Credit: Dangerous Minds / Album Cover

I reeeeally hope you’re not eating while perusing this fine website because this rumour is properly foul. One that sticks to the reputation of Frank Zappa as he stepped in…well, yeah.

Again, it’s fucking gross, and there’s a (forgive the pun) shit-ton of different tellings of it which should go some way to showing that it’s a load of bull-goddamnit, but broadly speaking, the tale goes thusly. At a gig with Captain Beefheart (some tellings say it’s Alice Cooper, but it’s mainly Beefheart), a “gross-out contest” is held onstage. Quite what that is, no one really knows. Quite how you win or who decides who’s won no one really knows, but that’s not the point. The point is that in this urban myth, Zappa wins quite handily.

How he does so is truly revolting. In the tellings where Zappa is up against Alice Cooper, Cooper sets a bar pretty high by stamping on baby chickens. Which is another way you can tell this is a fiction. Cooper was a showman who would love making the audience think that he did something that horrible, but never would I believe he actually would.

According to Zappa, this is a story that has followed him since the late 1960s. He even wrote about it in his memoirs, The Real Frank Zappa Book, where a guy came up to him in a London club in 1967 saying how amazing it was that he’d done something that out there.

Zappa denied it to the poor fuckwit at the time and denied it again in the pages of his book, saying in his inimitable manner, “the closest I ever came to eating shit anywhere was at a Holiday Inn buffet in Fayetteville, North Carolina, in 1973.”

So, why does this story follow Frank Zappa around?

It’s baffling, right? I just can’t figure out exactly why people would think Frank Zappa, leader of the Mothers of Invention, one of the best guitarists of his generation, a man who has had his music performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, would lower himself to such puerile, sub-GG Allin nonsense. This was a man who cared so much about what he put in his body that, and this is a hundred per cent true, he very rarely took drugs.

This is Frank Zappa we’re talking about, and the man basically never took drugs that weren’t caffeine. Anyone who knows the slightest thing about Zappa would know this was a fiction, so why can’t he seem to leave it behind? Not only after strenuously denying it in print, but then dying shortly afterwards?! I do have a theory about it, but I do warn you it’s based mostly on vibes rather than fact.

Since this whole story sticks to Zappa because of vibes rather than facts, however, I think I’m justified in putting my two cents out there for all to see. The story sticks to him because Frank Zappa is a lot more notorious than he is famous. People know the look of the gangling, moustachiod genius with his Gibson SG a lot more than they know anything he actually made.

It’s the reason why Beefheart is in some versions of the story, and absolutely the reason why Alice Cooper is in some versions of the story. A man who fancied himself an artiste like Zappa sharing a stage with a pop tart showman like Alice Cooper?! Yeah, right.

In any other situation, I’d say print the legend. But with this particular one? I think it’s one we can all stand to forget about. I need a drink and a shower.