The Mothers Of Invention Official Bootleg Album

Folks, I’m away on vacation this week – well, it’s a sort of working vacation, since I’m going to be performing at the annual anniversary reunion celebration for the 1969 Woodstock Festival (see my post of the complete audio from Woodstock from a couple of weeks ago).

But because I didn’t want to leave you without something to hopefully enjoy this week, I give you what turns out to have been an unreleased FZ/Mothers album from 1971. This would have been known as The Official Mothers Of Invention Bootleg Album, and it was delivered to Warner Brothers sometime in mid-1971. The album would have function as a sort of “audio documentary”, chronicling a typical short Mothers tour from mid-1970. Frank put this album together from his candidly recorded tapes, and attempted to get Warner Brothers to release it to help fulfill his contract to them. As usual, with these more esoteric projects, the label rejected it.

Now I will say upfront that most of this material has been released on the 1992 album Playground Psychotics. This is kind of the usual deal with Frank’s unreleased projects – most of them were integrated into other projects, or released posthumously in their complete form. This project obviously was considered by Frank to be special enough to warrant release during his lifetime. It is worth noting that Frank also had a real fondness for this particular era of the band.

Listening to the album in its proper context, however, reveals that many of the tracks heard here are at least somewhat different from the versions that appear on Playground Psychotics. Several of the tracks are longer, for one thing. And we get an early performance of “Easy Meat” that I am fairly certain has not been released in this form. According to Mark Volman, this was recorded at a rehearsal, the date and location of which is unknown. It does have a killer Frank solo on it, however

And now the caveat: this tape was apparently acquired from Mark Volman, probably from a cassette. The copy that is circulating is several generations down from the master. It’s not exactly hi-fi. That’s not quite the point. For those of us who have good “bootleg ears“, this is still a very enjoyable listen and there’s plenty of variation here to make this worthwhile. This one has been circulating for years, but doesn’t get much love or attention. So I thought it would be good to shine a spotlight on it. You can download this tasty little sucker here.

Back next week with more wonderful Frank goodness! Have a great weekend everybody! And fuck food - buy Zappa!