Pros: Brilliant lyrics and music that captures the essence of an era
Cons: Message lost on most listeners
The Bottom Line: Actually, this was great music to listen to while formulating one's values while growing up, despite what a lot of establishment moms and dads thought to the contrary.
metalluk's Full Review: We're Only in It for the Money by The Mothers of I...
This gem was the third album for Zappa and The Mothers of Invention and again we find the group making distinct progress in the quality of their musicianship. The band is again composed of seven members (same number as the predecessor album, Absolutely Free), but with a couple of changes. Zappa performs vocals and on the guitar and piano, Jimmy Carl Black returns as lead vocalist and performs on drums and trumpet, Roy Estrada contributes vocals and electric bass, Billy Mundi returns doing vocals and playing drums, and Bunk Gardner is back doing woodwinds. There are two new members, however, who would gain widespread popularity among the band's hardcore fans: Euclid James "Motorhead"Sherwood (singing soprano and playing the baritone saxophones) and Ian Underwood (playing the sax and the piano). Suzy Creamcheese has a few vocal lines and the great Eric Clapton stops by for a guest appearance.
The vinyl version of the album was released in 1967, shortly after the Beatles Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The inside of the jacket features a brilliant satire on the famous cover of the Beatles album, but the Beatles were mainstream and fabulously popular while The Mothers were beloved but only by a relatively select number of counterculture alternative-rock fans.
Track Listing:
1. Are You Hung Up? 1:24
2. Who Needs The Peace Corps? 2:34
3. Concentration Moon 2:22
4. Mom & Dad 2:16
5. Telephone Conversation 0:48
6. Bow Tie Daddy 0:33
7. Harry, You're A Beast 1:21
8. What's The Ugliest Part Of Your Body? 1:03
9. Absolutely Free 3:24
10. Flower Punk 3:03
11. Hot Poop 0:26
12. Nasal Retentive Calliope Music 2:02
13. Let's Make The Water Turn Black 2:01
14. The Idiot Bastard Son 3:18
15. Lonely Little Girl 1:09
16. Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance 1:32
17. What's The Ugliest Part of Your Body? (Reprise) 1:02
18. Mother People 2:26
19. The Chrome Plated Megaphone of Destiny 6:25
There are nineteen tracks on this album. It can be purchased as an individual CD or in a limited edition combination CD with the sequel album called Lumpy Gravy. As always with Zappa, some songs are a good deal better than others. "Who Needs the Peace Corps?", for example, is pretty lame, but is followed in the first half by some nifty tracks, including "Concentration Moon," "Bow Tie Daddy," and "What's the Ugliest Part of Your Body?" Zappa's answer to the last question is "your mind." Zappa never tired of mocking the members of his listening audience, whether in concert or listening at home.
The album really picks up in the second half. "Nasal Retentive Calliope Music" and "Let's Make the Water Turn Black" are, in my opinion, the best Zappa tracks up to that point in time. Zappa sometimes recorded his band members doing drugs and incorporated snippets of the drugged-up conversations in his tracks, with great effect. There's a bit of that in "Nasal Retentive Calliope Music." Zappa himself was quite conservative about drugs, despite what many people believe to the contrary. He had little use for the drug culture, which he viewed as a big cop-out and opt-out. Zappa was concerned about values like freedom of speech, cross-generational communication problems, consumerism and other vacuous American values, the culture of violence, and people generally failing to find what's truly important in life. Zappa didn't imagine that a bunch of drugged up hippies were likely to advance such causes effectively. Although Zappa was brutally anti-establishment, he pretty much stood for what a wiser establishment would stand for itself, if it simply had the brains to do so.
Style-wise, this album draws simultaneously on doo-wop, rock-jazz, and avant garde, plus classical electronic music. The last track, "The Chrome Plated Megaphone of Destiny," is actually electronic music and could just as well have been written by a classical composer. It's utterly brilliant. Elsewhere, Ian Underwood on the sax was a marvelous addition to the band.
This is the best of the early (first four) albums produced by Zappa and the only one of the four to which I'm giving five stars. Lyrics and music are seamlessly integrated and capture the essence of an era.
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