1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 113. The Mothers of Invention – We're Only In It For The Money (1968)

Although I do like Frank Zappa, I have to say that sometimes his humour gets a bit grating; it’s like early Steve Martin stand-up, or Rowan And Martin’s Laugh-In, too knowingly “zany” (cue *Honk* *Cuckoo* *Swanee-whistle* sound effects, mugging at the camera, etc.)

Zappa is at his best when he’s not trying to make the songs sound weird, but just lets the lyrics carry the message instead. With this album, the Mothers skewer the hippy culture, from the naivete of thinking that prancing around Haight-Ashbury in a kaftan will bring about world peace, through bourgeois “weekend hippies”, to the corporations cashing in with commercialised psychedelia. And at its best, with tracks like Absolutely Free and Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance, it works as a nicely cynical antidote to all of the Summer of Love stuff.

Other times, what we get are just soundscapes of noise, like The Chrome Plated Megaphone of Destiny or Nasal Retentive Calliope Music, which take the kind of Syd Barratt sound effect collage and run with it.

Other tracks, talking of Pink Floyd, are sort of small interjections of things, like a brief phone call or radio noises. Mixed in with this are a pair of tracks based on a couple of weird kids that used to live next door to Zappa, and basically ran feral while their parents were out, collecting their nasal mucus and lighting farts. This is the fairly straightforward Let’s Make The Water Turn Black (which references an attempt to make homemade alcohol by fermenting raisins), and The Idiot Bastard Son, which is a bit more flaky.

For me, because it is a lot more knowing and wilfully silly, this isn’t as good as the previous Mothers album, but that’s my experience of Zappa; he likes to experiment, sometimes it works, sometimes less so, but you never get anything other than unique.