我们只是要钱 (1968)

We're Only in It for the Money is the third album by American rock band the Mothers of Invention, released on March 4, 1968, by Verve Records. As with the band's first two LP's, it is a concept album, written and composed by bandleader and guitarist Frank Zappa. The album satirizes left- and right-wing politics, the 1960s counterculture, the corporatization of rock music and youth culture, particularly the hippie subculture, as well as general American culture and society. It was conceived as part of a project called No Commercial Potential, which produced three other albums: Lumpy Gravy, Cruising with Ruben & the Jets, and Uncle Meat.

The album's originally intended cover artwork was arranged by Cal Schenkel and Jerry Schatzberg as a parody of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The photoshoot was financed by Zappa and featured Jimi Hendrix. However, Verve decided to package the album with the parody cover as interior artwork, with the original interior artwork (which parodied Sgt. Pepper's interior gatefold art) as the main sleeve out of fear of legal action. The original intended main sleeve artwork was later featured on the front cover of subsequent releases. Artists such as Eric Clapton, Rod Stewart and Tim Buckley would contribute to the recording sessions of the album.

We're Only in It for the Money encompasses experimental music and psychedelic rock, with orchestral segments taken from the recording sessions for Zappa's Lumpy Gravy, which had previously been issued by Capitol Records as a solo instrumental album in 1967. MGM claimed that Zappa was under contractual obligation to record for them and withdrew the album. Subsequently, Zappa re-edited Lumpy Gravy, releasing a drastically different version on Verve in 1968, produced simultaneously with We're Only in It for the Money. The album is the first "phase" of a conceptual continuity, which continued with the reedited Lumpy Gravy and concluded with Zappa's final album Civilization Phaze III (1994).

The album was unexpectedly embraced by the hippie subculture it criticized, peaking at number 30 on the Billboard 200, the highest position of any Mothers album. In August 1987, Rolling Stone ranked it number 77 on their article, "The Top 100: The Best Albums of the Last Twenty Years", and number 297 on their 2015 list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. It was also placed at number 343 in the third edition of Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums (2000) and is featured in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die along with their 1966 debut album Freak Out!.

In 2005, We're Only in It for the Money was selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry by the United States' Library of Congress, who deemed it "culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant" and "a scathing satire on hippiedom and America's reactions to it".

Background

While filming Uncle Meat, Frank Zappa recorded 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; Lumpy Gravy (1968); Cruising with Ruben & the Jets (1968); and Uncle Meat (1969), which served as the soundtrack to the film of the same name, which finally saw a release in 1987, albeit in incomplete form.

In July 1967, singer Ray Collins had left the Mothers before the New York recording sessions took place, which led to Zappa singing lead vocals for most of the songs on the album, though they were slightly pitched up in post-production. Gary Kellgren was hired as an engineer for the project, and subsequently wound up delivering whispered pieces of dialogue for the album. Collins later rejoined when the band was recording the doo-wop songs that formed the album Cruising with Ruben & the Jets. As the recording sessions continued, the Beatles released their acclaimed album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. In response to the album's release, Zappa decided to change the album's concept to parody the Beatles album, because he felt that the Beatles were insincere and "only in it for the money". The Beatles were targeted as a symbol of Zappa's objections to the corporatization of youth culture, and the album served as a criticism of them as well as the psychedelic and hippie movement as a whole.

In reference to the record being a "concept album", 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."