Jimmy Carl Black was the drummer with the Mothers of Invention on a series of influential albums in the late 1960s. In addition to his drumming, he is remembered for his satirical, deadpan one-liner, repeated several times on the band’s 1968 album, We’re Only in it for the Money: “Hi boys and girls, I’m Jimmy Carl Black and I’m the Indian of the group!'”

He was born James Carl Inkanish in 1938 in El Paso, Texas, and his Indian blood came from his Cheyenne mother. He grew up in the small town of Anthony on the border of Texas and New Mexico and played piano and trumpet as a child. His life was changed by Elvis Presley, when he saw the singer perform at the El Paso Coliseum in 1955.

“When I saw the effect he had on those women, I thought: ‘Man. That’s what I want to do’,” he recalled.

He abandoned the trumpet and took up the drums, playing in a country and western trio while serving in the US Air Force in 1958-61. After his discharge he made his first recordings in Kansas with an instrumental band called the Keys, in 1962. Two years later he moved to California where he formed the Soul Giants with Roy Estrada and Ray Collins. When they lost their guitarist to the US Army, Collins proposed his friend Frank Zappa as a replacement. Zappa was duly hired, and within a month the forceful new recruit had taken over the band and renamed them the Mothers.

Adding Billy Mundi as a second drummer, much to Black’s irritation, Zappa dramatically expanded the band in size and scope, and in 1966 the group signed with the Verve label.

Tom Wilson, the producer assigned to their first album, reportedly believed he was working with a blues band. Instead, Zappa served up a set of acerbically satirical and zany compositions and the results appeared on the 1966 album Freak Out! under the expanded name the Mothers of Invention.

It was followed by Absolutely Free (1967), on which Zappa sharpened his savage wit still further. On the band’s next release, We’re Only in it for the Money (1968), he lampooned flower power and hippy culture, both in the LP’s cover — a spoof of the Beatles’ revered Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band — and in the music and lyrics. Black’s “I’m the Indian of the group” line appeared at the end of the opening track, Are You Hung Up? and again in the psychotic anthem Concentration Moon.

The doo-wop pastiche Cruising With Ruben and the Jets followed, and Black made another vocal contribution to the jazz-rock-orientated Uncle Meat (1969), which included If We’d All Been Living in California. Zappa had recorded a conversation between himself and Black in which the drummer complained that the band were not being paid properly and were living in poverty.

Black later said he did not realise that Zappa had recorded the conversation and was shocked by its inclusion on the album. By the end of 1969 Zappa had disbanded the original line-up of the Mothers in acrimonious circumstances.

“A week after a successful tour, he called us together and said:

‘I’ve decided to break up the band. Your salaries have stopped as from last week’,” Black recalled.

He was seen prominently as Lonesome Cowboy Burt in Zappa’s 1971 film 200 Motels, but by then he had formed the group Geronimo Black, with which he made two albums. By 1974, however, he had been reduced to working in a doughnut shop and later he ran a painting and decorating business. He toured briefly with Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band and later worked with a Zappa tribute act called the Muffin Men.

He spent his last years living in Europe and was working on an autobiography titled For Mother’s Sake.

He is survived by his wife, Monika, three sons and two daughters.

Jimmy Carl Black, drummer, was born on February 1, 1938. He died on November 1, 2008, aged 70