The Concept
MGM's contract specified that the group owed the record company two more LPs, but Uncle Meat was proving to be a huge recording and editing undertaking, so instead Zappa took the group back into Apostolic Studios in New York in January 1968 to record something quick as a way of fulfilling their contractual obligations.
Frank never seemed to work on just one album at the time—two was the absolute minimum. He'd start on one and a little ways into that he'd get an idea for another one. [...] One of the best examples of this is the album Cruising With Ruben and The Jets. During a break at a session for some other album, we were sitting around talking about old high school days and doo-wop tunes. Ray Collins and some other people just started singing them. Then someone sat down at the piano, someone else played drums, and so forth. All of a sudden Frank said, "Hey, let's make an album of this stuff!" Right then and there Cruising With Ruben and The Jets was born. He came in the next day with charts for the whole album.
MUSICIAN: Was Cruising With Ruben & The Jets a parody of the 50s then, or was that a serious attempt to play in that style?
ZAPPA: I'll tell you, there's a very scientific reason for the existence of Ruben & The Jets. The closest relationship between that album as an artistic event and another event from a different field that you can compare it to would be the point in Stravinsky's career in which he decided he was going to write neo-classical music. He started doing stuff like Pulcinella—writing music in his day and age, but using forms that were thoroughly out of style and frowned upon by the academic establishment. You have to remember that the American people don't have much going for them in the way of taste. I mean, taste is something that's inflicted on the American public by other outside forces. So if somebody tells you that something is cool, well, you'll think it's cool and you'll go out and buy it. To make an album like Cruising With Ruben & The Jets at that time in history, in '68, was very unfashionable. And everybody went, "Oh, I can't own that; it's not cool. It's not acid rock, it's not fuzztone, it's not psychedelic. Who needs this?" I didn't do it just to be arbitrary—I like that kind of music, and I wanted to have some examples of that style in my total catalog output.
MUSICIAN: Is it difficult to find musicians who can play in that style convincingly?
ZAPPA: Yes, it's very difficult to find vocalists who understand that technique anymore. The sort of stuff Roy and Ray [Estrada and Collins] were doing—that's a lost art. That kind of falsetto stuff—there may be a few people left in the world who know how to do that. None of the younger singers know how to do that.
MUSICIAN: You sang the bass parts, right? That's a bit of a lost art in itself.
ZAPPA: Yeah, you have to understand what it means to make those sounds come out of your throat. They're not just low notes.
There was a lot of nonsense in the press when Cruising with Ruben & the Jets came out, about how it had 'fooled people.' I heard one story that a DJ in Philly was playing it like crazy until he found out it was the Mothers, at which point he yanked it. The fact is, everybody knew it was the Mothers of Invention because it said so on the cover: "Is this the Mothers of Invention recording under a different name in a last ditch attempt to get their cruddy music on the radio?"
I conceived that album along the same lines as the compositions in Stravinsky's neoclassical period. If he could take the forms and clichés of the classical era and pervert them, why not do the same with the rules and regulations that applied to doo-wop in the fifties?
Carl Wilson: Yeah, Cruising with Ruben and the Jets. I think that's really out of sight, man.
Mike Love: If he keep comin' up with titles like that, he's gonna have friends for life from The Beach Boy organization.
CW: You know, we think those type of things are humorous. Ruben and the Jets . . .
ML: They're somewhat esoteric, but Frank knows what they mean.
CW: That's out of sight, man.
The Recording Sessions
Liner notes by FZ, 1968
engineered by Dick Kunc at Apostolic Studios, New York
Liner notes by FZ, 1968
JIMMY CARL BLACK and/or ARTHUR DYRE TRIPP III: lewd pulsating rhythm
The function of the drums in a rock music ensemble is to keep the beat. ("It has a good beat . . . I give it 10 points, Dick.") On early R&B records, the drum part was usually executed with brushes. All the arrangements required, generally, was a dull thud on the second and fourth pulse of the bar. There were very few "breaks" or "fills." When the drum fill (a short percussion outburst, usually at a cadence or resting point of a musical phrase) became popular in rock arrangements, it most often took the form of groups of triplets (three-note rhythmic figures, squeezed into the space of two beats . . . sounding like: ya-da-da ya-da-da ya-da-da ya-da-da- whomp). For a while, during the mid-50s, it seemed like every record produced had one or more fills of this nature in it. Eventually, with the improvements in studios and recording techniques, the drummers began to use sticks on the sessions and the cadence fills became more elaborate but, before and after the fill, the drummer's job was still to keep the beat . . . that same old crappy beat . . . the beat that made the kids hop around and scream and yell and buy records. A long process of rhythmic evolution has taken place since the early 50s. It is laughable now to think of that dull thud on the second and fourth as lewd and pulsating.
Art Tripp
Ruben & The Jets was the first LP [Art Tripp] played on. Dick Kunc had set him up with Zappa. He came in and laid down the percussion track. Everything else was already recorded at that time.
The first thing he had me do was he had me redo all the drum tracks for Ruben And The Jest, because he didn't like what Billy Mundi had played. So, it was funny, because I hadn't had a lot of experience. It was funny to sit down with the phones and play to the track. The music was already done and they were just replacing his drum tracks.
[...] The parts were so ridiculously easy, it was real simple. [...] It was a lot of fun. We sat there, and I think we did the whole goddamned album in a day.
The Cover Art
summer 68 -LA. Acrylic, pencil, collage, spray-paint. Animopomorphized snouts courtesy Carl Barks. In spring of 68 Frank moved the operation back to LA, and I took up residence in the tree-house at the Log Cabin wherein I assembled this comic combo. (reference the Uncle Meat story) Then I found some interesting trash on the hill up above the Log Cabin where they were building roads. which started a diversion to overlaying car parts diagrams on people's heads.
95RR-inlay: Jellyroll/Bop from promotional material .
The Ruben and the Jets characters were really just me showing Frank a comic strip with the dog-nosed guys who I stole from Carl Barks, and Frank wanting to use them as the fake doo-wop band on that record.
FZ on The Johnny Otis Show, November 2, 1970
You know the cover of the Ruben & The Jets album? There's a figure on the front holding a guitar. And it's a red Stratocaster that's all scratched up. It was copied as exactly as possible—including the hand position—off the cover of the Pee Wee Crayton album that was out on Kent. All the cracks in the pick-ups and everything are illustrated in that . . .
I was a big fan of Carl Barks, who did the Disney ducks and all the funny animal comics. I found all the superhero stuff very boring, but Carl Barks did very complex, interesting, and funny stories. They were really a classic type of delivery and influenced a lot of artists of my generation, including Robert Crumb.
The jellyroll illustration [a how-to guide to achieving a perfect greaser hairstyle, included in a promotional package for the album and reproduced on the 2012 CD reissue]; was fun to do and it fitted in with the dog snout characters on the cover. Again, some of that goes back to those ads that I did for Moop, which were surrealistic comic strips, basically. Frank liked that concept.
And so I was playing with the animal nose type thing. At one point, we were going to do these rubber noses for the band to wear. We took a cast of Frank's nose in order to do that.
I used some acrylics, some watercolors. The background is Krylon spray paint, because I didn't have an airbrush to work with at the time, so I just used a spray can. It's incredible. I like to work in all different media, so it was good for me. Collage works well too, because then, if you make a mistake, you can change it easily.
FZ on The Howard Smith Show, October 10, 1971
Have you ever seen a cheapo, cheapo album that sells for about 98¢ called Blues After Hours by Pee Wee Crayton? Well, Pee Wee Crayton is the possessor of I believe the very first Stratocaster ever manufactured. It was given to Pee Wee Crayton by Leo Fender. And on the cover of this Blues After Hours album, you see this Stratocaster #1 after a zillion years worth of wear, and the frets are all messed up, and in between the frets the wood is vanishing, and the faceplate is scratched, and some of the knobs are broken off, and it's really a great looking guitar. And Calvin duplicated Pee Wee Crayton's hand chordal position on the guitar and most of the details of the guitar itself for the picture on the front of the Ruben album. Definitely a detail man.
[Pee Wee Crayton, Pee Wee Crayton, Crown Records CLP 5175, 1960]
Additional informant: Charles Ulrich.
Liner Notes
THE STORY OF RUBEN & THE JETS
There was already 11 other guys in the band so when he quit nobody missed
him except for his car when they had to go to rehearsal or play for a battle
of the bands at the American Legion Post in Chino.
Hall Capacity 299.
8 hr. Rental.
Bartender Services Included.
Frank lands a spot with his first rock band, the Ramblers, in San Diego. They work places like American Legion Post No. 6.
Towns such as Lancaster always have American Legion Posts, where in the Fifties they held dances that they hyped over the radio: "Come and meet old friends and make new ones. No Levis or capris, please." And then the next day, the news on the same station would say there were five knifings at the dance. Guys got high on white port and lemon juice and wore leather jackets, peggers and hair in a ducktail. Girls wore full skirts with five petticoats.
Generally speaking, they save "Cherry Pie" & "Work With Me Annie" till the late part of the evening
One of my favorite Negro R&B groups during the 50s was Hank Ballard and the Midnighters. Their work was some of the most important sociosexual true-to-life commentary of that era, for instance: "Stingy Little Thing" (a song in protest about girls who wouldn't "put out"), "Work with Me Annie," and "Annie Had a Baby." Songs like these got played on the air every once in a while—the kids would hear "Annie Had a Baby" and say, "Hey, here's a song about a girl getting pregnant," and rush to tune it in—but an official of the station (with teen-age children of his own to protect) would "lay a pink memo on it," and the song would sort of "disappear."
1. Cheap Thrills
There's only two songs on that record that were easy to do—'No, No, No' and 'Cheap Thrills.' I wrote them, recorded all the instruments, and vocals, and mixed both of those songs on a Sunday afternoon. It took about seven hours and I did both songs from top to bottom.
[The album] contains four of the songs from Freak-out, re-arranged in the '50's style, plus two which I wrote, played eight instrumental backing tracks and six vocal tracks for, recorded and mixed all in one Sunday afternoon in the studio alone, just for a laugh.
Cheap thrills up and down my spine
8. Later That Night
Oh, I cried
(I cried)
My heart out
The phrase "I cried my heart out" is the title of a song by Jackie & the Starlites, who also did the original "Valarie."
(I hold in my hand three letters from the stages of your fine, fine, super-fine career . . . )
My best white shirts with the Mr. B collar
[Billy] Eckstine was a style leader and noted sharp dresser. He designed and patented a high roll collar that formed a "B" over a Windsor-knotted tie, which became known as a "Mr. B. Collar."