Freak Out!

The debut album by American experimental rock composer Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention followed in 1966, and in the next two years Caravan, Jethro Tull, the Moody Blues, the Nice, Pink Floyd, the Pretty Things, Procol Harum, and Soft Machine released art-rock-type albums. Much of this…

…unconventional, and its debut album, Freak Out! (1966), drew on rock and pop conventions as it satirized them, expanding rock’s musical base by incorporating a mix of studio manipulations, doo-wop melodies, shifting time signatures, rhythm-and-blues riffs, and amelodic dissonance while skewering the conformity of both the mainstream and the counterculture.…

…Invention, the conceptual double album Freak Out! (1966), was a key influence on the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, released the following year. By way of wry acknowledgment, the cover of the Mothers’ third album, We’re Only in It for the Money (1968), parodied that of Sgt. Pepper’s,…