Zappa '66 Vol. 1: Live at TTG Studios

Tommy, come back!

INTRO/SEMI-NECESSARY HYPE: To obtain PDF copies of my books for a mere $5 each, go to the link below:

Folks, here we have another excerpt from the forthcoming 20th anniversary edition of my book Hungry Freaks Daddy, which is a description of the material that you can hear on the brand new FZ album Zappa ‘66 Vol. 1: Live at TTG Studios. As you may be able to tell, this is essentially a cleaned-up draft, written this morning in a bit of a rush so I can get it to you all on time. It will be included in the book, corrected and alongside the usual transcriptions. Until then, I hope you enjoy!

UPDATE: I forgot the link to the Sex In Today’s World documentary! Here it is. Very little Frank in it, but still cool…

First week of October, 1966
TTG Studios, Los Angeles, CA
73 minutes, B+

Improvisation (Sex In Today’s World Excerpts) (2:56)
Freak Chouflee’ (14:06)
Move On (3:44)
FZ and The United Mutations (2:05)
“Tommy Come Back!” (3:22)
FZ Directs The Freaks (1:38)
Pomp and Circumstance Sequence (1:31)
Legalize Abortion (3:17)
Twistin’ Again (1:33)
The Electric Banana (5:59)
I Could Be A Slave/A Story Untold (7:20)
A2 Jam (4:13)
Khaki Sack (9:29)
Duke Of Prunes (Edited) (3:27)
Victory Through Vegetables (10:19)
“We’re Havin’ A Freak Out!” (1:33)

By October 1966, the Mothers had been going full steam in Los Angeles for months, playing some of their first actual “concert” gigs and earning their reputation as the house band of the Freak scene in town. This was despite the fact that the number of places to play in Los Angeles was getting progressively smaller as the local government and police did everything they could to close down, or to make it difficult to work at, any place that allowed dancing. The Mothers had also gone out on their first tour in the summer, promoting Freak Out! on television and in live performances. They were shortly to expand their horizons further, heading out to New York for their first shows there.

That fall, word had gotten out to the media about kids who were “freaking out” in Los Angeles. This led CBS News to send a camera crew out to the City of the Angels to capture shots of this heathen out-freakage, and what better group to organize this “happening” with than The Mothers Of Invention. Frank decided to host what was essentially a party at TTG Studios, allowing the CBS crew a place to come and capture some of this Freak action. This footage would be used in a documentary titled Sex In Today’s World, which aired the following year on CBS. Rather tame by today’s standards, it was partly educational and partly scare tactic, designed to feed into the fears of the older generation about what their kids were potentially getting into.

Strangely enough, it appears that TTG did not run audio on this event themselves, and that Frank wound up capturing the action on his own portable reel recorder. In typical Zappa fashion, Frank cut up the master tape of this event, scattering the pieces all over the Zappa Vault. Vaultmeister Joe Travers was able to collect most of the recording, which was issued in May 2026 on the album Zappa 66 Vol. 1: Live At TTG Studios. In the liner notes to that album, Joe expressed his frustration at not being able to find the entire recording, and it is certainly true that the Sex In Today’s World documentary has a few pieces of audio not available on the album, including one excerpt in which Frank delivers a monologue aimed at the square parents watching at home, who were most likely disgusted by the cavorting they saw on the screen. At the start of the CD, Frank can be heard speaking during a radio interview with an unknown station in Santa Barbara, recorded in August 1966. This interview was conducted immediately after a Mothers gig at the Whisky. Frank notes that the band “had one heck of a really wonderful time for the kids” playing “commercial poop that would make you just dance”.

The available recording from TTG kicks off with a monster improvisation, later titled “Freak Choufleé” by Gail Zappa. An excerpt of this had been made available by the Zappa Family Trust on the 2014 digital-only release The Frank Zappa AAAFNRAA Birthday Bundle 21.12.2014. The recording begins in progress, and features a wailing guitar solo by Del Casher, who proves himself to be quite the skilled guitar picker on the only known extended recording that we have of him playing with the Mothers. The fuzzy guitar tone suggests that he is using a Maestro Fuzz-Tone, essentially the first mass-market produced fuzz pedal for guitar. Frank, who has been playing some aggressive rhythm behind Del, steps up for a solo of his own, and it’s very interesting to hear Del providing strong support behind him, and even some engaging interplay that Frank appears to respond to. Also getting some spotlight time here is Don Preston, Frank’s old Cucamonga era buddy, who has recently joined the group. A highly skilled musician, Don more than holds his own with a spirited workout on his organ and electric piano.

This opening jam ends to a smattering of applause (remember that these are mostly friends that the band is playing to), and Frank announces that the next piece will be a song called “Move On”. This is obviously a composed instrumental piece, but curiously it is one that will advance no further. It’s a gorgeous little ditty, with Arabesque passages that allow Frank to dig in with one of the fastest displays of fretwork that you will ever hear him pull off, obviously influenced by the speedy runs that Del peels off effortlessly. Once again, the support from Del is sensitive and impressive. It’s truly a shame that he did not stay on with the band longer.

A break in the tape takes us into the first improvisation of the evening to feature the Los Angeles Freak contingent, who have now been given the name “The United Mutations” by Frank. After a tentative start with some of the participants singing gloriously off-key quote from Wilson Pickett’s “Land Of A Thousand Dances”, Frank takes control and directs the throng into chanting, for some reason, “Tommy come back!” From here, Frank conducts the crowd into a chaotic vocal improvisation very similar to the recordings made on the final night of the Freak Out! sessions. In the aural chaos, Ray Collins adds some of his peculiar vocal noises, but this is mostly about the Mutations.

Frank asks Don to play the traditional British anthem “Pomp And Circumstance”. A tambourine and kazoo play along with this, and very shortly thereafter we are into another groove, faster than the opening improvisation. Ray sings a bit of Chubby Checker’s “Let’s Twist Again”, but the groove gets locked down enough for another round of solos. Frank begins to solo somewhat tentatively over this, with Del once again backing him up, but backs off from this approach to ask the crowd what they think of Planned Parenthood, the American organization that would primarily have been known to the public at the time as a facilitator of abortion. This was obviously a provocative topic that Frank felt would come up in the documentary.

Asked by the camera crew if the they could get some more action shots of the crowd, Frank asks the Mutations to do the twist long enough for the TV crew to get their shots. The band vamps for a couple of minutes, Ray again singing variations on “Let’s Twist Again”. Apparently, at this point, the camera crew needs more shots of the kiddies freaking out, so Frank calls for the band to play “Electric Banana” while the Mutations writhe around on the floor. This turns out to be an early instrumental version of a song that would become known as “Absolutely Free” when released two years later on the album We’re Only In It For The Money.

This drops away into the first proper vocal number of the session, the earliest known performance of the song previously known as “No Matter What You Do” but titled “I Could Be A Slave” on the Live At TTG Studios album. This is an expanded version of the song that collectors would be familiar with from 1967 Mothers live performances, which segues into a cover of the Nutmeg’s R&B classic, “A Story Untold”. This features the angelic vocal chops of Ray Collins, and segues back into “I Could Be A Slave” in a segue that was obviously standard repertoire for the band at that time.

Another Santa Barbara interview segment follows, Frank humorously explaining how the music of the Mothers keeps changing all the time because the band personnel keeps changing. Frank plays up the multicultural makeup of the current Mothers, offering particular praise for Del, who he describes the sounding like “Les Paul and Mary Ford at the same time”. When we rejoin the action at TTG, the band is into another jam, which possibly led out of “I Could Be A Slave”. Del whips out an absolutely incredible solo here, his frenzied fretting obviously influenced by classical Indian music (“raga rock” being a Mothers specialty at the time). Frank emerges from this with a quote from “Funiculí Funiculá” but steps out of the way to allow Don to work out like the mad genius that he is on the organ.

The band shifts into a prototype version of a piece that would later be known as “Khaki Sack”, played at a blindingly fast tempo for the era. Frank dips back in for a brief, measured solo before Don takes over, this time starting on the acoustic piano before heading over to the Hammond B3 organ, an unusual instrument for him (no doubt some of these instruments were the property of TTG). Frank can be heard directing the audience to “freak out”, implying that the camera crew is looking for more shots of the crowd doing very unusual things. Frank and Ray throw in a line about “Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches” as the band works itself into a lather behind them.

As this winds down, Frank introduces Ray, who is said to be “disguised as an elderly eunuch”. The assembled are then treated to a performance of what would come to be known as “The Duke Of Prunes”, performed here with its original non-prune-oriented lyrics (the composition originally being known as “And Very True”). This has been written back in Frank’s Cucamonga days, and it’s always interesting to hear a Zappa composition from that era before cynicism became a key part of his lyrics. As heard here, the song is basically the same musical arrangement as would be heard on the Absolutely Free album, which would be recorded a month later. The performance released on the Live At TTG Studios album is noted on the cover as being edited, a probable victim of Frank’s tendency to cut up master recordings and stick the bits to pieces of other performances in his Vault.

Up next is another jam, this time a slow blues with Jimmy Carl Black and new recruit Billy Mundi pumping out a rhythm not unlike that heard in performances of “King Kong”, the lengthy instrumental that would be the centerpiece of the Mothers show by the following summer. Don is again the primary soloist here, pumping out a solo on the organ that proves that his blues credentials are first-rate. Frank repeats the phrase “Victory Through Vegetables” over and over again, and it’s a shame that we don’t have film footage of this particular section as one can imagine the vegetable-oriented frolicking that must have been going on. This mutates into a peppy 1950s-style rock ‘n’ roll vamp, over which Del begins to peel off another crazy fast solo before Frank winds down the performance into a stereotypical blues outro, over which Ray sings “We’re Havin’ A Freak Out!” Frank informs the audience that they can “go outside and breathe freely“, and another Freaky night for Frank Zappa and the Mothers comes to an end.