When Eric Burdon called Frank Zappa the “Adolf Hitler of rock”
David Bowie once highly controversially referred to Adolf Hitler as “one of the first rock stars”. He soon retracted this and apologised. But to best knowledge, Eric Burdon has continued to stand by his assertion that Frank Zappa was the “Adolf Hitler of rock”. He certainly stood on the outside of society and refused to play ball with his peers, but likening this to the behaviour of the most despicable scourge in human history does seem a little strong.
However glib and controversial Burdon’s remark may be, at least he had first-hand experience of Zappa to base his wild claims upon. “We were recording in the studio with Tom Wilson when he [Zappa] was doing the Freak Out album next door and he popped in to listen to us,” the Animals singer once recalled. “He was friends with Tom Wilson and he just said to me, ‘I’ve got a couple of songs, do you want to try them out?’ and I said ‘yeah’.”
All seemed to be going well; the Geordie singer was impressed by this mystic American iconoclast. “We got together after an Animals session and I recorded a couple of songs with him,” he continues. “My voice sounds ridiculously teenage, but it was fun. I got pretty close to Frank and later lived a few doors away from him in Laurel Canyon. I used to spend nights watching his 16mm experimental films which never came to light. I expected him to become one of the new world directors.”
At this stage, likening him to the fascist who was responsible for the deaths of three per cent of the world’s population seems pretty far out of the question for the so-called pal. But when they began to work together for the record Animalism, Burdon saw a different side to his buddy. Ultimately, the experience of working with the outlandish creator caused his view to change, and he made one of the most infamous quips in rock history.
However, Zappa wasn’t all that offended by the remark. In fact, years later, he said with a degree of pride that he still had “that clipping in which Eric Burdon called me the Adolf Hitler of rock and roll”. In actuality, he seemed to think that he had expanded Eric’s mind and took this assertion as proof. He even pinpointed the late-night moment that might have led to it.
“I set up my projector and screen and proceeded to show them my home movies, of an experimental nature, accompanying the movies with a collection of electronic music,” Zappa recalled. “Everybody sat there looking at the spots on the leg, not knowing how to take it. Some of them got very paranoid and wanted to leave, It made them very tense. Eric dug it. He stayed until 4 o’clock in the morning, then he split.”
Concluding: “I didn’t know that it had affected Eric that much until I started reading all these things he said in the Hit Parader article, It must have really blown his mind. Ha Ha.”
Alas, quite what any of this has to do with the Third Reich still remains to be seen; perhaps it was just a symptom of rock ‘n’ roll’s occultist obsession at the time.
