Did Frank Zappa really eat shit on stage?
I don’t think I’ll be the first to tell you, dear reader, that sometimes rock stars do stupid shit onstage.
The dearly departed Ozzy Osbourne has a myriad of tall tales to do with his onstage antics, from biting the head off bats onwards. L7’s Donita Sparks (brilliantly) responded to being pelted with mud at Reading Festival 1992 by whipping her tampon out and chucking it into the disgusted crowd. Red Hot Chili Peppers have played a number of concerts wearing nothing but their instruments and four strategically placed socks between the four of them. In some truly disgusting cases, the “stupid shit” is all too literal.
A decade after L7’s stunt at Reading Festival 1992, Greg Puciato of The Dillinger Escape Plan protested against sharing a bill with Puddle of Mudd and The Offspring by shitting into a plastic bag, smearing it over himself, then throwing it into the crowd. In their minds, they had a lot of shit coming next, so they might as well get used to it. GG Allin made a career out of flinging his own faeces around on stage, cos he certainly didn’t make his career out of any music.
However, it’s one thing for the likes of GG Allin and The Dillinger Escape Plan to do that. Both are artists whose extremity is the point. In Dillinger’s case, it’s the sheer madness of their music, and in Allin’s, it’s the fact that his chronic lack of talent meant that he had to resort to schoolyard tactics in order to keep anyone’s attention. So when someone as cerebral and respected as Frank Zappa has a more disgusting story than anything Allin can claim to, one has to look a little deeper.
So, did Frank Zappa actually do it?
Right from the off, there’s a reason to doubt the veracity of the story baked into the fact that no one can get what the story actually is straight. In all tellings, Zappa supposedly wins a gross-out contest at a concert of his by eating shit onstage. However, in some tellings, it’s a contest against Captain Beefheart, and they both partake. In others, it’s against Alice Cooper, who sets the scene by stepping on baby chickens before getting one-upped by Zappa.
Now, a lot of the time, we don’t really know whether the legendary stories associated with the rock greats of the 1960s happened or not. The fact that stories like this occurred in the 1960s means that there’s very rarely video evidence of it, so we’ve just got to go off the testimony of a bunch of people whose livelihoods are built around keeping their own legend alive. However, a story like this featuring Frank Zappa, a man who has conducted symphony orchestras, is tantamount to character assassination, and one that he stepped in to nip in the bud in his autobiography, The Real Frank Zappa Book.
In it, he didn’t just deny the story, he gave an example of denying it to a punter’s face at the time, saying, “I was in a London club called the Speak Easy in 1967 or ’68. A member of a group called the Flock, recording for Columbia at the time, came over to me and said, ‘You’re fantastic. When I heard about you eating that shit on stage, I thought, ‘That guy is way, way out there.’ I said, ‘I never ate shit on stage’. He looked really depressed—like I had just broken his heart. For the records, folks: I never took a shit on stage, and the closest I ever came to eating shit anywhere was at a Holiday Inn buffet in Fayetteville, North Carolina, in 1973.”
So no. Didn’t happen. Let’s stop talking about it. Especially because now I have to take lunch. Great.