We're Only in It for the Money
We're Only in It for the Money is the third album by American rock band the Mothers of Invention, released on March 4, 1968, by Verve Records. As with the band's first two LP's, it is a concept album, written and composed by bandleader and guitarist Frank Zappa. The album satirizes left- and right-wing politics, the 1960s counterculture, the corporatization of rock music and youth culture, particularly the hippie subculture, as well as general American culture and society. It was conceived as part of a project called No Commercial Potential, which produced three other albums: Lumpy Gravy, Cruising with Ruben & the Jets, and Uncle Meat.
The album's originally intended cover artwork was arranged by Cal Schenkel and Jerry Schatzberg as a parody of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The photoshoot was financed by Zappa and featured Jimi Hendrix. However, Verve decided to package the album with the parody cover as interior artwork, with the original interior artwork as the main sleeve out of fear of legal action. The original intended main sleeve artwork was later featured on the front cover of subsequent releases. Artists such as Eric Clapton, Rod Stewart and Tim Buckley would contribute to the recording sessions of the album.
We're Only in It for the Money encompasses experimental music and psychedelic rock, with orchestral segments taken from the recording sessions for Zappa's Lumpy Gravy, which had previously been issued by Capitol Records as a solo instrumental album in 1967. MGM claimed that Zappa was under contractual obligation to record for them and withdrew the album. Subsequently, Zappa re-edited Lumpy Gravy, releasing a drastically different version on Verve in 1968, produced simultaneously with We're Only in It for the Money. The album is the first "phase" of a conceptual continuity, which continued with the reedited Lumpy Gravy and concluded with Zappa's final album Civilization Phaze III.
The album was unexpectedly embraced by the hippie subculture it criticized, peaking at number 30 on the Billboard 200, the highest position of any Mothers album. In August 1987, Rolling Stone ranked it number 77 on their article, "The Top 100: The Best Albums of the Last Twenty Years", and number 297 on their 2015 list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. It was also placed at number 343 in the third edition of Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums and is featured in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die along with their 1966 debut album Freak Out!.
In 2005, We're Only in It for the Money was selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry by the United States' Library of Congress, who deemed it "culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant" and "a scathing satire on hippiedom and America's reactions to it".
Background
While filming Uncle Meat, Frank Zappa recorded in New York City for a project called No Commercial Potential, which ended up producing four albums: We're Only in It for the Money; Lumpy Gravy ; Cruising with Ruben & the Jets ; and Uncle Meat, which served as the soundtrack to the film of the same name, which finally saw a release in 1987, albeit in incomplete form. Also recorded in New York was a live album that would later be released as Ahead of Their Time.In July 1967, singer Ray Collins had left the Mothers before the New York recording sessions took place, which led to Zappa singing lead vocals for most of the songs on the album, though they were slightly pitched up in post-production. Gary Kellgren was hired as an engineer for the project, and subsequently wound up delivering whispered pieces of dialogue for the album. Collins later rejoined when the band was recording the doo-wop songs that formed the album Cruising with Ruben & the Jets. As the recording sessions continued, the Beatles released their acclaimed album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. In response to the album's release, Zappa decided to change the album's concept to parody the Beatles album, because he felt that the Beatles were insincere and "only in it for the money". The Beatles were targeted as a symbol of Zappa's objections to the corporatization of youth culture, and the album served as a criticism of them as well as the psychedelic and hippie movement as a whole.
In reference to the record being a "concept album", Zappa stated, "It's all one album. All the material in the albums is organically related and if I had all the master tapes and I could take a razor blade and cut them apart and put it together again in a different order it still would make one piece of music you can listen to. Then I could take that razor blade and cut it apart and reassemble it a different way, and it still would make sense. I could do this twenty ways. The material is definitely related."
Recording and production
Recording for We're Only in it for the Money began on March 6, 1967, with the basic tracking of "Who Needs the Peace Corps?" at TTG Studios which was then under the title of "Fillmore". The working title was inspired by a series of performance the Mothers of Invention held at the Fillmore Auditorium, finishing a day prior to the recording session. Zappa would then inaugurate a three-day recording stint at Capital Studios to record Lumpy Gravy from March 14–16, 1967. The band returned to New York in the following week, where Zappa became acquainted to then Cream guitarist Eric Clapton during an acoustic guitar led jam at his home. The band subsequently spent from April to June rehearsing and gigging locally in support of their previous album Absolutely Free, which released on May 26, 1967. Popular contemporaries such as guitarist Jimi Hendrix, and singer-songwriter Essra Mohawk, joined the Mothers of Invention during their New York shows.Primary recording sessions ran from July until September 1967 at Mayfair Studios in New York. During this period of work on the album, the band recorded at a continuous rate, only taking breaks on the weekends. While the Jimi Hendrix Experience occupied Mayfair Studios on July 19 and 20, to record "The Stars That Play with Laughing Sam's Dice", the band worked on and executed ideas for the cover art for We're Only in it for the Money. Hendrix would make an appearance in the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band mock cover, blending in with the cardboard cutouts of other major figures. Weekday work was only halted again on August 4, when Bob Dylan booked the studio to mix and press an acetate disc of "Too Much Of Nothing". A majority of the basic tracks would be finished in August, and September was spent mostly overdubbing onto the basic recordings. On September 4, the Velvet Underground, who the Mothers of Invention then detested, entered the studio's second recording space with Tom Wilson, the band's previous producer, to record their sophomore album, White Light/White Heat. Both bands did however co-operate in the studio, and Zappa even suggested to Velvet Underground front-man Lou Reed that he record himself stabbing a cantaloupe with a wrench in the band's song "The Gift". The Mothers of Invention halted work on September 22 to pursue what is considered to be their first European tour, before returning to Apostolic Studios, also in New York, from October 3–8 in order to finish the album off, with final overdubs and mixing occurring.
While recording We're Only in It for the Money, Zappa discovered that the strings of Apostolic Studios' grand piano would resonate if a person spoke near those strings. The "piano people" experiment involved Zappa having various speakers improvise dialogue using topics offered by Zappa. Various people contributed to these sessions, including Eric Clapton, Rod Stewart and Tim Buckley, who Zappa became familiar with after a concert in December 1966. The "piano people" voices primarily consisted of Motorhead Sherwood, Roy Estrada, Spider Barbour, All-Night John and Louis Cuneo, who was noted for his laugh, which sounded like a "psychotic turkey".
During the production, Zappa experimented with recording and editing techniques which produced unusual textures and musique concrète compositions; the album featured abbreviated songs interrupted by segments of dialogue and unrelated music which changed the continuity of the album. Segments of orchestral music included on the album came from a solo orchestral album by Zappa previously released by Capitol Records under the title Lumpy Gravy in 1967. MGM claimed that Zappa was under contractual obligation to record for them, and subsequently Zappa re-edited Lumpy Gravy, releasing a drastically different version on Verve Records, after the release of We're Only in It for the Money. The 1968 version consisted of two musique concrète pieces that combined elements from the original orchestral performance with aspects of surf music and spoken word. The artwork of Lumpy Gravy identified it as "phase 2 of We're Only in It for the Money", while We're Only in It for the Money was identified in its artwork as "phase one of Lumpy Gravy", alluding to the conceptual continuity of the two albums.
Censorship and reissues
We're Only in It for the Money was heavily censored upon release, with several different alternate versions of tracks being featured on later reissues. During the recording sessions, Verve requested that Zappa remove the entire verse containing "shut your fucking mouth about the length of my hair" and "you shitty little person" from the song "Mother People". Zappa complied, but reversed the recording and included the backwards verse as part of the dialogue track "Hot Poop", concluding the album's first side, though on some versions, even with the reverse effect, the line "fucking" is still cut. The entire reversed line would be removed by Verve themselves on subsequent represses of their own. Also censored on all copies was the line "don't come in me", which was a Lenny Bruce reference in "Harry, You're A Beast", which was also reversed and manipulated through tape effects by Zappa.For some pressings of the album, MGM censored several tracks without Zappa's knowledge, involvement or permission. On the song "Absolutely Free", the line "I don't do publicity balling for you anymore" was edited by MGM to remove the word "balling", changing the meaning of the sentence. Additionally, on "Let's Make the Water Turn Black", the line "and I still remember Mama, with her apron and her pad, feeding all the boys at Ed's Cafe" was removed. Zappa later learned that this line was censored because an MGM executive thought that the word "pad" referred to a sanitary napkin, rather than a waitress's order pad. The other line that was censored was cut entirely. On some versions of the album, the line "I will love the police as they kick the shit out of me on the street" was removed from "Who Needs the Peace Corps?".
The Kellgren dialogue segment in "Concentration Moon" was also re-edited, due to Kellgreen labelling the Velvet Underground "as shitty a group as Frank Zappa's group", the censorship made it seem like he was calling the Velvet Underground "Frank Zappa's group", while on later versions, the line is cut entirely. Zappa later declined to accept an award for the album upon being made aware of the censorship, stating "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."