"MGM"

Lyrics

FZ: "When they first us, we were working in a club in Hollywood called the Whisky a Go-Go and the A&R man, uh, producer Tom Wilson, came in, he heard us play one song, it was the Watts Riot Song, and it's some sort of an R&B-type thing, so he figures, topical R&B group, just what we need, [laughter], so he phones up the company, … I got one, datadah, we're goin' into the studio, you know, not too much later we're going to the studio to record and they didn't know what was happening.
He got on the phone, we … first we did Any Way The Wind Blows, that was the first thing we recorded and the second thing we did was Who Are The Brain Police? and by the time we finished Brain Police his head going around like this, y'know 'n' he says, what happened to the other one that I heard at the "Whisky a Go-Go", and he called back to New York and he said, I got something strange happening here in the whole project, just expanded incredibly and everybody got really thrilled over suddenly, thought they got a real hot item on their hands.
Then, the cost of recording Freak Out! kept booming, it – instead of starting off saying, well, you guys, uh, you guys 're real swell, we're gonna a twenty-five thousand Dollars, which is approximately four times the cost of the average rock and roll album to manufacture, and, uh, you're going to turn out one heck of a good album. Instead, they kept trying to keep the budget down but it expanded up to twenty-thousand Dollars, they reached that point, they didn't want to spend any more, and figured, well, it'll sell, we will spend five thousand Dollars promoting it. So when it was finally put on the stands our promotion budget on the album was … we should call 'peanuts'.
Absolutely Free had a promotion budget of twenty-five thousand Dollars and consequently got up to 'bout number twenty on the charts. Freak Out! never got up to number twenty on the charts, but it's still selling after about a year and a half. And it sells regularly between four and eight thousand copies a week and it won't stop."

Players On This Song

Frank Zappa - Interviewee

Records On Which This Song Has Appeared

The MOFO Project/Object (Deluxe Edition)

Notes About This Song

Source according to booklet: Mixed Media, Detroit, 13 November 1967