The song that made Frank Zappa want to stick a “flower in somebody’s gun”
As one of music’s foremost subversives, Frank Zappa liked to confuse. Whether this be through his music and lyrics or complex political postulations, the Mothers of Invention leader made a career out of scrambling signals.
While Zappa was undoubtedly a distinctive character, he could be somewhat perplexing regarding the music he liked. An artist discussing their love or hatred for another usually gives insight into their inner workings. However, when it came to Zappa, these accounts would only serve to make his personality more opaque, as they tended to be giant contradictions.
For instance, Zappa famously hated the biggest band of his day, The Beatles, and said he preferred the American, manufactured response to them, The Monkees.
“Everybody else thought they were God!” Zappa once said of the Liverpool quartet. “I think that was not correct. They were just a good commercial group”. While most can agree with the ‘Cosmic Debris’ songwriter’s point, it seems unfathomable that a man so antithetical to the establishment and commercialism would prefer The Monkees, the ultimate pop group founded for one reason only: to sell records and compete with the commercial strides of the British invasion.
However, a few years later, in classic Zappa style, he would change his tune and describe a Beatles highlight as “wonderful”, with it having such an impact on him that he wanted to “stick a flower in the end of somebody’s gun”. Strangely, for a man who was not only known to openly hate the Fab Four but hippies as well, the track in question was 1967’s psychedelic rock highlight, ‘I Am the Walrus’.
Zappa’s comments came when he was a guest on BBC Radio 1 in 1980 as part of their Star Special show. For the segment, the American selected 30 of his favourite songs to play for the audience listening intently at home to see what weirdness he would throw up. Yet, surprisingly, among them was ‘I Am The Walrus’, a widely popular effort.
When the song faded out, Zappa reflected: “Now wasn’t that wonderful? Just sitting here today, so sophisticated as we all are, in this modern age that we call The Eighties, and to be able to hear something like that with thousands of people in the background on that record saying ‘everybody smoke pot’. It makes you want to tighten your headband and stick a flower in the end of somebody’s gun.”
Ironically, this famous comment was made during a BBC segment because they had initially banned the track for including the word “knickers” when it was first released.
