The Parable of Arable Land is the first studio album by the Red Crayola (later known as Red Krayola). The album was considered psychedelic music when it was introduced, but later assessments describe it as a forerunner to avant/noise rock. With this album as introduction, Ritchie Unterberger assessed the band as a precursor to industrial rock. The album features free improvised pieces involving industrial power tools and a revving motorcycle dubbed "Free Form Freak-Out" played by a group of over 50 people known as "the Familiar Ugly" as well as notable instrumental cameos by label mate and 13th Floor Elevators frontman Roky Erickson.
The Familiar Ugly
The Familiar Ugly was a group of 50 people who joined the Red Crayola on stage with music that was made on anything from industrial power tools to a revving motorcycle. They perform on the "Free Form Freak-Out" tracks that are present between each song on the album. Rick Barthelme later reflected. "At heart we were as elitist as could be, but these folks came to our shows and some we knew and most we did not know, but whenever we played, there they were, ready to mount the stage and screech until the last plug was pulled, and there we were, ready to invite them – the Familiar Ugly, we dubbed ’em."
After playing as a five-piece consisting of all three original members plus Bonnie Emerson and Danny Schacht, the group split back to the original trio and instead called every added member a part of the Familiar Ugly. "Free Form Freak-Out" was a term coined by record producer Lelan Rogers who proposed the idea of having the album intermingle songs with the Familiar Ugly, fading one into the other as well as having Rick Barthelme take up a tribal drumbeat instead of a standard rock beat for "War Sucks".
Mayo Thompson details the formation of the Familiar Ugly and the origin of "Free Form Freak-Out" in an interview conducted on December 26, 2011 "Conversation with Mayo Thompson: Part One"
Recording
The Familiar Ugly were recorded on April Fool's Day 1967 in a three-hour evening session on one master tape, it was done on eight tracks with eight microphones, one per channel. The other tracks on the album were recorded on 3 different sessions from April–May (one of the sessions contained unreleased recordings titled "F.R.E.D" and "Water Vessel" but they have been presumed lost). Mayo Thompson said, "We went back and pieced it together so that it would have a flow to it and all the while we were naïve. We went in the studio, if we'd had our druthers, we would have multitracked the free form stuff, because we could have done more of our own thing. As it was, it was just frozen. It was a documentary relation, documenting the recording."
"Our first album was recorded mono. [The simulated stereo mix] is Walt Andrus' studio wizardry. We made the mono version and then like two days later I was around the studio, and they said, 'Come here, what about this for a stereo album?' And I sat there and listened to it and I said, 'sounds okay to me, crazy, but sounds okay.' For the stereo mix the songs were processed through a stereo effects chamber with added psychedelic effects (such as loops, reversed tapes, speed fluctuations and sound effects).
"And then over the next couple of days we went in and did the backing tracks — we played them live," with few overdubs. Vocal tracks on some songs, such as "War Sucks," were also recorded live. "When we had the backing tracks, Roky Erickson of the 13th Floor Elevators was invited in to play the organ part on 'Hurricane Fighter Plane' and played the mouth organ part on 'Transparent Radiation'."- Mayo Thompson talks about the recording of The Parable of Arable Land.
Music
The band took influences from a variety of different artists, some of them were Frank Zappa, the Fugs and Albert Ayler. As well as avant-garde music composers John Cage and Harry Partch.
Mayo Thompson talked about the Red Krayola's relation with punk rock: "I would say, the mindset of those people in the '70s was something like our mindset in the mid-'60s. They hated everything too that had happened before--'we're not necessarily going to clean the slate, but we're going to burn everything down and then we're going to start over again. Or in the process, we're going to burn down everything as a starting over again.' And this relation was understood. So some people would say, this is proto-punk - that was where we got lumped, a little bit. But the same things that were talked about the music then are the same things that people talk about it now - 'jazzy, broken, dada, blah blah.'"