Release, Lawsuit and Reediting
Capitol released Lumpy Gravy on August 7, 1967. Capitol intended to release a single consisting of the pieces "Gypsy Airs" and "Sink Trap" to promote its release. In response to the album's release, MGM threatened a lawsuit, claiming that its release violated Zappa's contract.
During the litigation, Zappa reedited the album while recording in New York City for a project called No Commercial Potential, which ended up producing four albums: We're Only in It for the Money, the reedited second version of Lumpy Gravy, Cruising with Ruben & the Jets and Uncle Meat, which served as the soundtrack to the film of the same name, which was ultimately not completed until 1987.
Zappa stated, "It's all one album. All the material in the albums is organically related and if I had all the master tapes and I could take a razor blade and cut them apart and put it together again in a different order it still would make one piece of music you can listen to. Then I could take that razor blade and cut it apart and reassemble it a different way, and it still would make sense. I could do this twenty ways. The material is definitely related."
The reedited Lumpy Gravy contained dialogue segments recorded at Apostolic Studios after Zappa discovered that the strings of the studio's grand piano would resonate if a person spoke near those strings. The "piano people" experiment involved Zappa having various speakers improvise dialogue using topics offered by Zappa. Various people contributed to these sessions, which produced dialogue that was released on other Zappa albums in the No Commercial Potential project and later albums. These speakers included Eric Clapton, Rod Stewart and Tim Buckley.
Most of the dialogue on the reedited Lumpy Gravy, recorded simultaneously with We're Only in It for the Money, was spoken by a small group which included Motorhead Sherwood, Roy Estrada, Spider Barbour, All-Night John (the manager of the studio) and Louis Cuneo, who was noted for his laugh, which sounded like a "psychotic turkey". The concept of the reedited album derived from Zappa's "big note" theory, which states that the universe consists of a single element, and that atoms are vibrations of that element, a "big note".
The reedited album proved to be very difficult to make, as the master tapes featured many accidental splices. The reedited version also incorporated additional musical content not on the original release of the album, including previously recorded surf music. Some of the editing was done in Zappa's living room. On the 1967 and 1968 releases of the album, Zappa was credited as "Francis Vincent Zappa", as Zappa had believed that this was his real name. He later learned that his birth name was Frank Vincent Zappa, and this mistake was subsequently corrected in reissues of the album.
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