After lying on my To Do pile for literally years, I finally got around to translating all the Zappa articles in my Hitweek book.

Zappa in Hitweek

Hitweek was a Dutch weekly pop culture journal. It ran from September 1965 to April 1969, and then became the bi-weekly Aloha. Most of the authors were in late teens and early twenties. The magazine had a large cult following back in its heyday.
One of Hitweek's claims to fame is it was the first magazine worldwide to have Frank Zappa on the cover.
Unfortunately I don't own that little bit of history, but I do have the Hitweek book that was issued in 2003, a "best of" book compiled to accommemorate the magazine.

The Zappa occurrences in the book are:

No 3 '67:
This issue has two smaller pictures of FZ on the cover. Page 4 and a section of page 5 are devoted to Absolutely Free. Assuming you all know the lyrics (not to mention they are copyrighted) I won't reproduce those here. Page 4 has a neat photo of FZ at the Hitweek desk.

MOTHERS OF INVENTION
ALL TEXTS OF THE LP
ABSOLUTELY FREE
All texts are by Frank Zappa and the World Copyright is with him of course.
The album Absolutely Free is out. It is a super-recommended album and you can really hear how fantastic the album is if you have the lyrics next to it. MGM thought the texts were too filthy (not tidy enough) to print on the cover. Zappa's efforts were in vain {Du. proverb: he could jump high and low. -BB} But you can order the lyrics in America for a dollar. The address you have to send your dollar to: The Mothers Idea Fund - PO box 36399 in Los Angeles - California 90036, USA.
Frank Zappa visited the hitweek editors and gave us permission to print all words to the 2nd LP. Thanks to our sister magazine International Times and Mr Zappa we present the lyrics.
Side 1 of the record is a serious outcry to the grey civilian society (plastic people). Song 1 is about the riots on Sunset Strip. Pandora's Box was a nice club there.

The prune songs (2, 3, 4) mock the hypocritical vocabulary of U.S. love songs. You'd say Zappa's choice of words makes no sense. The way of singing says enough.
The use of words in the PRUNES-songs is very absurd when sexual activities are described (inspired by blues metaphores). The Vegetable songs are about the rusty and uncreative spoilsports. Zappa suggests us to contact them for a laugh. They might just react.
After song 5 comes a long instrumental that lasts about 7 minutes. An endless song that is so monochromous that it seems like it never ends. It seems to last for hours. A sort of music-kick (play loud). Ritual Dance of a Pumpkin (vegetable-chick). In the last song, the good relation between you and the vegetable people is mocked.
Side 2 is about certain facets of the currently reigning Ugly Great Society (usa now). A terribly sick sung intro that makes no sense. The song is about the addicted consumer. It's sung again at the end of the record in a much nicer crooner nightclub way (complete with tills and drunk cheering). How the american parents entertain themselves. As horrific as how they entertain themselves here. Parents who have finished their school neatly and who accomplished something in life. Parents who want to see their children in the same way. Their main occupation however is drinking.
Their children are still in school and also need to try to accomplish something. This rhyme is about someone whose status in high school is going down and doesn't get gleered at by the pompon girls. Pompon girls are pushy types that support the school football team {the article names football/soccer, but we can assume this is a mistranslation of American Football - BB}. They toss balls of crepe paper around and shout immortal yells like "We've got the team that's on the beam, that's really hep to jive". After the match they drink beer and get pregnant in the back of someone's car. A sports whistle and a crazily sensitive bar-saxophone can be heard in this song.
Song 10 is about disgusting plastic factories that make disgusting toys. If it wasn't sung in such a funny way it might have been too serious. In track 11 Suzy Creamcheese turns out to be a crazy hippie who appears everywhere just to be en vogue.
In song 12 you can hear that the Plastic People lead a horrific life. Boring duties and dreaming about touring with 13-year-old teenage queens. In bed those girls entertain themselves and that's not right. A grey suit doesn't make you happy after all, because the TV bores too. This song sums up the message of the record. These are the texts. Read them and listen how incredibly well they are brought on the record. Actually social criticism worthy of consideration. Zappa wants the tweeners to realize that they can eventually create an alternative. Respond to it.

No 24 '67:
Page 4:
Small article under the punny title Zapplaat. Contains lyrics to Lonely Little Girl.
In spite of the previous duds (two singles of which about 25 pieces were sold to friends and acquaintances) the Mothers Of Invention releases a new single. Announces as the hit single from the new album We're Only In It For The Money in a beautiful ad (see the collage at the Zappa-article on page 5) in Cashbox turns out to be a spiffy new single that contains Lonely Little Girl on the A-side and Mother People on the flip. Below and next to this we print the cute text (copyright 1968 by Frank Zappa).
{note: lyrics printed are of Lonely Little Girl and Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance. -BB}

Page 5:
Collage
PUBLICITYMAN ZAPPA
Frank Zappa is, apart from the leader of the Mothers Of Invention, president of an advertising agency, The Nifty Advertising Agency, and for those who thought that both the company and the presidentship is fake, the American magazine Saturday Evening Post published a pleasant article by one mr W.H. Manville, in which with a mix of amazement and irony, an eye-witness report of a scene in the lavishly furnished boardroom of Unicord Inc., a major enterprise in musical instruments and amplifiers, to which Frank Zappa is connected as advisor.

SLEEPING ON THE CARPET
When mister Manville enters, Zappa lies on the thick carpet next to the mahogany desk where the president of Unicord, Mr Sidney Hack, is seated. Next to him on the carpet lies Herb Cohen, vice-president of Nifty and manager of the Mothers, having a snooze. A quote:
"You should have listened to me eh?" His finger was pointing to the man at the desk, who apologetically plays with his revers. He says: "I'm sorry Frank. Maybe I should have done that. When I started in this business, everybody wanted a louder sound, clear tones, small amplifiers they can put away easily they can carry easily."
"And now you're going to that fair in Chicago," says the speaker on the floor without mercy, "and because you didn't listen to me, you are going to sell the smallest "beautful tone" amps there are. And are you going to sell those "beautiful tone" amps? No, you can smear the "beautiful tone" amps in your hair because you won't sell them, because the youngsters don't want your "beautiful tone" amps. They want big, gigantic aps, and the traders know the kids won't even look at your "beautiful tone" amps."
"I'm sorry Frank," says the man behind the desk again. "Everything has changed so suddenly. Maybe I am an old goat."

LIES
When Manville asks him about his opinion on advertising, Zappa replies: "Most societies cheat on the youth." "Our ads are true. There's nothing wrong with ads, but there's something wrong with liars." He paused.
"I hate liars," he says suddenly. "Why would I believe that?" I asked him. "Why would I believe anything you say? The way you are lying there, for instance, a businessman talking to his customers. Why do you wear these ridiculous clothes? Is that a pose?"

SHOCK
Again that charming gluttonous smile. "I wear these clothes on one hand because I like them, on the other hand because they are my trademark." He paused. "And especially to shock you." I thought he was a lot nicer. "Come with me," he says, "then I'll show you the amps they used to make here." He lead us through a passage into the factory. I felt like in Alice in Wonderland, some weird children's dream from the sky where children are the boss and showing adults their errors.

CRYING
"When I first came here," Zappa said, pointing towards an amp, "I had to explain to them that young people don't want nice sounds; that's something for the soft martini-generation. Kids want to hear sound. And if it sounds like screaming in your eyes, peeping, crying, the screaming that the radio spends millions on to get rid of it? That is music to us these days. And the youth loves it, if you hate it. Go to one of those concerts. You'll want to see what your daughter gets up to. So you go in there, you step inside and say: "The amps are so loud, I can't even hear what the lyrics are. The youth thinks that's fantastic, because they already know the words, and know you don't know them. The amp is their weapon of destruction."
Mr Mersky, vice-president of Unicord said: "Be reasonable Frank. It's not that bad." Zappa started to talk in a friendly tone. "Listen Bernie, why do you work so hard in the music business, where you must tolerate people like me, customers that don't understand you? For as far as you are concerned, they might as well be shoes, chairs or nails. Why do you work so hard in the music business?"
Mr Mersky smiles. "I have a family, Frank. I have to support a wife and kids..."

EXTERMINATOR
Zappa digs up a mag from his butt pocket and shows an ad from a competitor amp. It looked bigger than I had ever seen. "Look," he said to Mersky, "what do they call that machine? You know how well it sells. Do they call it the Mello-Tone amp? The Beauty-sound?" He pointed at the name. The amp was called Exterminator. Zappa turned to Mersky again and said: "Listen Bernie, you work hard and make a lot of cash here. After work you go home and spend it on your kids. Your son buys an Exterminator for it. And why? To sound louder than you." His voice became soft and friendly again. "So why do you all work so hard, gentlemen?" he asks. End quote.

LOVE
At the end, Manville asks Zappa what he thinks of all "the kids in San Francisco who talk about love all the time."
"If you have it, you don't need to talk about it all the time," Zappa replies.
"Do you talk about it then?"
"Have you heard even one word?"

No 26 '67
Publishes the results of a publicity poll. On one page, a photo of the '67 Mothers can be found.
MOI scores 8th with 83 votes in the Best Foreign Group, topped off by Beatles, Stones, Hendrix, John Mayall, Bee Gees, Cream and Byrds, latter two only by a small margin. "The amazing, even rejoicing fact that bands like MOI and The Doors are in, and the Monkees aren't."
MOI leads the foreign avant garde list by a long shot with 506 votes, followed by Pink Floyd (342), Doors, Jefferson Airplane, Soft Machine, Electric Prunes, Jimi Hendrix Exp., Velvet Underground, Country Joe & The Fish, Vanilla Fudge, Cream, Byrds, Procol Harum.
"After their incredibly successful performance in Amsterdam and their two splendid LPs, the MOI are at a by international measures unbelievable first place.
Instrumentalist: FZ shares 12th place with Alan Price, below Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, John Mayall, George Harrison, Peter Green, Brian Jones, Charlie Watts, Jeff Beck, Mike Bloomfield, Keith Moon and Stevie Winwood. "...and by the way also Frank Zappa, who is indeed a miraculously versatile instrumentalist."
Singer: FZ 19, result list is lead by Bob Dylan and has Tom Jones at a 10th spot.
Album: Absolutely Free comes in 3rd with 188 votes, behind Sgt Pepper (745) and Their Satanic Majesty's Service by the Stones (196).
Producers: Zappa hits 18 in a list lead by George Martin, Tom Wilson and Phil Spector.
Songwriters: FZ is 4th after Lennon/McCartney, Jagger/Richard, and Dylan.

Here follow the matching pictures. I only post the unfamiliar ones.

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The Publicist article collage:

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Uncle Meat collage:

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Thanks for your efforts Bonny.

These are great Bonny!
The Amsterdam show reviewed here - I think it is 20Oct68 - is a great one!
tape sounds real good except for the Brown Shoes Don't Make It at the end
recorded by Don Preston, kept by bruce burnett
and seeded by jaypfunk back in 2005
it remains one of my clear favorites
here's a setlist that is a bit clearer
1. Jam (incl. Smoke Gets In Your Eyes) / Nasal Rententive Calliope Music / Help I'm A Rock > Transylvania Boogie/drum duet / Whiskey Behind the Sun / Dog Breath Variations / The String Quartet > A Pound For a Brown / Sleeping In A Jar > Gas Mask > Charles Ives/ Orange County Lumber Truck medley [source change starts here]/ Brown Shoes Don't Make It

and these versions of dog breath/a pound for a brown (to 8:40) can be found on Electric Aunt Jemima, the rhino beat the boot issue

Hey cool! Thanks for the backup information!

Bonny ! EXCELLENT STUFF !

It's always fun to read historical material from other countries like this!

But this was kinda strange ..... I sure hope they were right :grin:


That is all we can see on the surface, because Zappa knows no rest and if we have been well-informed the recording of the two next Mothers albums has been completed. In short, it all goes on, and if it goes on at this rate, there will continue to come out new records fifty years after Zappa's passing.

And here we are, finally, the translation of That First Article in Hitweek:


The first magazine worldwide to sport FZ on the cover (at least according to an interview from 2005 with one of its editors) was Hitweek, who put the band logo on the front page of their October 1966 issue.
The underground paper was hard to acquire back in the day. An issue would have set you back 30 cents, for which you got a newspaper with a naked male on the cover, and articles on Ike & Tina, Troggs, Batman and Wally Tax. The FZ article is on page 3, right above an article comparing the long-hair at schools regulation to the Dutch national socialistic movement, explanation on how to take our partner's clothes off during sex (focusing on the various types of closures) and let's not get started on the other types of teenage rebellion here.


From the front page introduction:
"At the moment a new type of music resounds throught the HITWEEK-BUILDING. A record sent to us from the States by Frits Boer. The "Moeders Van De Uitvinding" make a music that would pale the Who. See page three.

***
freak out / The mothers of Invention by Frits Boer, USA

An hour before the FREAK OUT would start, the street around the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles were filled with the United Mutations: dozens of biarrely and jofel* dressed, so called by Frank Zappa (leader of the Mothers and inventor of Frek Out) because of their collective effort to esape the social slavery in the areas of thought, dress, interection etc.
Right next to me, a thirty-five-ish man with cut hair, who started making jokes in a fifteen-year-old jargon to the noticeably younger bystanders. It turned out that he was a beautiful FREAK (vreemde vogel), when indoors he was hopping around wearing a Buster Keaton-type wig on his nearly bald head.

BEHOLDING NIRWANA

In the concert hall, there are railings high up on the walls. On three sides of the hall, bed sheets were hung from these railings. When the first group. The West Coast Experimental Pop Art Grou, starts to play. something amazing happens. The loudly playing group is in a sea of light, but can't be seen because an hellish machine produces massive smoke pules onstage. At the same time a projection has started on the sheets, that won't stop. On three sides you can see old Laurel & Hardy-films, old newsreels with Roosevelt and such), completely unclear technical instruction-movies, op-art figures that move along with the rhythm, coloured merging images and red sircles of alternating size floating over the cloth. In the film projectors red lamps instead of white lamps were installed, so that the juxtapositioned (and often overlapping) projections are red-black. "The Light Show Nirvana" it was called.

After the West Coast Experimental Pop Art Group the Mothers of Invention perform, for whom most freaks came from North Hollywood and Laurel Canyon (where everybody lives, including the Byrds) came to the centre of LA. On their first double album there's a list with ca 160 people who contributed to their music, of hich the influence of Eberhard Kromhausen, Randy de Wees the Bokelmans, Uncle Ed and Lenny Bruce are less clear than that of Elvis Presley, Charles Mingus, Lightnin' Slim, Mauricio Kagel and Phil Spector.
The Mothers play songs that are about 15 minutes long, with all sorts of electronic effects, although some songs also contain yodelling (by one of the two drummers: Jim Black, a thoroughbred Cherokee). As the Mothers play, super-freaks jump and shake on two small stages.

DE MOEDERS
(van de uitvinding)
Frank Zappa is 26 years old, born in Baltimore, raised in California. Two years ago he founded the Mothers together with Ray Collins, Jim Black and Roy Estrada. The have started to grow insanely popular in the last year. Not just with the treens - fellow professionals are also (partly) enthusiastic. Jack Nitzsche believes Frank Zappa is one of the tree, four people who will make it in the pop future in the way Spector, Bacharach, Gordy etc are making it now. In March the Mothers recorded their first LP, produced by Tom Wilson (back then producer for Bob Dylan). In response to this album they appeared in various TV-programmes In the programme where I saw them for the first time, a group of tow-along freaks chopped up an armchair with a pickaxe, the performance ended in a mad chaos, that sent the upholstery of the armchair flying through the tudio. Even so I noticed straight away that in the apparently chaotic music there is a magnificently sophisticated discipline. When I later attended a rehearsal of the Mothers (which lasted nine hours) it did turn out that Zappa thoughtfully composes his pop pieces, and the so confident on stage Mothers were all listening carefully to Frank to do absolutely nothing wrong ("Elliot, your timin' is so fuckin' bad!') . Every now and then the tight rehearsal waas interrupted by a pop-jam-session where everyone played himself for half an hour.

The Brainpolice
Soon the Who will record a song by Frank Zappa ("Who Are The Brain Police"). By that time the Mothers will come to England for a tour. It's hard to explain why you think some music is so fantastic. I struggled with this as I met a youngster at a party in Hollywood, who was very high. Every half hour he walked up to me, and he said, with huge eyes like those of a child who just got something beautiful: "Did you hear that Freak Out album of the Mothers of Invention? Isn't that something? Hey isn't that something?"
Freaks of HITWEEK, it certainly is.

*****************



*
I will never know how best to translate "jofel", as the King of Translation Engines Deepl.com gives the yucky, yummy, yophile and jofel as translations. Grabbing the Van Dale it is a word that means "pleasant, fun" but it being street lingo means it means whatever it means.

I guess Deepl was right after all. Jofel means jofel.

Side note - in the mean time Dad is watching the German cop show Tatort - and somebody has a 200 Motels photo - which we see seconds before we see he hung himself.
RIP Fictional FZ Fan. There's Too Little Of You.