black Baby Shoes”, “Flower Pot” and “Dirty Gene”), thus making a more finished-sounding album (although the instrumental “On Tomorrow” was used to mimic the tracklist for Strictly Personal).  The end result is eleven tracks that span two 45-minute discs and offer a purer Captain Beefheart album than Strictly Personal, with this effectively replacing it. 

Side A of my reconstruction begins with take 12 of “Trust Us” from the Safe As Milk remaster, selected over take 6 as take 12 featured vocal overdubs, suggesting it was the master take.  This is followed by the epic “Mirror Man” from Euripides’ vinyl rip of the album.  Side B begins with the reserved Delta Blues “Korn Ring Finger” from the Safe As Milk remaster, followed by “25^th Century Quaker” from Euripides’ Mirror Man vinyl rip, concluding with take 12 of ”Safe as Milk” from The Mirror Man Sessions, again chosen over take 5 because of its vocal overdubs.

The second disc begins with the decidingly upbeat take 8 of “Moody Liz” from The Mirror Man Sessions (chosen over the overdub-less take 16 from Sundazed’s Plain Brown Wrapper) and the rest of the side C belongs to “Tarotplane” from Mirror Man.  The final side of the album attempts to offer an alternate, unadorned version of side B of Strictly Personal, beginning with the instrumental “On Tomorrow” from the Safe As Milk remaster, which is segued into “Beatle Bones n’ Smokin’ Stones” from The Mirror Man Sessions. The final descending bassline is hard edited into “Gimme Dat Harp Boy”, also from The Mirror Man Sessions.  The album concludes with possibly the most commercial track of the lot, “Kandy Korn” from Euripides’ vinyl rip of Mirror Man.  

Sources Used:

Mirror Man (Euripides vinyl rip, 1971 Buddha Records)

Safe As Milk (CD remaster, 1999 Buddha Records)

The Mirror Man Sessions (CD, 1999 Buddha Records)

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*md5, artwork and tracknotes included

The Zombies - RIP

The Zombies – R.I.P.

(soniclovenoize reconstruction)

Side A:

1.  She Loves The Way They Love Her

2.  Imagine The Swan

3.  If It Don’t Work Out

4.  Smokey Day

5.  I’ll Keep Trying

6.  Conversation Off Floral Street

Side B:

7.  I’ll Call You Mine

8.  Telescope (Mr. Galileo)

9.  I Know She Will

10.  To Julia (For When She Smiles)

11.  Don’t Cry For Me

12.  Walking In The Sun

This is a reconstruction of what would have been the final Zombies album, an intended 1969 release as a posthumous follow-up to their sleeper-hit Odessey and Oracle.  While all 12 albums tracks were collected in the box set Zombie Heaven in 1997 and then sequenced as originally intended as an official Japanese release in 2008, my reconstruction attempts to create a more well-rounded and cohesive album with a new sequence that more evenly distributes the posthumous 1969 Argent-led tracks with the overdubbed 1964-1966 Blunstone-led outtake tracks, as well as using alternate mixes of both.  Also through creative editing I was able to add more Colin Blunstone vocals to the album and less Rod Argent lead vocals.  In effect, my R.I.P. seems a bit less awkwardly anachronistic, and more a cohesive theoretical baroque-pop follow-up to Odessy and Oracle. 

The Zombies are a perfect example of how sometimes great things can be overlooked and simply fall through the cracks.  Despite consistently producing some of the most well-crafted and well-performed pop-rock songs of the 1960s, the amount of new material from the band approached a near standstill by 1966.  The music scene was becoming increasingly psychedelic and the generally straight-laced Zombies were in danger of becoming irrelevant.  With a label quickly becoming uninterested and a live circuit drying up, they pooled their own scant resources together and financed the recording of their sophomore album, a sink or swim record entitled Odessey and Oracle.  Recorded literally as The Beatles walked out of EMI Studios after completing Sgt. Pepper in 1967, The Zombies utilized the plethora of exotic instruments their British pop brethren left lying around.  Adorning magnificently-written psychedelic pop songs with these instruments as well as serendipitous harmonies, the outcome was one of the greatest masterworks of the 1960s, let alone 1967.  But the unfortunate reality is that relatively few people really paid attention.  The magnificent “Care of Cell 44” ceased to be a hit, live gigs dried up and singer Colin Blunstone, having no stake in The Zombies’ publishing royalties, left the band because he simply didn’t have the money to continue.   The album was released to silence in 1968. 

Yet due to friends in high places—namely Al Kooper who championed the band to Columbia in the US—Odessey and Oracle was given a second chance on the other side of the Atlantic.  But because of the fatal choice to push “Butcher’s Tale” as a single, the album again fell to silence.  It wasn’t until another year passed that radio picked up on “Time of The Season” which propelled the song to an eventual status as an anthem of the Summer of Love, despite being two years late and from a band that had ceased to exist.  But keyboardist Rod Argent and bassist Chris White, whom were already occupied in their current project Argent, were offered the chance to essentially capitalize in the unexpected interest in the dead Zombies who were suddenly undead.  In an effort to create closure to the band that had passed away before it’s time—and a chance to not only clear the vaults but to advertize their band Argent—the pair began work on the final Zombies album, the posthumous R.I.P. 

The plan was simple: the first side of the album was to feature “new” Zombies recordings and the second side of the album to feature newly finished outtakes from the numerous singles-sessions from 1964-1966.  Argent and White collected the best of the series of demos recorded in-between the demise of The Zombies and the formation of Argent, recordings which were used to secure their own record contract.  While sometimes reminiscent of the mid-60s psyche-pop of The Zombies, their songs bared a stronger resemblance to the tail-end of the 60s and the hard rock/prog of Argent.  In stark contrast to this, the outtakes found on side B were simply anachronistic, sounding exactly like they were: tracks recorded around1965 with new layers of lush harmonies and some with new orchestration.  As it stands, R.I.P. sounded more like a document of how far recording techniques had progressed in the 1960s.  Of the Side B tracks, only “Walking In The Sun” approached the soundquality of Side A with newly recorded symphonic instruments and new lead vocal by Colin Blunstone juxtaposed with the backing track dating from a demo session in 1964.  Singles were released for “Imagine The Swan” and a newly-finished “If It Don’t Work Out” (which was originally a 1965 demo for Dusty Springfield), both failing to replicate the success of “Time Of The Season” or even their 1965 hit “Tell Her No” and the R.I.P. album was scrapped. 

Of the 12 songs slated for the album, most trickled out as bonus tracks on various compilations throughout the decades.  It wasn’t until 1997 with the insanely comprehensive four-disc box set Zombie Heaven that the public heard R.I.P., as all 12 of the tracks from the album were featured on the ‘rare/studio outtakes’ disc .  Finally in 2000, the same exact R.I.P. masters as found on Zombie Heaven were released as their own standalone album in correct track sequence, albeit as a Japanese import with numerous bonus tracks (followed by a 2008 compilation of outtakes from this era of the band called Into The Afterlife).  In plain sight—but also apparently as overlooked as  Odessey and Oracle was in 1968—we could hear the bizarre combination of late-60s proto-prog and mid-60s pop.  Perhaps we can have a second memorial service for The Zombies and allow this album to better rest in peace?

My reconstruction of R.I.P. had two main goals:    

1) To resequence the songs and use some alternate mixes so that the vast time difference between recording dates is less-apparent, making the Argent-led songs and the refurbished classic Zombies songs intermingle, in turn making a more cohesive album.  

2) Less Rod Argent and MORE Colin Bluestone!  After all, he was the voice of The Zombies.  To do this we are able to use recordings from Blunstone’s first solo album One Year (produced by fellow Zombies Argent & White), replacing Argent’s vocals with Blunstone’s.  Just as well, we will drop the two weakest Argent-led songs for others, making the album more Zombie-like and less Argent-like.

Side A begins much as the official R.I.P., with “She Loves The Way They love Her”.  Instead we use the version from One Year but with the audience sound effects from the R.I.P. version overdubbed at the appropriate points, effectively “replacing” Argent’s vocals with Blunstone’s.  The R.I.P. mix of “Imagine The Swan” is next, with the orchestral mix of “If It Don’t Work Out”  from the compilation Into The Afterlife following, an attempt to make a more baroque-pop follower to Odessey and Oracle.  Next, Colin Blunstone’s lead vocal from “Smokey Day” is extracted from his One Year album and superimposed into the alternate mix of Argent’s “Smokey Day” (a bonus track on the Repertoire remaster of Odessey and Oracle), again creating a new Colin lead vocal that sings a harmony to Rod’s.  Note that the vocals fall out of sync in the last verse, due to Colin intentionally deviating from the rhythm of the vocal; no attempt was made to change his artistic decision to sing the verse in that manner.  The R.I.P. versions of “If It Don’t Work Out” and “Conversations Off Floral Street” end the side, the later being the only post-break-up song on the album featuring the original Zombies lineup, including guitarist Paul Atkins and drummer Hue Grundy.

Side B opens with the R.I.P. version of “I’ll Call You Mine”, following with an unused Argent track from this era which seemed more appropriately Zombie-esque, “Telescope” from the Into The Afterlife compilation, which replaces “Girl Help Me”.  My own unique edit of “I Know She Will” follows when the first half of the orchestral version from Into The Afterlife is edited together with the second half of the full-band mix found on the R.I.P. album, creating a strong dynamic and emphasizing its orchestration.  Next is another “more Zombies-like Argent track” taken from Into The Afterlife and remixed my myself, the classical “To Julia” which occupies the same idiosyncratic function as “Butcher’s Tale” held on Odessey and Oracle and replaces “I Could Spend The Day”.  The R.I.P. mix of “Don’t Cry for Me” attempts one final ruckus before giving way to my own unique edit of “Walking In The Sun”, again editing the orchestral version from Into The Afterlife onto the full-band R.I.P. mix, creating a wide dynamic. 

Sources used:

The Zombies - Into The Afterlife (2007 Rhino Records)

The Zombies - Odessey and Oracle (1992 Repertoire Recrods)

The Zombies - R.I.P. (2008 Imperial Records Japan)

Colin Blunstone - One Year (2007 Water Music Records)

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*md5, artwork and tracknotes included

Neil Young - Chrome Dreams

Neil Young – Chrome Dreams

(soniclovenoize reconstruction)

Side A:

1.  Pocahontas

2.  Will To Love

3.  Star of Bethlehem

4.  Like A Hurricane

5.  Too Far Gone

Side B:

6.  Hold Back The Tears

7.  Homegrown

8.  Captain Kennedy

9.  Stringman

10.  Sedan Delivery

11.  Powderfinger

12.  Look Out For My Love

By overwhelming request, this is a reconstruction of the famous unreleased 1977 Neil Young album Chrome Dreams.  Originally compiled from material recorded between 1974-1977 and slated for a release after an acetate was allegedly compiled, Young withdrew the album and restructured it into American Stars ‘n Bars.  This reconstruction collects all the best possible source tapes into the sequence generally accepted as being Chrome Dreams.   It is banded as a cohesive album and attempts were made to create a large dynamic range between the acoustic Young songs and the full-band Crazy Horse songs.   While my reconstruction isn’t necessarily anything that hasn’t been heard before, it attempts to be as close to a finished album as possible with the best possible soundquality, an improvement on circulating bootlegs.

Ups and downs and an epic back-catalog of recordings were Neil Young’s modus operandi throughout the 1970s, the true seeds of what would eventually become—and then not become—Chrome Dreams.  So epic in fact, that Young simultaneously worked on different albums and collections of songs thought the mid 70s, in as much as cultivating numerous projects that either never materialized or were shifted into something else, often completely unrelated to each other.  After his triumphant success with 1972’s Harvest, Young attempted to undo the very success he initially strived to reach by recording his “Ditch Trilogy”—the more challenging Time Fades Away, On The Beach and Tonight’s The Night albums—partially instigated by the death of Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten.  As well as “The Ditch Trilogy” albums, Young also composed a set of ‘Water Songs’ meant as a concept album about, well, water, which was never realized and the songs scattered to other projects.

Aside from those three albums and abandoned concept, Young also offered a slew of originals for the reformed Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young album Human Highway which never materialized either (but of which this blog has already tackled).  And still aside from those five projects Young also recorded an entire folk/country album concerning his separation from his wife Carrie Snodgrass, entitled Homegrown.  That project nearly saw the light of day as the second album of the ‘Ditch Trilogy’, but Young scrapped the more somber and painful Homegrown for the more raw and immediate Tonight’s The Night (which the label put on hold making it the third album of the Trilogy).  Young’s classic 1975 album ZUMA collected some of the scattered leftovers from the six mid-70s projects, following it with a duet album with Stephen Stills, 1976’s Long May You Run.

Finally bringing us to Young’s next project in 1977, it was to be a hodge-podge of new material and leftovers that dated back to the unreleased Homegrown album.  Titled Chrome Dreams, it was to be a fairly schizophrenic record, jumping from Nashville country-rock, solo acoustic folk and full-blown Crazy Horse rock anthems, all tracks simply culled from his personal vaults, recorded between 1974-1977.  The few that have heard Chrome Dreams commented that it could have been one of his strongest albums of the 1970s.  But for reasons unknown to this day, Young scrapped the album and recorded a completely different set of forgettable songs as the meat of American Stars n Bars, which was released in Chrome Dreams’ place in 1977.  While this completely new set of mediocre songs occupied all of side A, four of the original songs slated for Chrome Dreams found its way onto side B, giving the second half of the album a hint at the greatness Chrome Dreams could have been.

A few of the Chrome Dreams songs—“Pocahontas”, “Sedan Delivery” and “Powderfinger”—were re-recorded for Young’s triumphant finale of the 1970s, Rust Never Sleeps.  Aside from a few more trickling out over time and mediocre follow-up albums, Chrome Dreams was never a shared dream with anyone outside Young’s inner circle.  Its reputation grew over time, accumulating to an officially released sequel in 2007, Chrome Dreams II, a completely new set of songs by a Neil Young not without a sense of humor.  Luckily a few acetates of the original tracks have leaked out into the bootleg market as well as an alleged copy of the album’s tapebox (although denied as being accurate by some close to Neil, but never necessarily confirmed).  With all of the material existing either on bootlegs or the original 1970s albums, we will be able to reconstruct one of the great Neil Young albums that never were.

Side A begins with the original acoustic version of “Pocahontas”.  While the official version on the Rust Never Sleeps album features subtle overdubs, this is the unadorned version found on the bootleg Chrome Dreams “GF Rust Edition”.  Following are three songs all taken from the album versions of American Stars n Bars: the eerie and ethereal “Will To Love”; “Star of Bethlehem”, a track salvaged from the Homegrown album; and the epic “Like A Hurricane” which became a hit for Neil Young.  “Too Far Gone” releases the tension built up from the hurricane blast, this being the original unreleased version taken from the Black Label bootleg of Chrome Dreams rather than the re-recoded version from 1989’s Freedom.

The longer Side B starts with “Hold Back The Tears”, which was re-recorded for American Stars n Bars; presented here is the original acoustic version taken from the GF Rust bootleg.  "Homegrown" from American Stars n bars is next, a re-recording of the allegedly acoustic title track from the unreleased Homegrown album.  My personal favorite “Captain Kennedy” is an alternate unreleased mix as compared to the version from Hawks & Doves,  also taken from the GF Rust bootleg.  I used it here as it is in true stereo and matches the mixing of the other acoustic songs on the album, probably sourced from the same tape.  My own remaster of “Stringman” from the GF Rust bootleg creates a smoother intro to the song which was otherwise too loud, a track eventually re-recorded for Young’s 1993 Unplugged performance.  The unreleased original studio versions of “Sedan Delivery” and “Powderfinger” follows, taken from the GF Rust bootleg.  Closing the album out is the official album mix of “Look Out For My Love” from Comes A Time.

The last task of our reconstructed Chrome Dreams is an original artwork by LCM, representing the original conceptual artwork for the album: an anthropomorphic grill of a 1955 Chrysler as “a beautiful chick”.  When set alongside Young’s 1970s discography, Chrome Dreams shines brilliantly over its own dull replacement American Stars n Bars, and can fend its own against Young classics ZUMA and Rust Never Sleeps.  According to the man himself, a reconstruction of Chrome Dreams (as well as Homegrown) will appear on Archives Volume II, set to be released later in 2014… allegedly anyways, knowing the vast length and improbability of ‘Neil Young-time’.  Until then, we can only dream.

Sources used:

American Stars n Bars (2003 Reprise CD remaster)

Chrome Dreams (bootleg, 1993 Black Label)

Chrome Dreams (bootleg, 2008 Godfather Records)

Comes A Time (1988 original CD master)

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*md5, artwork and tracknotes included

Frank Zappa - We’re Only In It For The Money (Uncensored)

 

Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention – 

We’re Only In It For The Money

(Uncensored Original Mix by soniclovenoize)

May 2014 UPGRADE

Side A:

 1. Are You Hung Up?

 2. Who Needs The Peace Corps?

 3. Concentration Moon

 4. Mom & Dad

 5. Bow Tie Daddy

 6. Harry, You’re A Beast

 7. What’s The Ugliest part of Your Body?

 8. Absolutely Free

 9. Flower Punk

10. Hot Poop

Side B:

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

Okay okay okay…  Even Einstein was allowed a “biggest blunder” so cut me some slack, alright? On my blog, my biggest blunder (to date) was using the 1986 overdubbed version of We’re Only In It For The Money as source material for the patches for my Uncensored Original Mix.  I got a lot of flak for it, and I guess rightfully so.  Because certainly a completely uncensored stereo 1968 version of the album could be made, I just had to try harder!  Zappa fans spoke out against my ignorance, and so here is my UPGRADE to that.  Please forgive me!

The upgrades to this revision:

- A new edit of “Harry, You’re A Beast” is created, restoring the censored “Don’t cum in me, in me” verse using original 1968 recordings, NOT the 1986 overdubbed versions.  To do this, I re-assembled the entire cut-up verse in correct order, forward, using the mono master from Lumpy Money Project/Object.  I then synced that reassembled mono verse to the stereo instrumental backing track, creating a full stereo, uncensored verse for the first time ever (at least to my knowledge - no the acetate demo version is in mono and in subpar quality!)

- a new edit of “Mother People” is created, restoring the censored “Shut your fucking mouth” verse using original 1968 recordings, NOT the 1986 overdubbed version.  To do this, I took the reversed version of the verse from “Hot Poop”, swapped the channels to match “Mother People”, and inserted the verse to its proper place.  I then extracted the “Shut you fucking mouth” line from the mono mix found on Mothermania and restored the uncensored line in place.  To keep the stereophonic mixing of uniform, I panned the entire mono line to the right and added a low-pass-filtered mix of the line to the left.  The result was surprisingly cohesive and kept with Zappa’s original mixing scheme with the bass to the left and the drums to the right, with the only discrepancy that the singular vocal line being single-tracked for a second or two while the rest of the verse remains double-tracked.   

- a new edit of “Hot Poop” is created, restoring the reversed and censored “Shut your fucking mouth” verse using original 1968 recordings.  To do this, I reversed the above edit I created for “Mother People”, swapped the channels and inserted it back into the track. 

Note that my same edit of “Concentration Moon” is still used here because, although sourced from the 1986 remaster, there were no 1986 overdubs featured in the edit itself and it is technically all original 1968 material. 

This was a special request a number of months ago, and it sounded like a fun challenge.  This  is my own unique edit of Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention’s We’re Only In It For The Money that utilizes all original 1968 stereo mixes, but reinstates all the originally censored material, thus creating a completely uncensored original mix. 

Frank Zappa famously said, when accepting an award for his third album We’re Only In It For The Money, “I prefer that the award be presented to the guy who modified this record, because what you're hearing is more reflective of his work than mine.”  Although he was exaggerating a bit, it is certainly true that much of Zappa’s groundbreaking and cutting edge humor was softened or even literally removed for commercial release.  Numerous pieces of the album were edited to appease late 60s “decency standards”, thus beginning Zappa’s heavily-championed cause for artist’s Freedom of Speech and the battle against censorship and the suits who perpetuate it.  For decades, fans could only enjoy what the label thought would appease social standards at the time, rather than what the artist intended.  Luckily throughout the years, there were a handful of reissues and international repressing of the album that did reinstate many of the dubious censored pieces. 

Currently, all but four specific alterations of the album had been restored to the original 1968 mix of We’re Only In It For The Money: the spoken Velvet Underground reference in “Concentration Moon”, the “Don’t cum in me” verse of “Harry, You’re A Beast”, the “Shut your fucking mouth” verse of “Mother People” and the reversed version of that same verse in “Hot Poop”.  But is there a way to reinstate these sections?  Some of those pieces exist on a bootleg of demos recorded for the album, but only exist in mono at the wrong tape speeds, and are thus unusable.  Maybe there is another option? 

The next chapter of the album’s curious history began with revolutions in the recording industry, specifically the advent of digital mastering.  In 1986, the album was slated for a new digital remaster along with the rest of Frank Zappa’s discography.  In a move that is almost universally considered sacrilege by fans, Zappa utilized the remastering process as an excuse to literally replace the original drum and bass tracks on the album with a newly recorded rhythm section.  Not only was this new remaster of We’re Only in It For The Money condemned by purists, but the end result seemed extremely anachronistic with an obviously 1960s guitar, keyboard & vocal sound juxtaposed with an obviously 1980s drum & bass sound; today in the 2010s, the effect is exacerbated with the 1980s overdubs sounding extremely dated.  This version of the album is currently out-of-press, aside from being included in an exhaustive box set release from this era of The Mothers.

The only benefit of this horrid 1986 remix/remaster was that three of the aforementioned censored tracks, “Concentration Moon”, “Harry, You’re A Beast” and “Mother People”, all contained their original unedited, uncensored material, albeit with an infuriating re-recorded rhythm section ("Hot Poop" curiously retained the orignal, untouched reversed and censored line).  What can be a generally painful listen can also be revelatory in showing Zappa’s original artistic intent… in regards to the originally censored material, of course.

What I have done here is take the best master available of the original 1968 stereo mix (which reinstates all the minor censored parts that were internationally restored via reissues) and replaced the four remaining censored bits with their uncensored equivalents from a number of source, thus creating a completely uncensored and completely stereo version of We’re Only In It for The Money.  The spoken Velvet Underground line in “Concentration Moon” was mixed to mono and panned to 10:00 to match the original mix; the result sounds completely authentic as there were no 1986 overdubs underneath the edit.  The replaced verses of “Mother People” and “Harry, You’re A Beast” also fit perfectly, and are for the first time here in full stereo.  I even went ahead for extra credit and uncensored the backwards bit in “Hot Poop” for any anal-retentive listeners out there! 

Other minor technical errors of the source material remaster were fixed, such as the rejoining of “Telephone Conversation” and “Bow Tie Daddy” into one track (as Zappa originally intended) and the correction of the half-second track-split offset that was inherent to this remaster.  With this, I hope you enjoy what Zappa originally intended us to hear, all in stereo. 

Sources used:

We’re Only In It For The Money (2005 MFSL remaster)

Lumpy Money Project/Object (2009 release)

Mothermania (2009 remaster)

flac --> wav --> editing in SONAR & Goldwave --> flac encoding via TLH lv8

*md5, artwork and tracknotes included