History
The first instance of lyrics being written for the melody is on a 1965 demo tape by The Mothers Of Invention on which the song is recorded as "I'm So Happy I Could Cry." The lyrics describe the sincere love of a man to a "...girl he left behind him when he went out to see this great, big world..." This version, released on the posthumous Frank Zappa album Joe's Corsage, also contains a bridge section that is not included in any other version of the song, save for the instrumental version that appears at the end of the "Lumpy Gravy" LP. At one point, the tune (without lyrics) was referred to by a working title of "Never On Sunday" (coincidentally the title of another very popular and oft-recorded song by Greek composer Manos Hadjidakis, written around the same time that Zappa wrote his song).
Three years later, in 1968, Zappa wrote entirely new lyrics to the tune and it was finally re-recorded by The Mothers Of Invention (in a more abbreviated arrangement, with the bridge section excised) as "Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance" for the album We're Only In It for The Money. The song would be known by this title from that point on. The lyrics to this version are a satirical look at social classes and the hippie subculture of the sixties.
The song was once again re-recorded by Frank Zappa for his album Lumpy Gravy under the shortened title "Take Your Clothes Off," this time in its more common instrumental form and, as previously mentioned, with the original bridge section that was excluded from the "We're Only In It For The Money" version of the track fully reincorporated. Most live performances of the song by Frank Zappa are instrumental jams.
Read more about this topic: Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Regarding History as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimized—the question involuntarily arises—to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)