"Sgt. Pepper was okay," Zappa allows, "but just the whole aroma of what the Beatles were was something that never really caught my fancy. I got the impression from what was going on at the time that they were only in it for the money -- and that was a pretty unpopular view to hold."
In the case of Cal Schenkel, I saw his portfolio and I hired him.
When I first met [FZ] in New York, the art studio was in his apartment - but that was only for a brief period. I didn't actually live there, but I would commute to work at his place. When we moved to LA when he had rented the log cabin, I had a wing of it. It was my living quarters and art studio, which I rented separately from them. There was probably more of a chance to fraternize when I lived in that close proximity than when I didn't, but even when I lived in my own place I'd be hanging out a lot and listening to what he was doing with the music. I think that it was just that I happened to fit the mold. I'm not sure I totally did understand it, but it just happened to coincide with what I was doing.
6-67 thru fall 67 -NY. Photo, photo-collage. This was the first cover that I worked on. I had just started working for FZ in spring (67), doing ads for "Absolutely Free", group photos, drum heads, light show -various paraphernalia for "Pigs & Repugnant" (Garrick Theater extended gig). Frank very carefully directed this package, I did the plaster models, collage in background & supplied whatever else was needed- with the help of Dick Roth at Queens Litho (they also printed "Sgt Pepper"). Incidentally-- the "Only Money" cutout insert was actually printed with "Sgt. Pepper's" inserts on the same press sheet.
95 Ryko release restores the original cover, back cover, liner and cutout sheet with some subtle changes. The inlay pictures are neverseenbefore out-takes from the original Jerry Schatzberg photo session for the BC (which is actually the inside-out left panel on the original, but the BC on the earlier reissue... well, you know what I mean).
By the spring of 1967 Schenkel was back in the Philadelphia area, where he was born and raised. Zappa, who had art directed the first two Mothers album covers himself, was looking for an artist to take over, and Schenkel's then-girlfriend, a Zappa collaborator, showed the musician some of the artist's work. Schenkel and Zappa got together in New York, where the Mothers had a lengthy performance residency, and Zappa hired him immediately to work--in quick succession--on some advertisements for the forthcoming Absolutely Free record, on the live light show and then the Sgt. Pepper's parody cover for We're Only In It For the Money, which was designed to Zappa's satirical specifications.
I had shot a photograph for the Rolling Stones in drag for the U.K. release of their single "Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?". Zappa had seen that and after seeing the cover of Sgt. Peppers, he had the idea the he wanted to do a spoof of that image, with the principals in drag. I had met Zappa a couple of times before that, but we'd never worked together, so I was intrigued when I was told that this was going to be the cover of his next record.
We had a couple of weeks to produce this, and keeping the Sgt. Pepper's cover in mind -- with its elaborate costumes, flower-filled foreground, and its amazing cast of celebrity guests who were featured on the cover, both of our staffs set out to find the clothes, the props and some "celebrities" who would be part of the final composition.
We all agreed that it'd be very funny if we'd use fruit and vegetables and other junk in the foreground (instead of flowers), and since both of us knew Jimi Hendrix, we asked him to take part (you'll find a real-live Jimi Hendrix on the far right-hand side of the shot, the second person to the right of Zappa, who's posed in a mini-skirt). Zappa and his record company then decided on the rest of the background imagery and then a series of photos were taken. I submitted all of my tests over the two weeks and then the final one was selected. No special effects or lenses were used -- the final photograph contains just the props and the people you see. Everyone was very happy with the results.
By summer's end, Zappa was attempting to entice his weary musicians into the local Mayfair Studios to begin work on Money. However, he says, only bassist Roy Estrada and multi-instrumentalist Ian Underwood "pretty much stuck with it. The rest of the guys didn't really like it. Most of them had quit at least five times. It was hard to get 'em to show up to sessions. That's why I did most of the stuff."
On We're Only In It For The Money, I basically had to rebuild it from scratch because the master tapes were badly stored. The oxide had fallen off; you could see right through them. The same thing was true of Lumpy Gravy, so I had no choice but to rebuild it. I thought adding the bass and drums would enhance them for the digital domain.
If I were to go back in and rebuild We're Only In It For The Money today, I might do it differently. We didn't have the all-digital editing equipment that we have today for putting CDs together. All the original razor-blade edits that were done on the two-track masters in 1967, had to remake on digital tape! I'll be the first one to admit that We're Only In It For The Money is probably the least satisfactory of all the reissues that have come out. I listen to that and I still cringe, but you can't do anything about it.
Can anybody spot the quote that occurs in the classic WOIIFTM tune, "Flower Punk"? I'm not refering here to the "Hey Joe" 3/8 chord progression that is used for the verses, but to the instrumental wah guitar (or is it keyboard?) riff that happens in 7/8 throughout the song (and is repeated until it degenerates during the 2nd half)
It's been identified as the hook lick from "Needles and Pins," composed in 1963 by Sonny Bono and Jack Nietzche. First recorded in '63 by Jackie De Shannon, but an international hit in 1964 for The Searchers.
Musically, the northern bands had a little more country style. In L.A., it was folk-rock to death. Everything had that fucking D chord down at the bottom of the neck where you wiggle your finger around--like "Needles and Pins."
I do remember teasing Jack [Nitzsche] about one line that he had written and wanted me to play on guitar. "Jack, that 4th doesn't belong in that chord, it won't sound good," and Jack, smiling replied, "Carol just play it anyway, it'll be OK" . . . and that was the Needles and Pins guitar line.
During the time we were doing Uncle Meat, I was working with an engineer [Richard Kunc], who was real cooperative, just trying to do any kind of weird thing we asked him to do. During the 60s, who knew what was right? "Let's try this. Plug it in backwards and see what happens." So we were dealing with different types of short-term distortion, and he built a little box with three pushbuttons; we called it the Apostolic Blurch Injector. And we took various tracks of different types of material and cranked them up into the distortion range and then by poking the buttons you'd get these little rhythmic bursts of white noise, brown noise, pink noise, and gray noise -- in a rhythm that you'd select. But instead of being derived from a noise generator on a synthesizer, it was completely distorted voices, instruments, percussion, whatever. We cranked off reams and reams of tape of this kind of material.
When Frank was building [We're Only In It For The] Money, we used this thing called the Apostolic Blurch Injector. Frank would fill up the Scully 12 track with snippets of his old abums (varispeeded, of course), interviews with guys who were trying to get him to drop acid (Frank's only vices were Coffee, Kools and CocaCola), chopped up snippets of stuff the censors wouldn't let him use (no kidding - and this was 1968) and mics planted to catch what the cops said when they came to bust us in the middle of the night cause we were keeping the neighbors awake. All of this would be mixed down to a single track and put on a new fresh 12 track tape which he would fill up with these collage tracks. The Blurch injector was a keybord made up of twelve switches which were patched in line between the 12 track outputs and the console. Then he would play the 12 track, which he called the BROWN NOISE master, and wail away on the keyboard. This is how he made, in part, Nasal Retentive Calliope Music an other stuff of that ilk.
Around the time leading up to [We're Only In It For The Money], Frank Zappa had been working at Apostolic Studios in New York, which had a 12-track tape machine. The band I was in at the time (Mandrake) worked there in between Frank's sessions; he had dozens, and maybe even hundreds, of plastic reels hanging on the walls with short bits of tape containing various sound samples (each was named -- my favorite was "Dynamite Blurch Injector"). In a way, he was doing analog sampling, but had to use tape recorders rather than keyboards as the playback devices.
(Ronnie helping Kenny helping burn his poots away!)
Oh! How they yearn to see a bomber burn!
Color flashing, thunder crashing, dynamite machine!
(Wait till the fire turns green . . . wait till the fire turns green)
WAIT TILL THE FIRE TURNS GREEN!
We also enjoyed burning poots (farts). One time FZ was over so we decided to show him the fine art of burning poots. We were in the Kenny's bedroom, if I remember. Ronnie jumped up on the bed and took off his pants. The seat of his underwear a big hole w/ threads hanging down. When he put the Zippo to it, there was a nice balloon of blue flame and the threads caught fire. The flame traveled up and set his anal hairs on fire. FZ fell against the wall in a fit of laughter. I guess he never forgot that because he wrote a song about it.
"Before they started making dolls with sexual organs," he says, explaining the title, "the only data you could get from your doll was looking between its legs and seeing that little chrome nozzle -- if you squeezed the doll, it made a kind of whistling sound. That was the chrome-plated megaphone of destiny."
Site maintained by Román García Albertos
