Exploding giraffes and Dada stagecraft: The wild concerts of Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention
A lot of people say that The Beatles were one of the most important and prolific bands of all time, and this is a pretty fair statement. The Beatles could engage with their creativity in their songwriting in a way that stayed true to their pop roots and appealed to the masses but was also experimental and unique. Because of how forward-thinking they were, many people struggle to admit that they were heavily influenced by other musicians making art at the same time, but they were. Enter Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention.
Frank Zappa was a prolific workaholic. In his 30 years of making music, he was responsible for 60 albums, each unique, experimental and genre-defying in its own right. He started that career with the Mothers of Invention, who were able to completely break down any creative walls that may have stood in musicians’ way at the time. The result of this was Freak Out!, an album that inspired The Beatles massively during their Sgt Pepper era and led to some of the most exciting live shows of all time.
When you have an artist like Frank Zappa and a band like Mothers of Invention, people who went on to inspire one of The Beatles’ most creative and psychedelic phases, observers quickly realise that not a lot is off limits creatively. This made a strange world that hovered above the real one, a world surrounding Zappa that was a perfect blend of fact and fiction, as people could say whatever they wanted about the band, and the majority would believe it.
Their live show took up much of the space within this world, separate from our own. People would go to their gigs, which were heavily themed around sci-fi, theatre and artistic expression, experience the gig and then take away from it a blend of what actually happened and what they thought happened. Subsequently, a number of stories came out of these shows, covering the band in a disgusting shroud of mystery that Zappa had to clear up.
One of the big rumours that went around was about gross-out contests, where people said Zappa ate poo on stage and urinated on the crowd. “There never was a gross-out content. That was a rumour. Somebody’s imagination ran wild. Chemically bonded imagination,” said Zappa, dispelling the stories, “The rumour was that I went so far as to eat shit onstage. There were people who were terribly disappointed that I never ate shit onstage. But no, there never was anything resembling a gross-out contest.”
Zappa also spoke about the stories of him weeing on paying gig-goers, saying, “I never had my dick out onstage and neither did anybody else in the band.”
Just because some of the gross rumours that came out of the shows aren’t true doesn’t mean that the gigs weren’t laced with weirdness, though. “We did have a stuffed giraffe rigged with a hose and an industrial-strength whipped cream dispenser. Under it we had a cherry bomb. That’s how we celebrated the Fourth of July in 1967,” said Zappa, “Somebody waved the flag, lit the cherry bomb. It blew the ass out of the giraffe.”
So, what inspired Zappa and the band to do all of this? There were a few factors at play: Firstly, they wanted to entertain the crowd, and secondly, they wanted to entertain one another. “There was a third factor, too. There’s an art statement in whipped cream shooting out the ass of a giraffe, isn’t there? We were carrying on the forgotten tradition of Dada stagecraft. The more absurd, the better I liked it.”
