Frank Zappa - Crush All Boxes (1980)

In 1980 Frank Zappa started recording songs for a new album, which was to be titled 'Fred Zeplinnn', but shortly after it was completed Led Zeppelin's drummer John Bonham suddenly passed away, so the pun didn't seem that funny anymore, and at the last minute Zappa decided to change the title of the record to 'Crush All Boxes'. This refers to a long-time feud between him and his former record company Warner Bros., who were still trying to cash in on their long-terminated contract by releasing a couple of box sets of compilations of older material, which Zappa totally disagreed with. On 11 October 1980, Zappa rather naively took the completed album with him to KUNM Radio in Albuquerque and played the whole thing on air while being interviewed by the resident DJ. Not surprisingly, enterprising fans taped the radio shows and almost immediately bootleg copies of the album stated to appear, leading to Zappa cancelling its official release. The songs later appeared on 'Tinsel Town Rebellion' and 'You Are What You Is', but in different mixes, with the original versions having a noticeable clarity of the voices and instruments, while 'Easy Meat' has a completely different guitar solo, and you can actually hear the trumpet overdubs that Bob Harris played during the solo and at the end of the song. The artwork had already been commissioned from Cal Schenkel, so when 'Crush All Boxes ' was cancelled, he just used the original artwork for 'Tinseltown Rebellion' and over-painted the title, but you can actually still see some of the original writing underneath. There are currently two different bootlegs of this album doing the rounds, one which was taped from the radio broadcast and one taken from the original acetate, which runs noticeably slower on some of the songs. The albumsforgottenreconstructed site posted this album a few months ago, and by comparing the lengths of the songs I'd say that that version was taken from the radio broadcast, so I don't feel too bad about posting this version taken directly from the test pressing acetate, and you can pick which one you prefer. 

Track listing

01 Doreen
02 Fine Girl
03 Easy Meat
04 Goblin Girl
05 Society Pages
06 I'm A Beautiful Guy
07 Beauty Knows No Pain
08 Charlie's Enormous Mouth
09 Any Downers
10 Conehead