Frank Zappa’s brutal refusal to play Woodstock: “A lot of mud”
To the layman, it may appear that Woodstock and Frank Zappa go hand in hand like dodgy tie-dye shirts and brown acid.
Surely, one of the central figures of the countercultural underground would have fought tooth and nail to appear at the 1960s’ most immortal music festival? Its stature is without question. Still towering in the rock and pop memory, the congregation of half a million-odd hippies and peaceniks at Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in upstate New York commands an enduring fascination to this day, a symbolic bottling of the era’s communal radicalism that just feels hopelessly remote in today’s over-commercialised landscape and bonfire to the post-war terrain affording such a spirited venture.
Yet, for those on the ground and taking the stage, Woodstock holds a less halcyon glow. Bad weather, chaotic set times, gridlock on the surrounding roads, technical mishap, and the ugly side of LSD-frazzled casualties painted a less romantic picture of the ‘Age of Aquarius’ most totemic spectacle. Jon Mitchell’s gilded ‘Woodstock’ theme the following year may have raised eyebrows among the attendees and performers wading through the festival’s ramshackle fumble.
No less than Zappa. “A lot of mud at Woodstock,” he wryly quipped on 1992’s The Class of the 20th Century documentary. “We were invited to play there; we turned it down.”
It’s possible that Zappa and The Mothers of Invention ducked from the Woodstock gig after a brief glance at the National Weather Report and just couldn’t be bothered with the hassle. He wouldn’t be the only big name missing from the line-up. Led Zeppelin, John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band, and The Rolling Stones all failed to appear due to scheduling clashes and logistical issues, but others like The Byrds and The Doors just failed to see what the fuss was about, with Jethro Tull specifically avoiding “lots of naked ladies… taking drugs and drinking lots of beer, and fooling around in the mud” like the plague.
Zappa’s aversion to Woodstock went deeper, however. Right from the moment his Freak Out! debut was unleashed to an American fringe lost in peace and love, the Mothers captain always harboured a cynical outlook on the era’s flower power, telling Circus Raves in 1975, “All the hippies were so impressed with themselves that they didn’t know which end was up.”
He was a freak, but no hippie. Coursing throughout the hefty Zappaverse of albums and film projects is Zappa’s healthy disdain for the establishment, perceptions of groupthink, and a contempt for dogma on whatever end of the political spectrum. Such fervent focus on personal emancipation from social conformity veered into a libertarian streak late in Zappa’s life, and much of his work was bogged down by an elitist snark that rubbed his detractors the wrong way.
Still, Zappa’s satirical eye on the 1960s counterculture and its Woodstock totem flashed a necessary critique of the hippie movement’s arguably naive shortcomings, as well as the darker dead ends hurtling toward the end of the decade. The Mothers Man’s most lasting statement on the flower child idyll was burned into his gargantuan oeuvre with 1968’s We’re Only in It for the Money, a scabrous piss-take on the youthquake revolution further illustrated by its acidic inverse of the Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band cover.
“I will love everyone / I will love the police as they kick the shit out of me on the street,” Zappa spits on ‘Who Needs the Peace Corps?’ With such savage lines in his lyrical arsenal during Woodstock’s plume, taking the stage on Bethel farm with his Mothers and targeting such cutting pot-shots at the far-out audience may well have marked the ultimate act of freak subversion.
