9. “Dope Fiend Music” 2:06

Interview with Matty Biberfeld
WRVR, New York City, NY
Summer, 1967

Interviewer: There’s a story that, um, during one of your recording sessions, during one of the numbers you were recording, there were some friends who, uh, were saying a BAD WORD, right there into the microphone. And that you left it in the record because you figured that no one would ever believe that, uh, they were saying that bad word. Is that, is that true?

FZ: No, I’m the one who said the bad word, and I left it in there because I wanted to leave it in there, I wanted to test the intelligence of the record company. Let me show you how this works. Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, in side four of the Freak Out! album, if you’ll play it at a very slow speed and wait for just the right moment, you’ll hear a tiny voice in the background saying FUCK! Beep it out, that’s it, you little devils. And the reason you hear that in there is because at that point, I was making some noises inside of a piano, I was dropping things on the strings of the piano, and my hand got underneath of one of the things that I was dropping on the piano and it smashed my finger, and it was one of those agonized cries. Well, I figured we might as well leave it in, why chop it out? Because at that point I knew that MGM was starting to censor things in the album that I thought were really ridiculous. For instance, today the word “psychedelic” is a great teenage, uh, commercial item. Uh, MGM was afraid of that word in this first album. I had that word in an echo chamber, just said once in the middle of one of the tracks. They said, “We can’t have that! It sounds too much like dope fiend music.” They chopped it out. There was another line at the very end of, uh, one of the selections, where the voice says, “Suzy, we’ve been very interested in your devlopment since you first took the shots.” And she says, “Forget it.” They had to take out “since you first took the shots,” because it sounded like dope fiend music, when actually all we were talking about is a little paraffin injection.

Just about to import disk 3 & see what goodies are on that.

I thought that the return of the son of monster magnet came up really well, much better than on the RYCO release.

And they spelled my name correctly in the booklet. (is yours in ther Barry?

they did a very fine job, over at the zft

– UniMuta