The Mothers of Invention “Help, I’m a Rock” (Verve, 1966) / West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band “Help, I’m a Rock” (Reprise, 1967)
Mike Shanley
“That didn’t sound too much like ‘Satisfaction.’”
“Well, that’s how it’s written on the page.”
That paraphrased exchange of dialogue appears early in the uncomfortable dark comedy Welcome to the Dollhouse. Three young adolescent boys try cook up a version of the Rolling Stones’ classic on the unlikely triumvirate of keyboards, drums, and clarinet. But they come up way short, thanks to their sheet music and lack of rhythm. It’s one of the pitfalls of attempting a cover version of a classic.
Sometimes a band can’t come within screaming distance of the original song’s power, like those three. At other times it’s best to turn a song inside out and have a good time in the process. Shockabilly, the band that included Eugene Chadbourne and Kramer, attacked rock and roll classics with a destructive glee, doing for them what Spike Jones did for popular music in the ’40s. That band, and Jones’ City Slickers, walked a fine line between parody and homage, which made their work so good. (Or as the old folks would say, “When they settled down, those guys could really play!”)
On rare occasions, someone’s cover can pack enough power to make you forget the original. Case in point: Nilsson’s version of “Without You.” If Harry sang that way to you, you would never want to dump him. But you’d probably forget that Badfinger did the song first. Let’s not forget that Aretha Franklin is synonymous with “Respect,” but Otis Redding asked for it first.
Then there’s the other side of the cover coin. The “what the hell do you think you’re doing” side. Cat Power’s cover concept walks a fine line between deconstructing the song and not caring enough to learn it. I give her the benefit of the doubt and think that Chan Marshall probably leans closer to the former route. Conversely, I once saw a guy cover a Nick Cave ballad, singing the words while playing two chords that probably just seemed close enough to the original to suit him. If I wasn’t so busy shaking my head in disgust, I’d’ve furrowed my brow and wondered, “Do you even know the original?”
That overly long intro leads to this week’s song. Like my previous entry on Phil Ochs’ “The Crucifixion,” this doesn’t exactly represent an endorsement of a song so much as it introduces a trainwreck worth hearing at least once.
“Help, I’m a Rock” appears on the Mothers of Invention’s debut album, Freak Out. The eight-minute piece is broken up into three movements. The first (“Okay to Tap Dance”) introduces a 6/4 riff with a jerky feel, like the record might be sticking. On top of the music, members of the band chatter and bark in foreign tongues. The riff continues in Movement Two (“In Memoriam – Edgar Varese”) but now vocalist Ray Collins is in the forefront, sounding agitated as he growls “Help, I’m a rock,” like he just woke up abruptly, or as if he’s trying to continue the nihilistic feel that has pervaded the album up to this point. As the rock (aka Collins) ponders a better life, he imagines being a cop, a bus driver and the mayor.
Movement Three begins with the group, now lead by Frank Zappa, singing in intentionally sloppy harmonies (“barbershop quartet,” he says in the liner notes) about how “It Can’t Happen Here” (this movement’s title), never clarifying what “it” might be. “Who could imagine,” the group ponders — stretching out the syllables of the first and third words— that people might freak out in all-American locales like Kansas, Minnesota, and Washington, D.C. When each state is introduced, the band members use it as a springboard for more goof-ball singing. Nothing deep, and pretty non-sensical unless I’m missing something, but highly entertaining.
Freak Out was released in the summer of 1966, several months before the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band released Part One, their debut for Reprise Records. But the band had played shows on the Sunset Strip with the Mothers. So it’s possible they heard the Zappa crew play “Help, I’m a Rock” live and decided to cover it on their album. Or maybe someone in the band mentioned it at practice one day and they came up with their own version, without bothering to listen closely to the original.
My money goes with the latter theory because nothing was ever that simple with the WCPAEB. The group were devised by a wild-eyed playboy/son of an oil tycoon named Bob Markley, whose talent was inversely proportional to his wealth. While Bob banged on a tambourine and scoped out the free-loving young ladies on the Sunset Strip, the real work was done by brothers Shaun and Dan Harris, John Ware and Michael Lloyd. Part One includes a few catchy psychedelic pop numbers but their four-minute version of “Help, I’m a Rock” is not one of them.
Here, the once jagged riff of the Mothers gets filed down to a simple 4/4 beat, landing somewhere between “Psycho Killer” and “This Diamond Ring.” Instead of sounding grouchy or ominous, the vocalist (probably Shaun Harris) goes for a pleading, dramatic performance that tries too hard. The rest of band repeats the title ad nauseum in cartoon voices behind him. It’s hard to tell what Zappa was going for with the original, but whatever it was, this bit of tomfoolery ain’t anywhere near it.
Up to this point, it’s not that bad. You can cut these kids some slack. But when the “who could imagine” question changes to the statement “I wonder if they’re freaking out in Minnesota/Kansas/DC,” the whole thing moves from amateur to carelessness. It’s the equivalent of getting a punchline wrong. Now it feels like one of the Harris brothers started telling the band about the original “Help, I’m A Rock” but couldn’t remember details of the song, so they just based their version on sketchy details. To put it another way, they left out all the good stuff.
If that wasn’t crazy enough, Reprise Records found the song strong enough to make it the second single to be pulled from Part One. This required editing two minutes out of the album version, which was probably a blessing, and probably making it a contender for novelty shows all over underground radio. You could probably really freak out listeners in 1967 by playing “Help, I’m a Rock” back-to-back with “They’re Coming To Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!”
The Gullible Ear 