“MGM”

FZ:

When they first heard us, we were working at a club in Hollywood called the Whisky à Go-Go, and the A&R man, uh, producer, Tom Wilson, came in, he heard us play one song, it was the Watts riot song. And that's sort of a R&B type thing. So, he figures, "Oh, topical R&B group! Just what we need!", you know?

(laughter)

So, he phones up the company, "Yeah, we got one," da dat dat da . . . We get into the studio, you know, two months later we go into the studio to record and they didn't know what was happening. He got on the phone, we, first we did "Any Way The Wind Blows," that was the first thing we recorded, and the second thing we did was "Who Are The Brain Police?," and by the time we finished "Brain Police," his head was going around like this, you know, and he says, "Wait, what happened to that other one that I heard at the Whisky à Go-Go?" and he called back to New York and he said, "We got something strange happening here," and the whole project just expanded incredibly, you know. Everybody got real thrilled all of a sudden, they thought they really had a hot item on their hands.

Then the cost of recording Freak Out! kept booming, it, uh— Instead of starting off saying, "Well, you guys, uh, you guys are real swell, we're gonna give ya twenty-thousand dollars, which is approximately four times the cost of the average rock and roll album to manufacture and, uh, you're going to turn out one heck of a good album," instead, they kept trying to keep the budget down, but it expanded up to twenty-thousand dollars. They reached that point, they didn't wanna spend any more and figured, "Well, it'll sell, we'll spend five thousand dollars promoting it." So when it was finally put on the stands, our promotion budget on the album was what you'd call peanuts.

Absolutely Free had a promotion budget of twenty-five thousand dollars and, consequently, got up to about number 20 on the charts. Freak Out! never got up to number 20 on the charts, but it's still selling after about a year and a half and it sells, regularly, between four and eight thousand copies a week and it won't stop.