"Dope Fiend Music"

Lyrics

Interviewer: There's a story, that, uh, … during one of your recording sessions, during one the numbers you were recording, there were some friends, who, uh, … who sang a BAD word, right there into the microphone, and that you left it in the record, bedause you figured that nobody would ever believe that they were saying that bad word. Is that … is that true?
FZ: No, I'm the one who said the bad word and I left it in there, because I wanted to leave it in there, I wanted to test the intelligence of the record company. Let me show how this works:
Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, on side four of the Freak Out! album, if you play it at a very slow speed and wait for just the right moment till hear a tiny voice in the background saying "FUCK"! Beep it out! [laughter] That's it, hear, little devils.
And the reason you hear that in there is because at that point, I was making some noises inside of a piano, I was dropping things on the strings of the piano, and my hand got underneath of one of the things I was dropping in the piano and it smashed my finger. And it was one those agonized cries. Well, I figured I might as well leave it in, why chop it out?
Because, at that point, I knew that MGM was starting to censor things in the album, that I thought were really ridiculous. For instance: Today, the word "Psychedelic" is a great teen-age, uh, commercial item. … Uh, … MGM was afraid of that word in this first album, I had that word in an echo chamber just said once in the middle of one of the tracks. They said, we can't have that, it sounds too much like Dope Fiend Music! They chopped it out.
There's another line that at the very end of, uh, one of the selections where the voice says, "Suzy, we've been very interested in your development, since you first took the shots!", and she says, "Forget it!", I had to take out "… since you first took the shots", because it sounded like Dope Fiend Music, when actually all we were talking about is a little paraffin injection.

Players On This Song

FZ and interviewer

Records On Which This Song Has Appeared

The MOFO Project/Object (Deluxe Edition)

Notes About This Song

Interview with Matty Biberfeld at WRVR, New York City, Summer 1967.