The 1966 album Frank Zappa wasn’t allowed to finish: “That was it”
There aren’t too many artists that landed in the rock and pop world with such a fully-realised world as Frank Zappa.
Even before the 1960s were over, the slew of records dropped with The Mothers of Invention all teemed to bursting point with haphazard creativity. Eye-popping comix covers and arresting proto-punk collages glared with freaky provocation on the likes of We’re Only in It for the Money and Uncle Meat, scored by dense mashes of Zappa’s eclectic grabs at anything from doo-wop nostalgia, rock and roll shred, orchestral bluster, and avant-garde tape experiments.
The Zappaverse was a wieldy one, a director’s vision that had long been gestating through his work on independent movie soundtracks during his stint at Studio Z, as well as penning minor hits for local California groups.
Once he’d joined The Mothers and assumed de facto leadership in 1965, Zappa was ready to commit his swelling artistic hinterland with the handsome budget bestowed by MGM’s Verve sub-label, offering the band a generous mountain of cash to cut 1966’s Freak Out! debut at Hollywood’s TGT studios and meeting all of Zappa’s far-out ideas before finally making one exception to The Mothers’ freaky ambitions.
“It was a double album, which was also unusual,” Zappa reflected to WLIR Free Flight in 1981. “I think it was the very first rock and roll double album. And it’s not finished either. They released it before all the tracks were done on ‘Monster Magnet’.”
That’s just the basic track from ‘Monster Magnet’. They wouldn’t let me finish it. They said no one could spend any more money, and that was it.”
Frank Zappa
MGM had been more than amenable during the Freak Out! sessions, doling out as much as $20,000 and roping in Bob Dylan and Simon and Garfunkel producer Tom Wilson to oversee the record’s creation, himself a huge enthusiast of The Mothers’ freak beat. But the 12-minute ‘The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet’ finale was indeed tacked on to the album as an unfinished piece, earning its ‘Unfinished Ballet in Two Tableaux’ subtitle, the percussion tracks recorded intended as the guts of a larger and more complex composition.
Not that you’d know it. Now long established as a Freak Out! highlight, ‘The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet’ swirls in a potent realm of the Zappaverse, introducing the recurring Suzy Creamcheese in its chatty opener before descending into a cavernous clug of electronic squall, frenetic percussion, and a ghoulish choir of primitive vocals, plus featuring Dr John on piano. Amid its jungle animalism, the gasping moans drift into a tape collage anticipating Lump Gravy’s screwed-up bricolage, a febrile distillation of everything Zappa was gunning for in his 1960s zenith.
MGM had doled out $500 alone for its rented drumming, but decided enough was enough when halting ‘The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet’ sessions, Zappa ostensibly never to return to the piece to expand or realise his original vision for the weird opus.
His creative drive was going a million miles an hour during his late 1960s output, but considering the way in which he stockpiled and recycled material nebulously across the Zappaverse, we’ll never truly know if The Mothers honcho hadn’t smattered some of the studio outtakes or ideas in some fashion across his bewildering oeuvre.
