Original subtitles

You want to hear the horrible truth about the first bunch of mothers?

It took a year and a half to convince them to let their hair grow.

They were so afraid to let their hair grow out that it was embarrassing.

And sometimes when their hair was just starting to get long, they would comb it

down when they were on stage and spray it up as soon as they left so that they

wouldn't be stopped by the police on the way home.

The mother's got love that'll drive you mad.

They're raving about the way we do.

Don't need to feel lonely. Don't need to feel sad. If we ever get a hold on you,

what you need is motherly love.

Come on, get it now.

Motherly love.

Frank played music that's Frank Zappa of The Mother's Invention.

It was different, to say the least. I mean, this guy was, you know.

seriously unique and very talented.

The first time I met Frank, I was utterly

impressed.

I'm meeting somebody who is really smart, really funny, and really sharp,

and had basically created the Mothers of Invention, which were sort of blowing

holes in society as we knew it, and finding humor.

in these strange changes that were happening.

Out of nowhere came a unique American pop culture document

that embraced high culture, low culture, avant-garde music, and basic rock and

roll.

He was the ultimate free speech advocate.

And essentially, Freak Out was his first act of free speech.

The title, Freak Out, what you can discover in the liner notes.

This one is one of my favorites. If your children ever find out how lame you

really are, they'll murder you in your sleep.

Frank didn't play by the rules. He created his own, and he was very

consistent throughout his entire career doing that. And Freak Out being the very

first album set the tone.

I had this girlfriend.

And we were young and in love and bent on exploring.

Her parents had a sailboat and they used to go sailing every weekend and leave us

alone in the house.

Good move, parents.

I came over there and she says, I want to, before we get started here, I want

to play this record I just bought. Put on the record and I sat there in front

of the speakers. Wow.

I was totally blown away. So much so that it was stronger than sex.

He was in his early 20s and Frank was writing film scores. He wrote the music

for a film called Run Home Slow.

and it was like a low-budget B-movie western.

I had scored a couple of films. One of them I didn't get paid for, and the

other one I did get paid for. The one that I got paid for, I went out and

bought a good guitar.

and took over the debts and the assets of a man named Paul Buff, who had a

recording studio in a town called Cucamonga, California.

And at that time, in the history of the record business, he had the only five

-track recorder in existence that he manufactured himself.

This meant that he could do overdubbing that was impossible in Hollywood at that

time. We're about to hear an early version of Any Way the Wind Blows before

they actually made Freak Out. Yeah.

Cucamonga time period.

Dark times.

Not the best moment in Frank's career. Getting divorced.

Just out of jail.

Fabulous, yeah.

Getting ready to go to jail. Oh, this is before the sting operation? Yeah, yeah.

Oh, jeez.

Ray Collins.

Voice of an angel.

Frank on drums. Yeah.

He's totally in lockstep with himself.

Frank's playing bass, guitar, drums, reflecting on his life to

prep this particular track.

From the troubles of the past, it took me much too long to see

that our romance couldn't last.

Picture this. See, I'm just getting a divorce. I'm living in this studio. It

doesn't have a bathtub. It doesn't have a shower. It doesn't have hot water. I

don't have anything to eat except peanut butter, instant mashed potatoes, and

coffee.

I go around gathering up pop bottles so I can buy cigarettes, but I've got all

the electronic stuff I need to make recordings.

And people just weren't ready to deal with Studio Z, some guy who says, hey,

come and record your band here, or let's make a movie.

Apparently the Holy Roller Church citizens and the parents of the children

who attended the grammar school felt that this mysterious 1350-an-hour

recording studio...

was bad for their community, so they designed to get me out of there. My

father was entrapped by a detective, a guy by the name of Detective

Willis. One day, this man comes in and introduces himself as a used car

salesman. Then he says, I heard that you could probably make for me a hot movie

that the rest of the used car salesmen would really get off on. He wanted to

know how much it would be, and so I sat there and figured it all out.

$300, 8 millimeter, you know?

And so he said that was too much. I said, well, how about a tape?

And he says, yeah, that would be great. And he sat there and read me off a list

of all the types of perversions that he wanted illustrated in the tape. And I

think, what a great conceptual piece of humor.

That night, I set about to manufacture this tape with squeaking bed springs and

all the rest of this paraphernalia, overdubbed a little music in the

background so it was luxuriant.

$100 I was going to get for making it. Next day, he comes back in there.

And he says, well, I don't have 100. I only got 50. And I start saying, hmm,

this is a little bit weird. I said, maybe you better not take the tape. Why

don't you just forget about it? So he turned around and started walking away.

And he whips out a badge.

And the door swings open. The guy comes in with a camera. Two other guys come

in. They've got handcuffs.

There was a front page story in the local newspaper that said, to a go-go to

jail. There was a picture of me and the girl whose voice was happening on the

tape. They sentenced me to six months in jail with all but 10 days suspended plus

three years probation.

In a way, I guess I have to thank Detective Willis and the evil machinery

of the San Bernardino County legal system for giving me a chance to see

from that perspective what the penal system is like in this country and how

putrid it is and how ineffectual and how stupid.

An incredibly intelligent human being, which was also intimidating, because I

thought I was reasonably smart, but he was smarter, and he was funnier.

A year ago today was when you went away, but

now you'll come back knocking on my door, and you'll say you're back to

stay, but I say... Frank wrote Go Cry on Somebody Else's Shoulder with Ray

Collins. which Frank describes as very greasy. You should not listen to it. You

should wear it on your hair.

Which...

I was thrown a little bit by the 50s doo-wop numbers.

They were funny, but I was going, what?

I think he means this.

There is a level of satire and kidding and parody and all that stuff, but there

was also a sincerity underlying all of it that I really, really thought was

cool. That man put out...

class, anything that he was making fun of, or anything that he was paying

homage to, he could surpass the very thing that he loved. His

satirical bent obviously carries through all of that doo

-wop and 50s memories that he brings forward on sides one and two.

But the love of the music and what he feels is the poetic connection he gets

out of it is genuine.

And he's doing it with a band who played it originally.

He got back out of jail and then realized that the building was going to

be sold and turned into something else. And so he couldn't stay there any

longer. But it just so happens that his trusty friend, Ray Collins,

was in a band. And so...

Ray Collins introduced him to the Soul Giants.

And the next thing you know, he turned that band into The Mothers.

He did this so young, and he did this with musicians who really understood the

culture that he was coming from.

After playing with them and enjoying the experience and

liking what I heard, I suggested that we develop

original material and try and make records well frank paid

a little more had to pay a little more dues in the clubs so like he was aware

more of the boundaries that was before i was with the band of course well it was

very risky to do your own material in those days i mean anybody who's working

in a club right now knows that if you play original material you get fired

So am I. So in order to develop original material, you have to sneak it in

between whatever else people are requesting. Just as much as you wonder

about me being in this place, that's just how much I marvel

at the lameness on your face.

We had a band that was working in go-go bars.

And we used to play midnight hour and knock on wood.

Louie Louie, Wooly Bully, and all the dance favorites of that time in order

for the go-go girls to stand up on the bar and rattle their bones to the

musical thrills. You rise each day the same old way.

And join your friends out on the street.

Spray your hair and thank your knee.

I think your life is incomplete.

but maybe that's not for me to say they only pay me here to play

every once in a while we throw in one of the songs from the freak out album and

everybody would go back to spewing play caravan with a drum solo i want to hear

a caravan with a drum solo you're probably wondering why i'm here and so

am i and so am i here comes the kazoos

I love it, but what is it? I don't know. It's got a kazoo in it. It can't be bad.

We got fired a lot.

This was music that he wanted to make regardless of

who didn't want to hear it. He was going to make it because he wanted to hear it

first and he knew there were other people out there who would respond to

it. The Sunset Strip was tailor-made for him.

I came into Hollywood from the valley. It was like going to Oz.

Ciro's ladies, the whiskey, the trip down the street.

You could see the doors, the mothers, the birds in the same block on the same

night. And everybody...

knew everybody or was about to know everybody.

I was just about to become involved with these bunch of freaks on the Sunset

Strip, led by Vito and his sidekick, Carl Franzoni. People were just amazed

at what we were doing.

Vito taught me all these things.

Vito was a monster about dance.

The actual freaks, per se, come from a...

more established artistic situation.

There was a sculptor in Los Angeles. His name was Vito.

Vito Pelikas.

He was so articulate, and he had a really nice wife.

Her name was Sue, and they had a little boy by the name of Godot.

They were like the holy family to us.

He had a dance class.

We developed a dance troupe.

And any place we would go, they'd let us in free.

He would gather his people, and they would go dance their expressive styles

in nightclubs. We were all there together, and we all felt alike.

So it was a feeling of camaraderie. It was all about the dancing. It was all

about showing yourself off. And Vito would flail.

They had participated in being filmed for the movie Mondo Hollywood by Robert

Carl Cohen and that's where they met the mothers.

Everybody's dancing their ass off and I turn to my left and there's these

musicians with stove hats that look like police hats.

And I said, who in the hell are they? They got a good beat, man.

The freaks were absolutely a force to be reckoned with at that time. And it was a

match made in heaven, the mothers and the freaks together.

I love the freak scene.

100 Freaks Daddy was written for Carl Resti's Fransone.

He is freaky down to his toenails.

Someday he will live next door to you and your lawn will die.

I'm Hungry Freaks Daddy.

Mr. America walk on by your schools that do not teach

Mr. America walk on by the minds that won't be reached

Mr. America try to hide the emptiness that's you

inside I've had a wonderful education, but it has nothing to do with going to

school drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre

educational system.

Forget about the senior prom and go to the library and educate yourself if

you've got any guts.

When I read that, I feel like I am the direct byproduct of his...

real belief that school would ruin your creativity.

And I was encouraged and I did. I dropped out of school in the beginning

of eighth grade.

Frank and Ray on the delivery here. It's interesting because most of the songs on

this record are like, it's like duets. Yeah.

Mr. America, walk on by your schools that do not teach.

Frank was shouting and speaking a lot of the words rather than singing them.

So Ray Collins would be singing the pitched line, but Frank would just be

saying, Mr. America, you know, in his monotone, in his annoyed, his

aggravated, his angry voice.

And that had a lot of...

of impact.

You didn't hear that on other so-called pop albums.

Frank's delivery is just like, it's just so like middle finger, you know what I

mean?

I want

kazoos.

The spirit of confrontation that was part of the mother's early

performances from the start. He's talking very openly about

change in America, how America as an ideal is worth fighting for.

It's like the vocals which are just like so...

ugly and in-your-face and attitudinal, and then the guitar is like an extension

of that.

A guy could play, you know.

If he were just a composer, if he were just an arranger, if he were just a...

lyric writer.

He would be amazing. But the fact that on top of all of that, that he was such

a brilliant improviser on guitar, it's just staggering.

It's just, it's monstrous. I love it.

All the bluesiness and the attitude of it is coming from all the blues

guitarists that he loved.

Clarence Gatemouth Brown and Johnny Guitar Watson and someone, the guy who

played with Howlin' Wolf.

When you heard them coming off of a record, you felt their attitude and

their power.

But then it's, you know, it goes through all these different chord changes. It's

obviously not a blues solo all the way through. And then, especially when you

get to the part where you got all this...

You know, those aren't the type of guitar figures you were accustomed to

hearing on rock and roll records in 1966.

I didn't even know about Frank. All it said on the marquee when I saw them was

the Mothers.

And that automatically says, you know, something different is going on in here.

At least at that time, that was a different sounding name, to say the

least. So what happened was when I got there, boy, what I saw and what I heard,

boy, I'll tell you, it really impressed me. Like, you know, I said, you know,

something's going on here.

as opposed to not.

Jimmy was on drums, and Roy, and Ray, and Frank, and Henry.

It was just really impressive.

We went to a lot of places, and they all said, forget it. And then one day, we

were working at the Whiskey A Go-Go, and that's where Tom Wilson comes in.

Tom Wilson is probably one of the most underparoled I

think, misunderstood producers in the record business.

One of the reasons that he was so remarkable was that he was a black man

in basically a white part of the music business.

Tom Wilson was a part of the creation of some of the most important records ever

made. Blonde on blonde.

Sounds of silence.

Bringing it all back home. The Velvet Underground and Nico. Like a Rolling

Stone. Tom Wilson was superlative.

Herb Cohen, doing his duty.

Which is what managers manage to do. You've got this guy named Tom Wilson,

who was working for MGM at that time, to come down from another club where he was

having a good time, come down to where we were, and listen to the group, you

know? We happened to be in the middle of the Watts Riot song, which is sort of a

bluesy thing, and he listened to five minutes of that and says, hey, yeah,

sure, white blues band, okay, we'll sign them. $2,500 advance, see you later, out

the door.

Didn't know what we were doing, you know?

So we made a deal, and after squabbling with the record company about the name

of the group... Some pinhead there had decided that this was a bad name for a

group and that no radio station would ever play our records because the name

was too risqué. So out of necessity, we became the mothers of invention.

We went into the studio.

The first thing we recorded on the first session was Any Way the Wind Blows.

That was recognizable enough.

But the second song was Who Are the Brain Police.

Uh-oh.

This is the beginning of Brain Police.

I've never heard anything like that on a record before. It's just like dark

sounding.

Who are the brain police? If you're 14 in the 60s,

you hear this and you might decide to question everyone.

What will you do if we let you go home?

And the plastics all melted and so is the...

It does make you think, is my brain under surveillance?

He was confrontational. And you think, what's that? That's just noise.

And then you realize, no, it's not just noise.

It's full of really intelligent ideas.

Musically, it's very inventive.

What will you do when the label comes up?

And the plastics all melted and the chrome.

And that's when Freddy Krueger comes out and rips your face off.

In that moment.

I think I'm going to die.

Do you hear the British?

I think I'm going to die.

Do you hear that?

And the eyebrows started going up and down in the control room.

And by the time that afternoon was over, there was a lot of phone calls between

Los Angeles and New York as to exactly what was going on.

When the mothers got presented their contract, Frank was presenting some of

the material that they were going to be recording, things like who are the brain

police.

Henry Vestine could not wrap his head around that stuff.

He just wanted to be in more of a bluesier band.

And so he bailed.

And Mr.

Elliot Ingber came into the situation at that time. Elliot back there?

Yeah.

I definitely remember listening to the playback on the big speakers in TT&G,

listening to Who Are the Brain Police?

At 5 o'clock in the morning, someone kept singing this in my mind and made me

write it down. I will admit to being frightened when I finally played it out

loud and sang the words.

What's going on here, you know? I mean, I knew what was going on because we just

did it, but I listened back to the whole thing coming back at me, and, you know,

it didn't bother me.

But I was, you know, I knew something was going on here, to say the least. And

then on this track, you have what's the lion's roar drum. Yeah, there's so many

weird things in this.

What's cool about this, Perez.

So that's a drum with a rope in the head, right? And then when you pull on

the rope, it makes that sound.

It's so sinister.

I was simultaneously enjoying Joe Houston and all the rest of the rhythm

and blues records that I had while I was listening to Edgar Burress.

I just heard that music and I liked it. I couldn't understand why other people

didn't like it as much as I did.

These are sounds, you know, never before heard in rock.

You know, I walked in with my guitar and amplifier.

When I got there, there was all these musicians in this room.

I sit down, tune up the guitar, and he counted off and conducted.

I'd never seen him do that, like that. I didn't know anything about this man's

ability to orchestrate.

Wilson had faith in us, and he went along with the whole project.

Tom Wilson realized how talented Frank Zappa was, but he also made it so

that... The record would be more than just a record with the five-piece band

playing. He enabled the budget to expand into having session players join in on

the sessions, which takes the music sonically to a completely other level.

The quality of these musicians were incredible.

Of course, everybody worked with Carole Kay.

Dave Wells on brass.

John Rotella on woodwinds. John Rotella is a songwriter for Frank Sinatra.

These names are the who's who of recording sessions of the day.

Side two, track four, I'm Not Satisfied is okay and safe and was designed

that way on purpose.

So maybe he thought that this song had commercial potential.

To me, there's nothing safe and okay about it. It's a dive down to the

deepest part of the person. And those words are dark.

No place to go.

I'm tired of walking up and down the street all by myself.

You hear really gut-wrenching lyrics.

He was being so upfront and personal with the shit that he was going through

at that time.

Times were bleak. I mean, even at the session, they needed a small advance of

money so that he can eat.

I think

his secret strength,

his superpower, is his ability with melody.

Frank is really underrated as a melodic composer.

He had the reputation of being unusual and different.

It was a challenge to work with Frank, not in a bad way, but just people

weren't used to hearing music like that.

When I talked to Carole Kay about those sessions, she said, you know, Frank was

basically running those sessions. He's telling the musicians what to play.

I can just picture him, you know, sitting by hand, writing those parts

out. days before the session, just getting all that shit together.

We have Carole Kay on 12 string on this one.

How cool is that? That's very cool.

Piano in the background.

Piano there. Sharing the same track.

And there's the strings.

And woodwinds.

And a bass sax or a baritone sax. Yeah, that's what it sounds like.

Very Supremes.

It's crazy, man.

I was simply flabbergasted that one young man.

of approximately 25 or 25 and a half could put all that together.

I had to reread the notes inside to make sure that he had done all the

orchestrations himself.

Everybody thought he was kind of this wild hippie. Nothing could be farther

from the truth.

He was a very disciplined musician.

You know, cigarettes and coffee up all night.

More than 100 square blocks were decimated by fire and looters.

and few buildings were left intact one of the major songs in that album was the

watts riot song trouble every day is how i feel about racial unrest in general

and the watt situation in particular it was written during the watts riot as it

developed i shopped it briefly all over hollywood but no one would touch it

everybody worries so much about not getting any airplay my my he was

playing in racially mixed bands very early on in his musical career, like

bands like The Blackouts.

It was the Antelope Valley Joint Union High School and Junior College.

That was such an isolated area. We were the only thing that even resembled rock

and roll or rhythm and blues up there. And in spite of that, even though the

kids would like to have heard some of that kind of music, the school and the

city authorities were against having it performed.

He took to R&B music so early in life.

It was my whole...

you know, upbringing with Frank and the records he was listening to.

It was always a real treat when Johnny Guitar Watson would come by.

I did hear that on the radio initially, and obviously the guitars got me right

away. It's a stone-killer riff.

That's the blues. That's nothing but the blues right there. No, that's Elliott

playing that, but that would provide like the framework, sort of like the

carpet of that song and allow Frank to just dance over the top of it with all

these crazy lines.

Checking out the news until my eyeballs fail to see.

I mean to say that every day there's just another rotten mess.

And what's going to change, my friend, is anybody's guess.

So I'm watching and I'm waiting, hoping for the best. Even think I'll go to

prayer every time I hear them saying that there's no way today, that trouble

coming every day.

You realize the anger that was out there, the lack of equality.

which became central to so much what so many of us were about in those days.

Let's fix that.

Wednesday, I watched the riot. I seen the cops out on the street.

Watched them throwing rocks and stuff and choking in the heat.

What is so disturbing, it's like we didn't succeed, and it continues.

Seen the smoking fire and the market burning down.

Watch while everybody on your street would take a turn To stomp and smash and

bash and crash and slash and bust and burn Funny thing is that the lyrics of

that song didn't go out of style. I mean, as you witnessed last year, with

the exception of the woman driver being sawed in half by .50 caliber machine gun

bullets, I guess everything else was right there. No way today, that trouble

coming every day

No way to delay, that trouble's coming every day.

That became a buzzword, a buzz phrase for everybody in LA. No way to delay,

that trouble's coming every day.

And what's interesting here is that in the mix on the album, it's double

-tracked. But here it's not, it's just single live vocal.

if it comes up they say that if the place blows up they will be the first to

tell because the boys they got downtown are working hard and doing swell and if

anybody gets the news before it hits the street they say that no one blabs it

faster their coverage can't be beat and if another woman driver gets a machine

gun from a seat they'll send some joker with a brownie and you'll see it all

complete a brownie being a camera. You can take the same images and completely

twist them depending on your master's orders.

He was first to kind of recognize that changing way that they were going to

present this, and it was immediate, and it was live.

Hey, you know something, people?

I'm not black, but there's a whole lot of times I wish I could say I'm not

white.

I assume that he knew the chance he was taking by including this on the record,

you know, being his first album, right? And they actually issued it as a single.

When Frank died, this was the song that was played over and over again on the

radio. The first time I heard that... And

I don't know what it is about that melody that really had an impact on me.

As a nine-year-old, I just thought it was...

sheer absurdism, just absolute, you know, just surreal nonsense, which was

very appealing to me.

Total Cthulhu madness.

He really devoted a lot of it to bringing awareness to the scene of the

freaks, and so freak out and what is freaking out was kind of the focal

point. He decides that on the last session...

He's going to invite Vito and Carl and Sue and the rest of the freaks down to

the studio along with a scout going down to Sunset Boulevard and saying, hey,

there's this guy named Frank Zappi who's having a recording session at TTG and

you're invited.

Then we get a little razor blade edit here.

Brain police.

And then... Classic.

On the corner of La Brea and Franklin, he knew this young girl, very beautiful

young girl.

So he said, why don't you come with me?

So I go in there with him, and he goes, immediately they go into the bedroom.

Well, I'm not going to follow them. So I'm standing there, and what is in front

of me is a pond.

So I pick up one of the rocks.

I help, I'm a rock.

And I show it to him, and he makes a song about it.

The satire of this, the

political climate.

Yeah, because they were, you know, they seriously were having issues with Sunset

Boulevard being packed with kids every night. There was tension. The cops used

to come and clean out Sunset Strip every once in a while.

All you freakers and dancers, put down your bells and let's go.

That was Frank just making stuff up as he went along, but having some sort of

framework. Help, I'm a rock. You know, help, I'm a cop.

Help, I'm a cop.

The soundtrack to the freak movement. Yeah.

Side four is just one long, massive 12-minute piece.

According to Frank, it's not done. It wasn't finished.

He just was able to record the percussion, the rhythm section of it,

and not fully orchestrate it the way he wanted it to be.

Susie? Yes?

Susie Cream Cheese?

Yes?

This is the voice of your conscience, baby.

I just want to check one thing out with you. You don't mind, do you?

What?

Susie cream cheese, honey, what's got into you? He invited as many people as

he could to the studio that would help what he was doing.

It was essentially the planned anarchy that Carl Franzoni talks about with

Vito and the troupe. So you got Jimmy Carl Black laying it down and just

total soundscapes over top.

Yeah, synthesizer-y things. There you have it.

So this is completely typical of Frank to introduce

electronic oscillator effects.

You know, he was messing around with stuff like this at Studio Z.

You're talking about an industry that's reliant on singles in a singles market.

And here comes Frank Zappa releasing a double album with Side 4.

of just sonic tapestry.

There we have the prepared piano.

The lion's roar drum.

What Tom Wilson did for Frank was he gave him the

money and the opportunity, having session musicians there, being able to

rent all of that percussion, being able to get that 500 bucks to rent all the

gear. and then get the three hours of studio time from 2 to 5 a.m to do

whatever the hell he wanted it's like he's he's like playing tapping you know

yeah he's literally reaching inside the piano with metallic objects and you know

yeah

meanwhile

we've got you know the uh the freaks doing their thing this is typical sounds

that the freaks would make when they would dance especially veto veto would

chant with like he would get into the zone and he would

like double talk and mumble and scream you know call friends only be back there

clapping and screaming like crazy and veto would just be like contorting his

entire body to the to the beat of this drum and and and literally like

He asked me to do background, you know... Or... I

think it's pretty cool to say, like, you know, you guys have been there for us.

Come into the studio for this moment and let's immortalize it. Let's capture

this.

And there's Vito right there.

Very Tarzan. There he is.

Perfect timing.

He liked to get a lot of people into a room and just see what happens. Anybody

could throw stuff against the wall and see what happens. But his was very well

constructed, you know, and they made sense and they blended and they made

each section relevant to each other.

Frank said that he wanted to send this record to Detective Willis because

literally side form of this record was no worse than the tape that was made

that got him sent to jail. Yeah.

Which, by the way, in my high school, kids used to do that.

Kids would get kicked out of class and then they would make that kind of condor

call, we called it.

it was a world forming itself and some of it was violent some of it was

beautiful some of it was just weird and some was ugly but it was a great time to

be alive is all i can say this is how side four ends

and there you have it

return of the son of monster magnet yeah

Ladies and gentlemen, would you please leave as swiftly as possible, although

it's nice of you to come by. We've got to get you out in a hurry so we can

finish recording some of these things. I would also like to request that

everybody kindly leave all the instruments in the studio. They don't

belong to us. Bless your hearts.

You know, the freaks love Frank, that's for sure, because he gave them freedom

to be who they were.

Well, the recordings were finished and I went back into the world, into the

normal working world of gigs and clubs and gigs and clubs.

I think our first date was actually a concert called the Guambo, which was the

great underground mass ball and orgy, which sounded much more divine and

stunning than it actually was, except for the music.

Reviews in the press basically trashed the album.

It's stupid, you know, these are songs about, you know, greasing your hair.

Clearly they didn't get any of the satire or any of the experimental

quality. They don't get it. Frank was on his own island.

I mean, he was just really on his own island.

It was so different and so unique, and that something different inspired

and influenced generations of musicians. Even today, there's musicians that

don't even realize that Freak Out was important to what they're doing because

it opened the doors so that they could do it.

a composer a band leader a songwriter and as someone who really wants to

affect change and actually say his piece as an american he wrote music every

day of his life and he used to comment on being a guy who had a boring life

because he just wrote dots on paper and he also liked to say that he liked to

connect the dots and that really speaks to what he did in terms of music

and what he did in terms of social commentary.

I liked his boldness.

Frank was not frightened of bothering anything. He just wanted to speak as

honestly as he could, I think. And he did it with wit.

and charm and and controlled anger even though it goes from crazy satirical doo

-wop to disgruntled protest rock to this avant-garde wildness it feels like a

whole it's a complete work and the fact that this is the first one and as

good as this album is it just gets better and better and better and better

if you like this record if it speaks to you chances are You are a freak.

So welcome to the club.

Yes, I agree, man. It really makes it. Yeah.

It's a real scene, man. It really makes it.

Susie, you just got to town, and we've been very interested in your

development.

Forget it.

It can't happen here.