It was soon obvious what he was getting wasn’t quite what he expected, but Wilson was impressed enough to wangle a hefty recording budget and authorise Zappa to rent $500 worth of percussion instruments for a session with all the freaks from Sunset Boulevard on the Friday night. The results formed a substantial chunk of the unfinished The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet which occupied Side Four of the resulting double album.
By this point, thanks to their gigs on Sunset Strip, Zappa was a leading player in the Los Angeles freak fraternity, alongside Carl Franzoni and Vito Paulekas, the effective role models for Hungry Freaks, Daddy which may have sounded like fairly standard mid-sixties rock until the vibes and kazoo chimed in but was, in effect a nonconformist call to arms, and fair enough, that’s what the package suggested was coming.
Following it with I Ain't Got No Heart might seem like a step back from the brink, given the fact that it’s reasonably straightforward in the lyrical department, but it’s a rather clever bit of sequencing in a double album that gradually departs from the mainstream over its four sides, culminating in the twelve and a bit minutes of The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet.
Side one of the vinyl version went along a one bent, one straight formula, with I Ain't Got No Heart being followed by a posting from the edge in Who Are the Brain Police? which is, in turn succeeded by the three part doo wop harmonising by Zappa, Collins and bassist Roy Estrada on Go Cry on Somebody Else's Shoulder. Zappa was, of course, a major doo wop fan with a collection of more than 7,000 doo wop and R&B singles but his take on the genre, however affectionate it might have been, was cynically satirical (You cheated me baby/and told some dirty lies about me/Fooled around with all those other guys/That's why I had to get my khakis pressed).
You might be inclined to dismiss Motherly Love as a lightweight affair, at least until the groupie references kick in, by which stage it’s obvious the Mothers are out for as much of the old horizontal mambo action as can be arranged, and I have to admit the Kazoo choruses have a particular charm when lined up beside the lascivious intent being expressed in the lyrics.
And you can imagine them delivering How Could I Be Such a Fool? as a fairly straight ballad in a club setting, though in this setting it’s a fairly obvious send up, as is the absurdist semi-bubblegum Wowie Zowie, coming a good two years before the Ohio Express and the 1910 Fruitgum Company.
The affectionate yet mocking take on the doo wop R&B ballad continues through
You Didn't Try to Call Me and Any Way the Wind Blows, one of the first tracks cut for the album (the other one, Who Are the Brain Police? was probably the one that had producer Wilson on the phone to headquarters) and there’s a darker touch to I'm Not Satisfied before things start to take a consistent turn away from the mainstream.
There’s still a bit of the mainstream in You're Probably Wondering Why I'm Here but it’s being firmly pushed aside as Zappa’s lyrics set about mocking the straight elements in the Mothers‘ nightclub audiences. At least that’s the way I read it.
Things get really serious withTrouble Every Day. Close to fifty years later you might tend to forget just how ugly things were getting in the black ghettoes right across the States. A perceptive take on 1965’s race riots in South Central Los Angeles and the police response to them is delivered in a Dylanesque rap with the crunch lines You know something people, I’m not black/But there’s a lotsa times I wish I could say I’m not white around half way through the close to six minutes.
From there, eight and a half minutes of Help, I'm a Rock meander along in a manner best experienced on headphones, but probably won’t make a great deal of lyrical sense in that environment either. I’m inclined to think of this one as a freak ‘em out performance piece, though they’d moved on from there by the time the album hit the racks (if the setlist from June 1966 here is any indication).