Japanese limited edition reissue of 1968 album, packaged in a miniature gatefold LP sleeve.

Frank Vincent Zappa was an American composer, singer-songwriter, electric guitarist, record producer, and film director. In a career spanning more than 30 years, Zappa wrote rock, jazz, electronic, orchestral, and musique concrète works. He also directed feature-length films and music videos, and designed album covers. Zappa produced almost all of the more than 60 albums he released with the band The Mothers of Invention and as a solo artist.

Uncle Meat is the sixth album by the Mothers of Invention, and seventh overall by Frank Zappa, released as a double album in 1969. Uncle Meat was originally developed as a part of No Commercial Potential, a project which spawned three other albums sharing a conceptual connection: We're Only in It for the Money, Lumpy Gravy and Cruising with Ruben & the Jets.

The album also served as a soundtrack album to the film of the same name, which Zappa eventually finished and released direct-to-video in 1987.

The music is diverse in style, drawing from orchestral, jazz, blues and rock music. The Uncle Meat album was a commercial success upon release, and has been highly acclaimed for its innovative recording and editing techniques, including experiments in manipulation of tape speed and overdubbing, and its diverse sound.

Cruising with Ruben & the Jets is the fourth album by the Mothers of Invention, and fifth overall by Frank Zappa, released under the alias Ruben and the Jets. Released on December 2, 1968 on Bizarre and Verve Records with distribution by MGM Records, it is a concept album, influenced by 1950s doo-wop and rock and roll. The album's concept deals with a fictitious Chicano doo-wop band called Ruben & the Jets, represented in the cover illustration by Cal Schenkel, which depicts the Mothers of Invention as anthropomorphic dogs. It was conceived as part of a project called No Commercial Potential, which produced three other albums: Lumpy Gravy, We're Only in It for the Money and Uncle Meat.

The album and its singles received some radio success, due to its doo-wop sound. Subsequently, the name Ruben and the Jets continued with a different lineup, led by musician Rubén Guevara Jr., who recorded the albums For Real! (1973) and Con Safos (1974). Zappa produced the former album.

Mothermania (1969), subtitled The Best of the Mothers, is a compilation album by the Mothers of Invention. While the songs were previously released on Freak Out!, Absolutely Free and We're Only in It for the Money, it contains unique mixes or edits made specifically for this compilation.

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. 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.

One of the most ambitious debuts in rock history, Freak Out! was a seminal concept album that somehow foreshadowed both art rock and punk at the same time. Its four LP sides deconstruct rock conventions right and left, eventually pushing into territory inspired by avant-garde classical composers. Yet the album is sequenced in an accessibly logical progression; the first half is dedicated to catchy, satirical pop/rock songs that question assumptions about pop music, setting the tone for the radical new directions of the second half. Opening with the nonconformist call to arms &Hungry Freaks, Daddy,& Freak Out! quickly posits the Mothers of Invention
as the antithesis of teen-idol bands, often with sneering mockeries of the teen-romance songs that had long been rock's commercial stock-in-trade. Despite his genuine emotional alienation and dissatisfaction with pop conventions, though,
Frank Zappa was actually a skilled pop composer; even with the raw performances and his stinging guitar work, there's a subtle sophistication apparent in his unorthodox arrangements and tight, unpredictable melodicism. After returning to social criticism on the first song of the second half, the perceptive Watts riot protest &Trouble Every Day, & Zappa exchanges pop song structure for experiments with musique concrète, amelodic dissonance, shifting time signatures, and studio effects. It's the first salvo in his career-long project of synthesizing popular and art music, high and low culture; while these pieces can meander, they virtually explode the limits of what can appear on a rock album, and effectively illustrate Freak Out!'s underlying principles: acceptance of differences and free individual expression.
Zappa would spend much of his career developing and exploring ideas -- both musical and conceptual -- first put forth here; while his myriad directions often produced more sophisticated work, Freak Out! contains at least the rudiments of almost everything that followed, and few of Zappa's records can match its excitement over its own sense of possibility.

2016 archive release. This is the one that has the Zappa online forums really buzzing! Though nothing was ever officially released from Frank's Petit Wazoo 1972 tour until 2005 (on the Zappa Family Trust release Imaginary Diseases), Frank had revisited and worked on the material that makes up this sequel to that '05 release in spurts throughout the '70s and '80s. Finally we get more from this massively improvisational period that found FZ leading a 10-piece horn-driven lineup. "Cosmik Debris," "Little Dots" (two versions), "Rollo," "Kansas City Shuffle" and two versions of "Columbia, S.C."