Notes & Comments
Tracklist from Zappateers
- Wipe Out 3:04
- East L.A. 4:59
- Weasels Ripped My Flesh 4:09
- Kung Fu 2:16
- Igor's Boogie 1:28
- Passacaglia 3:11
- Copenhagen Night Music 3:00
- Help, I'm A Rock 3:46
- Chocolate Halvah 3:33
- Prelude To The Afternoon Of A Sexually Aroused Gas Mask 3:35
- The Cookie Jar Lecture 3:11
- It Must Be Your Breath 2:04
FZ, interviewed by Jay Ruby, Jazz & Pop, August 1970
What I've been doing is ripping up the twelve albums, which were already edited—I had them ready to go. Chopping them up and I put together a new album called Weasels Ripped My Flesh—the cover of which is right here. So Weasels Ripped My Flesh is an all-live album. Most of the music on it—I'd say 80% of it—is group improvisation not just accompaniment with solos, but where the group was conducted into a spontaneous piece of music.
studiotan, "ZappaCast: History And Collected Improvisations," Zappateers, June 8-9, 12, 2023
And then, suddenly, the Artisan acetate begins to look like the early version of Weasels Ripped My Flesh. [...] What FZ described here is much closer to the Artisan acetate than the actually released WRMF.
And there's another clue: the catalog number. The Artisan acetate is numbered "RS 6406", and it looks like the same format as the ones on Reprise album releases. Burnt Weeny Sandwich was "RS 6370", and early Straight releases fell within the range of numbers "RS 6388" through "RS 6394" when they were reissued by Reprise in early 1970. Could "RS 6406" have been the one for WRMF before the actual album got numbered "MS 2028"? (By the way, the actual "RS 6406" went to The Rill Thing [August 1970] by Little Richard.)
[...] Joe said in the podcast that What Does It All Mean (disc #4 of the 12-LP set) had "Copenhagen Night Music," "Kung Fu," "Igor's Boogie" and "Skweezit Skweezit Skweezit." These four tracks are on the Artisan acetate, too. It is highly unlikely that four tracks on one disc also appeared on another disc in the same 12-LP set. Therefore, it's safe to say that the Artisan acetate was not compiled as one disc of the 12-LP set.