The first of hopefully many raids on the Utility Muffin Research Kitchen brings together a bunch of 1965 demos recorded by the original Mothers quintet (Zappa, Collins, Vestine, Estrada, Black), three tracks from an early live gig in California and further demos from the same band (minus Henry Vestine).
The live tracks, which include The Righteous Brothers’ “My Babe” and Marvin Gaye’s “Hitch Hike”, show that the Mothers were never going to make a living as a convincing covers band.
The pre-Freak Out material manages to sound both polite and sleazy: you can just hear them bristling to break into “…Brain Police” or “Trouble Every Day”.
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