Editing Lumpy Gravy (section)

== Release, lawsuit and reediting ==
Capitol released the original all-orchestral ''Lumpy Gravy'' album on August 7, 1967, only on the 4-track cartridge format, apparently in limited numbers. Capitol also intended to release a single consisting of the pieces "Gypsy Airs" and "Sink Trap" to promote its release.<ref name=Slaven/> In response to the album's release, MGM threatened a lawsuit, claiming that its release violated Zappa's contract.<ref name=Slaven/>

During the litigation, Zappa expanded and significantly edited the album, adding spoken word and [[musique concrète]] interludes, as well as some pieces of music from his pre-Mothers archives. The original ''Lumpy Gravy'' was not re-released until 2009, with the Zappa Records triple-CD release, ''[[The Lumpy Money Project/Object]]''.

{{quote box|quoted = 1|quote=''Lumpy Gravy'' is edited together out of hundreds, maybe thousands of tiny pieces of tape which took a long time to collect. First of all you have to find just the right little noise and things that are going to go in there, and then you have to manually cut these pieces of tape together with a razor blade.|source=— Frank Zappa (1987)<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Graves |first1=Tom |title=The Rock & Roll Disc Interview: Frank Zappa |journal=Rock & Roll Disc |date=December 1987 |url=https://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/the-rock--roll-disc-interview-frank-zappa |access-date=October 13, 2022}}</ref>|width=25em|align=right|style=padding:8px;|border=1px}}

The dialogue segments were recorded at Apostolic Studios in New York City after Zappa discovered that the strings of the studio's grand piano would resonate if a person spoke near those strings. The "piano people" experiment involved Zappa having various speakers improvise dialogue using topics offered by Zappa. Most of the dialogue on the reedited ''Lumpy Gravy'', recorded simultaneously with ''We're Only in It for the Money'',<ref>{{cite book |title= Icons of Rock|last= Schinder|first= Scott|year= 2008|publisher= Greenwood Publishing Group|page= 363|access-date=August 20, 2012|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=CzWE_J3ZZfoC&pg=PA363 |isbn= 9780313338472}}</ref> was spoken by a small group which included [[Motorhead Sherwood]], [[Roy Estrada]], Spider Barbour, All-Night John (the manager of the studio) and Louis Cuneo, who was noted for his laugh, which sounded like a "psychotic turkey".<ref name=Slaven/> The concept of the reedited album derived from Zappa's "big note" theory, which states that the universe consists of a single element, and that atoms are vibrations of that element, a "big note".<ref name=Walley/>

The revised album proved to be very difficult to make, as the orchestral master tapes recovered from Capitol featured many poor splices.<ref name=Walley>{{cite book |title= No Commercial Potential: The Saga of Frank Zappa|last= Walley|first= David|date= 22 Aug 1996|publisher= Da Capo Press|pages= 240|access-date=August 20, 2012 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=G_eCWwKdyfsC&pg=PA87|isbn= 0306807106}}</ref> The reedited version also incorporated additional musical content not on the original release of the album, including previously recorded [[surf music]]<ref name=Walley/> and a 1963 Zappa-produced demo recording of a tune that later appeared in a 1967 recording under the title "[[Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance]]" on ''We're Only in It for the Money''. Some of the editing was done in Zappa's living room.<ref name=Zappa>{{cite book| title = The Real Frank Zappa Book| url = https://archive.org/details/realfrankzappabo0000zapp| url-access = registration| first = Frank with Occhiogrosso, Peter| last = Zappa| year = 1989| publisher=Poseidon Press| location = New York| isbn = 0-671-63870-X |pages=[https://archive.org/details/realfrankzappabo0000zapp/page/244 244–245]}}</ref> On the 1967 and 1968 releases of the album, Zappa was credited as "Francis Vincent Zappa", as Zappa had believed that this was his real name. He later learned that his birth name was Frank Vincent Zappa, and this mistake was subsequently corrected in reissues of the album.<ref name=Zappa/>