Everything is so shitty and I am so tired of it all. Everything is just a squeeze or gimmick to rake the last dollar out of your wallet. I bought a portable air conditioning unit so I could run the central ac less, and the thing is not working after just a few weeks. So I tried to have it replaced and send the old one back but before they would do it I had to waste a bunch of everyone’s time talking to an agent and she asked a series of questions and then asked “Have you checked with the manufacturer?” and that is where I lost it.

“NO I haven’t fucking checked with the manufacturer and I don’t intend to and that’s because I’m not a fucking air conditioning repairman. I bought this from you, you sent it to me, it does not work, I want to send it back to you.”

At any rate they are sending a new one but how have we let everything get so fucking shitty. It’s gotten to the point that just getting anything done with a business is like dealing with a fucking car dealership. No I don’t want the add on. No I don’t want an extended warranty are you telling me you sell shitty stuff. No I don’t want fucking hell I WANT THIS THIS IS WHAT I FUCKING WANT NOTHING MORE NOTHING LESS.

Have you tried to cancel a streaming service or magazine subscription lately? Jesus tapdancing christ. Everything is awful.

Everything is just a squeeze to get their dirty fucking fingers and filch your last dollar. Shake and Bake doesn’t even come with the plastic bags to shake the food in anymore- you are paying 2-3 bucks for 8 cents worth of herbs, spices, and bread crumbs. Everything about modern life in America is irritating and dispiriting. The gutter racism. My god. Everything. How did it get this fucking bad?

Guest post: Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention's Verve/MGM albums (1966-1969): comparing mix variations

There is also an alternate master of the original stereo vinyl mix, with brighter EQ, that has been bootlegged. This tape is a fascinating mystery, because we don’t have much information about it. First of all, except for tape print-through problems, where one can hear remnants of a previous recording, its fidelity is higher than that of the regular stereo version of the album. The track order is completely different: it’s unclear whether this is an early configuration or a compilation of mixes. Most importantly, though, it includes an uncensored “It Can’t Happen Here” and a different edit of “Wowie Zowie”, including a short section that was removed from the final master, possibly at MGM’s request (see below). This version of the album is still unreleased.

An early version of the album was done in April, with a different track order from the final sequence completed two months later. For instance, "Wowie Zowie" (which would eventually begin side two of the finalized sequence instead, and was described by Zappa as "harmless", "cheerful" and apparently liked by Little Richard was the original planned lead-off track rather than "Hungry Freaks, Daddy", "Trouble Comin' Every Day" (which was inspired by the Watts Riots that took place the previous year) was included on side one rather than side three, and "Who Are the Brain Police?" (acknowledged by Zappa himself as one of the scariest songs on the album) took up the middle of side two rather than the middle of side one, with only "Help, I'm a Rock" (dedicated to Elvis Presley) and "Cream Cheese" (retitled "The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet") taking up the same concluding places on the early sequence that they eventually would on the finalized sequence.

"Wowie Zowie" itself originally contained a musique concrète section between the bridge and third verse that would eventually be edited out of the song as it appeared on the finalized sequence, while the third section of "Help, I'm a Rock", called "It Can't Happen Here", contained two additional lines consisting of the word "psychedelic" during the self-pleasure sequence and of the words "...since you first took the shots" immediately following the "we've been very interested in your development" line. Tapes of the early sequence were eventually leaked to European collectors and bootlegged on vinyl as The Alternate Freak Out! in 2010, with long-time Zappa associate Scott Parker later describing the early sequence's track order as having more conceptual "integrat[ion]" and "a greater amount of weirdness sprinkled throughout" than that of the finalized sequence during a 2011 podcast.

The label eventually requested that the two lines in question be removed from the "It Can't Happen Here" section of "Help, I'm a Rock", both of which had been interpreted by MGM executives to be drug references. However, the label either had no objections to, or else did not notice, a sped-up recording of Zappa shouting the word "fuck" after accidentally smashing his finger, occurring at 11 minutes and 36 seconds into "The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet". From the 1995 CD reissue of the album onwards, the formerly three-part "Help, I'm a Rock" was reindexed as two separate tracks, with only the first two parts ("Okay To Tap Dance" and "In Memoriam, Edgard Varèse) remaining under the "Help, I'm a Rock" title but with "It Can't Happen Here" becoming its own track, as "It Can't Happen Here" had been on the 1969 vinyl compilation Mothermania, where the two previously censored lines were also reinstated.

Who'da Thunk It?