The Mothers Of Invention release “We’re Only in It for the Money”, a parody of “Sgt. Pepper”

On this day, Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention released their third album, “We’re Only in It for the Money,” which featured an inner sleeve that parodied The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” It was the first of many parodies of The Beatles’ album cover over the years.

In September 1967, while in London to promote his second album, Frank Zappa met with Barry Miles and expressed his desire to parody the “Sgt. Pepper” cover. Barry Miles called his friend Paul McCartney, who explained to Zappa that EMI owned the rights to the album sleeve, not The Beatles, and suggested he speak with EMI.

It seems MGM / Verve Records, Zappa’s record company, did not seek permission from EMI, leading to a five-month delay in the album’s release due to legal concerns. Ultimately, Verve chose to invert the cover artwork, using the parody image inside and the intended interior artwork as the main sleeve. Zappa, upset by this decision, held Paul McCartney responsible. In recent years, the album has been reissued with its original intended cover.

It was Zappa’s first time in Europe [in September 1967] and he seems to have been overzealous in trying to show how professional he was. There was also a semantic problem: the word ‘product’ was not used in Britain and sounded very crass to the music journalists, who were unaccustomed to musicians talking like managers. The artists were supposed to talk about everyone having fun, or how artistic their work was.

Zappa’s use of the word ‘product’ also shocked Paul McCartney. During a press reception at the Kasmin Gallery, Zappa asked the Beatle on the phone for permission to parody the Sgt. Pepper sleeve on We’re Only In It For The Money. It was fine by McCartney, who liked the Mothers, but he told Frank the sleeve image was owned by EMI, not the Beatles. Frank would have to deal with the record company. Afterwards Zappa told Griffiths: ‘Paul McCartney was disturbed that I could refer to what we do as product, but I’m dealing with businessmen who care nothing about music, or art, or me personally. They want to make money and I relate to them on that level or they’d regard me as just another rock ‘n’ roll fool.’

‘I never understood why Zappa blamed me for not being able to use the Sgt Pepper sleeve,’ McCartney said later. ‘I told him I’d write a letter or get Brian [Epstein, the Beatles’ manager] to ask them. I don’t think EMI would have stopped them, or even could have stopped them.’ This issue held up the release of the album, but it is quite probable that MGM-Verve never even approached EMI. If they did, the Beatles would have heard of it, and helped. Subsequently, Sgt Pepper became one of the most parodied album sleeves of all time, presumably with no lawsuits. […]

From “Zappa: A Biography” by Barry Miles, 2005

As I remember it, [Frank Zappa] rang me up and said, “We want to do an album parodying the Pepper cover. I want to do a cover similar to it but with dustbins and garbage and stuff. I’m ringing to see if you have any objection.’ I said, ‘Well, no, I haven’t but sometimes there are copyright problems. It’s outside my jurisdiction. I can say, “Hey, Frank, go for it, man!” but then somebody in the lawyers’ department of EMI might say, “We don’t allow this.” You’ll have to speak to those people yourself, but as far as I’m concerned, yes, you’ve got my blessing.’ I rang up my office and said, ‘Frank Zappa wants to do this. Try and help him if you can.’ And then I’m not sure what happened. I assumed he’d done it but then years later I heard him saying, ‘Oh, he wouldn’t let me do it.’

Paul McCartney – From “Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now” by Barry Miles, 1997

The cover of Money became Cal Schenkel’s most celebrated piece of work: a parody of Sgt. Pepper. Peter Blake’s collage of pop personalities is replaced by a strange and disturbing pantheon with cancelled eyes: Lyndon B. Johnson, viewed as a war criminal by the anti-war movement, appears twice; Elvis is holding snakes, one of the accessories of Southern religious mania; the girl from the International Times logo watches a mechanical man drink a glass of water. The Beatles were attending a burial of their old image: compared to the Mothers’ jumble-sale dresses their Carnaby Street military chic looks hopelessly twee. Where the Beatles spelt their name in neat rows of tulips, ‘Mothers’ is written in carrots, tomatoes and ruptured water melons. Schenkel himself crouches next to a TV aerial and a six-pack of beer – symbols of middle-aged inertia. Zappa stands over a cancelled bust of Beethoven, his right foot seemingly extended in a ludicrous boot? Instead of Madame Tussaud’s careful wax works Schenkel has fashioned grotesque dummies of Zappa, Black, Mundi, Preston and Underwood. A plastic doll in the dummy’s lap and a toy robot at its feet repeat the theme of mechanical humanity. Near one of Titian’s Popes a Christmas tree sprouts up, symbol of everything false and conformist in American family life. Producer Tom Wilson is wearing nothing underneath his high-school sweater and is holding his left nipple. Behind Zappa a pregnant Gail poses in an uncharacteristically dowdy dress and Jimi Hendrix holds a cut-out of a small girl (Herbie Cohen’s daughter Lisa), satirizing racist paranoia about black sexuality threatening family values. Money reached number 32 in the UK pop chart during the summer of 1968.

From “Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play” by Ben Watson, 1996

On the day that that album was released, the thing that escaped everybody was the fact that it was designed to show that The Beatles were only in it for the money, not that we were. If we were only in it for the money, we’d be doing something else! I mean, to look at that cover and to see the people on that cover and say that these guys are only in it for the money… I thought that was the funniest thing we could have put together. But automatically everybody assumed that that was the exact truth, and nobody stopped to question for a minute the relationship between the Sgt. Pepper cover style and the title. You know, they never once questioned that the Beatles might be anything other than directly descended from heaven. And I personally felt for a long time that they were extremely plastic, and flat-out commercial.

Frank Zappa – Interviewed with Mike Bourne, Down Beat Yearbook, 1971

From Wikipedia:

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 efforts, it is a concept album, and satirizes left- and right-wing politics, particularly the hippie subculture, as well as the Beatles’ album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. 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.

We’re Only in It for the Money encompasses rock, experimental music, and psychedelic rock, with orchestral segments deriving from the recording sessions for Lumpy Gravy, which was previously issued as a solo instrumental album by Capitol Records and was subsequently reedited by frontman Frank Zappa and released by Verve; the reedited Lumpy Gravy was produced simultaneously with We’re Only in It for the Money and is the first part of a conceptual continuity, continued with the reedited Lumpy Gravy and concluded with Zappa’s final album Civilization Phaze III (1994).

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; a revised version of Zappa’s solo album 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.

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.”

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 and psychedelic rock as a whole.

Recording

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.

In July, band member Ray Collins had left the Mothers before the New York recording sessions took place, but later rejoined when the band was recording the doo-wop songs that formed the album Cruisin’ with Ruben & the Jets. Gary Kellgren was hired as an engineer for the project, and subsequently wound up delivering whispered pieces of dialogue that linked segments of We’re Only in It for the Money. During the recording sessions, Verve requested that Zappa remove a verse 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, but this would be removed by Verve themselves on subsequent represses of their own. Also censored on all copies was the Lenny Bruce reference in “Harry, You’re A Beast”, and a spoken segment of “Concentration Moon” in which Kellgren called the Velvet Underground “as shitty a group as Frank Zappa’s group”.

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 (the manager of the studio) 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 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.

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 Kellgren dialogue segment in “Concentration Moon” was also re-edited, making it seem that he was calling the Velvet Underground “Frank Zappa’s group.” 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.”

Themes

In his lyrics for We’re Only in It for the Money, Zappa speaks as a voice for “the freaks—imaginative outsiders who didn’t fit comfortably into any group”, according to AllMusic writer Steve Huey. Subsequently, the album satirizes hippie culture and left-wing politics, as well as targeting right-wing politics, describing both political sides as “prisoners of the same narrow-minded, superficial phoniness.”

Zappa later stated in 1978, “hippies were pretty stupid. … the people involved in [youth] processes … are very sensitive to criticism. They always take themselves too seriously. So anybody who impugns the process, whether it’s a peace march or love beads or whatever it is – that person is the enemy and must be dealt with severely. So we came under a lot of criticism, because we dared to suggest that perhaps what was going on was really stupid.”

Another element of the album’s lyrical content came from the Los Angeles Police Department’s harassment and arrests of young rock fans, which made it difficult for the band to perform on the West Coast, leading the band to move to New York City for better financial opportunities. Additionally, Zappa made reference to comedian Lenny Bruce; the song “Harry, You’re A Beast” quotes Bruce’s routine “To Is A Preposition, Come Is A Verb”.

The song “Flower Punk” parodies the garage rock staple “Hey Joe”, and depicts a youth going to San Francisco to become a flower child and join a psychedelic rock band. Additionally, the track makes a reference to “Wild Thing”, one of the songs that defined the counterculture of that period. The rhythmic pattern of “Flower Punk” is complex, consisting of 4 bars of a fast 5 (2–3), followed by 4 bars of 7 (2–2–3).

Packaging

Zappa’s art director Cal Schenkel and Jerry Schatzberg photographed a collage for the album cover, which parodied the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Zappa spent US$4,000 (equivalent to $33,700 in 2022) on the photo shoot, which he stated was “a direct negative” of the Sgt. Pepper album cover. “[Sgt. Pepper] had blue skies … we had a thunderstorm.” Jimi Hendrix, a friend of Zappa, took part in the photo shoot.

Zappa phoned Paul McCartney, seeking permission for the parody. McCartney told him that it was an issue for business managers, but Zappa responded that the artists themselves were supposed to tell their business managers what to do. Nevertheless, Capitol objected, and the album’s release was delayed for five months. Verve decided to package the album with inverted cover artwork, placing the parody cover as interior artwork (and the intended interior artwork as the main sleeve) out of fear of legal action. Zappa was angered over the decision; Schenkel felt that the Sgt. Pepper parody “was a stronger image” than the final released cover. In recent years, the album has been reissued with the intended front cover.

Release

The album was released on March 4, 1968, by Verve Records. It peaked at number 30 on the Billboard 200. […]

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