Zappa’s brought his new piece, Jerry’s back from California.
Lou’s sucking on some king kong, I’m searching for my main ten.
Just like Ed Varese said, I might have heard some Pigpen.
Whip it on.
This mix attempts to show how close The Grateful Dead, The Velvet Underground, and the Mothers of Invention got to each other in the late 1960s, despite seeming to be on different planets at the time. The sequence takes you from sweetness through strange, kindred jams, to pure noise.
84-minute mp3 proposition zipped up here
- VU: Ocean instrumental edit (Atlantic outtake, 1970) (2:05)
- Hartbeats w/Elvin Bishop: Jam (super tight edit, 10/30/68) (7:38)
- VU: Sister Ray pt. 1 (10/18/68) (8:29)
- MOI: King Kong excerpt (11/8/68) (10:19)
- GD: The Main Ten (6/19/68) (9:51)
- VU: Sister Ray pt. 2 (11/7/69) (15:27)
- MOI: The Orange County Lumber Truck excerpt (4/28/68) (7:36)
- GD: Feedback > What’s Become of the Baby > Feedback (4/26/69) (17:44)
- MOI: Octandre (8/25/68) (4:35)
Notes:
- Most of this music has already appeared on other SYF mixtapes, though I’ve pruned and noodled some of it. A few fortuitous segues presented themselves.
- The notable upgraded Dead edit is the Hartbeats/Elvin Bishop jam, which appeared on the “Fate Music 1968” mix I put together with Jesse Jarnow. For this mix, I’ve trimmed out two additional minutes, eliminating 90% of the cowbell.
- To the best of my knowledge, only “Ocean” and “Octandre” have been officially released. You can find the latter on Zappa’s “Road Trips vol. #1,” which is an essential release for fans of the original Mothers.