Frak Zappa - Lumpy Money Project
Now this is the sort of posthumous release Zappa fans crave. What MOFO did for Freak Out!, Lumpy Money does for Lumpy Gravy and We're Only In It For The Money, two of the most important albums in the Zappa canon. Herein you'll find three CDs of alternate mixes and historical artifacts surrounding the creation of these albums. The material includes much that is obscure, as well as much that is well-known but presented in an unfamiliar guise.
Disk 1 starts off with a 22-minute composition built mostly from the recorded orchestral sessions for Lumpy Gravy. You will recognize the music from the eventual 31-minute Verve release, but it is organized quite differently. This is apparently what the Capitol release was supposed to sound like before the record company kerfuffle over Zappa's contractual exclusivity delayed matters by a year, allowing FZ time to extend and rework the material into what we now know as Lumpy Gravy. The Capitol version was briefly available on 8-track cartridge, and then kicked around for years in bootlegs run from a stolen acetate test pressing. Here it's presented in mono, having been salvaged from a much better-sounding single-channel reference tape (apparently, neither a multi-track master nor a stereo mix tape has survived). It lacks sung lyrics, and has only a modest amount of spoken material, and most of that seems to come from rehearsal chatter, and not the piano-reverberated directed dialogue that Zappa inserted extensively into the released version (and 25 years later, into his swan song Civilization Phaze III). This may be the most interesting part of the set, a very distinct "primordial" version of what become Lumpy Gravy. If you've listened to Lumpy Gravy proper many times, and have grown tired of the spoken dialog but not the music, then you might really enjoy having this.
Of all Zappa's albums, WOIIFTM may be the one that presents the most textual issues. The original 1967 mix, released on LP the next year, had a thumpy and distorted bass register, and when Zappa reissued the album on CD in 1986, he substituted a 1984 remix that infamously featured new rhythm section tracks laid down by Chad Wackerman and Scott Thunes, replacing the original tracks from Jimmy Carl Black, Billy Mundi and Roy Estrada. After Zappa's death, fan interest led to the original 1967 mix's reappearance on CD, first by Rykodisk in 1995, then Phantom in 2008. This album restores the 1984 remix, and also offers an obscure 1968 mono mix. This latter version closely matches the 1967 stereo release, though with some slightly different instrumental balances and (obviously) none of the latter's trademark spatial exploits. Even the dialog snippets that were censored in 1967 (e.g., "...the Velvet Underground which is as s**tty a group as Frank Zappa's group" in Concentration Mood) are censored in this mono mix, though they're restored in the 1984 remix.
Sandwiched between the two WOIIFTM mixes is a version of Lumpy Gravy that Zappa created in 1984. Like the 1984 WOIIFTM remix, there are added/replaced drum and electric bass tracks. It also introduces singing into the first section, (sounds to me like Ike Willis, FZ and perhaps another singer) with Thing-Fish like lyrics like "Yo mammy, who's yo mammy, who's you daddy? Holy mackle. Whole round Moses..." going along with the original electric guitar tune. I don't get this, honestly, and in the end Zappa never released this version, which appears here for the first time. It does improve on the original mix with respect to stereo clarity in several sections, and once you get past the shock of the opening song, it's a very rewarding listen.
With the four alternate album versions out of the way, we move to Disk 3, which starts with a 25-minute track that seems to comprises the material that Zappa wrote out for the instrumental musicians in the 1967 recording sessions that seeded Lumpy Gravy. The music definitely sounds to me as though it was composed to be source material for an eventual collage, rather than as a standalone composition, but aside from being identified as "an FZ construction" that existed as a stereo mix on ¼-inch tape, it's not clear just how this was assembled. Much of the important instrumental music from Lumpy Gravy is here: including the extended section in septuple time that Zappa often subsequently performed, with lyrics, as Oh No (c.f. Weasels Ripped My Flesh). There is also music that anticipates the "big band" style of Grand Wazoo and the 1988 tour band. The remainder of the album is similar to Disk 2 of MOFO, consisting of outtakes, building tape excerpts, interview excerpts, and audio "home movies" such a brief Zappa experiment with electronic feedback followed by a conversation with his wife where surprise is expressed that the loud sound didn't scare the baby.
About the only misgiving I have about Lumpy Money is the price. As I write this, it's an expensive "luxury" item, whether you purchase it here or from the ZFT's Barfko-Swill store. At current prices it will only appeal to Zappa aficionados, or those with lumpy wallets. But if you can get it at a reasonable price, you won't be disappointed at the gems within it.
