Mothermania
I should have done this last Sunday, but whatever. I have one more Mothers Of Invention album and it's the perfect opportunity to delve into some behind the scenes stuff about Zappa's recordings. Tonight's album is the "best of" called Mothermania. The back cover is completely in German. Geil!
It was considered redundant by critics, and Zappa publicly distanced himself from it for a long time, but the story is more interesting than that.
They made 4 albums for MGM/Verve and that was the end of the contract. So, Zappa created a semi-independent label called Bizarre. Essentially they worked out a deal where Bizarre was the publisher and Verve did the marketing and MGM was the distributer. Verve felt like they had lost money publishing the first 4 albums, so part of the deal was that Zappa would make a compilation that Verve could use to recoup their money. He did. He remixed and remastered material to form a brand new continuous mix. Each side really is a 20sh minute work, pieced together from earlier pieces. It's the only one Frank himself ever made.
What made him mad was that they pushed it through as quickly as possible and got it into stores before Uncle Meat. That meant that anyone walking into a store would see both the new Zappa owned album next to a cheaper, not owned by Zappa "best of" album. Which one are more people who don't actually know the difference going to buy?
However, it's hard to stay mad when the actual project is a realization of something you've been saying all along: all this stuff is a giant modular monstrosity that can and should be played around with, rearranged, and heard in various combinations. That's what appeals to me.
Believe it or not, Zappa and Prince had a lot in common. They both fought really hard to get back their masters, they stored them all in the hopes of doing more with them, but died before they really had the chance to actually get somewhere. They also had no real plan for how anyone should actually execute decisions about their estates. I don't know the exact difficulties with Prince's vaults, but i do know that Zappa's estate was basically bankrupt, to the point that Ahmet and Moon had to actually sue Dweezil for playing their dad's music just to pay some leftover bills. I'm sure i've mentioned my feelings about our convolutedly moronic copyright laws a time or two. I know the idea of royalties for the heirs of great artists in perpetuity sounded good in Sonny Bono's brain, but that brain also produced Inner Views, and both those things are so shortsightedly preposterous that i can't even.
The reason you don't see Mothers reissues is that they just don't have the money to manufacture physical copies. Great for collectors looking to sell for profit, tough luck for anyone looking to buy physical records or CDs. The worst Zappa LP with giant visible gouges will fetch $20 IF you happen to stumble across it.
And really, what's the point any more? You can't sell new physical music anywhere because it would cost trillions of dollars to cater to everyone's tastes, and the moment an independent label does find a niche market, the majors come smashing down the door to keep themselves afloat. Fat Mike wrote a lovely song called "Dinosaurs Will Die," but UMG, Sony, and Warner, are putting up one hell of a kamikaze death fight.
I feel like a broken record harping on this major corporations thing, but we have to make it stop at some point. There are enough cars sitting on dealership lots to satisfy us for the next 15 years, we're killing thousands of pigs a day because we can't find truck drivers or slaughterhouse workers willing to work for pennies, ups drivers are trying to make triple the amount of stops in a day than a month ago, "illegal immigrants" build our McMansions, America is destroying itself just like Dave Mustaine said we would, and everybody's too busy demanding that someone else cook them a steak to be bothered.
That's my sermon, and i'm stickin' to it. Contact your local vegetables, and call them by name.
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