Ah, Zappa again. This one was designed by the immortal Neon Park. It – and the title – was based on a 50s men’s magazine that Zappa found. He challenged Park, "This is it. What can you do that's worse than this?" Park subsequently found an ad from the same time, put the two together … and the rest is history.
Neon, born Martin Muller, was most famous for his covers for Little Feat (at least one of which we will feature in this blog). In fact, the only cover of theirs he didn’t do was their very first one.
Neon also did covers for Bowie, the Beach Boys, Dr. John, and Lowell George, and had illustrations in Playboy and National Lampoon. He died pretty young, of ALS.
In general, his stuff combined elements of whimsy, surrealism, and Americana. I won’t possibly have room to do him justice, so let me throw in a few extra here.
Weasels Ripped My Flesh is, like Hot Rats, another instrumental done soon after the Mothers broke up. And like Hot Rats, WRMF is also one of Zappa’s better efforts. No big hits (unless, of course, you’re a fan). By the way, the title track is 2 minutes of very loud static, played in concert no less.
A few more great Zappa (and extremely bizarre) covers:
Here's one of my favorite shots of Frank. It was actually taken by Norman Seeff, whom we’ve seen here before.
No comments:
Post a Comment