Another encounter with FZ, this time as a Sears-poncho faux hippie slouching down Tejon Street in scenic downtown Bibleburg. Head shops were everywhere in the Seventies, even here. Tejon also served as home to an office of the John Birch Society, two or three dirty bookstores and a clean one, Dick and Judy Noyes’ Chinook, felled some years back by Amazon.com. One dirty bookstore survives, which tells you much of what you need to know about this place.

But as I said, I was slouching down Tejon and in the window of this head shop I saw a poster that stopped me in my tracks — the now-legendary Phi Zappa Krappa poster, depicting FZ squatting on a toilet. I was eagerly doing my lame-o best to offend as many people as possible through cartoons like “For Sure God Gets High” and “The Adventures of Loadedman,” and so found it delightful.

But FZ apparently found it less so, according to Kill Ugly Radio. The picture was originally intended to illustrate a British magazine article and promote The Mothers’ first concert in 1967, but took on a life of its own as a widely bootlegged poster from which FZ derived no royalties, though he did authorize at least one version, according to a 1975 story written by Steve Weitzman:

“Well, I don’t see anything wrong about sitting on a toilet and having your picture taken, but when somebody takes that picture and uses it to make money on your name. … Then you compound that with the public’s attitude toward excretory processes pictured in a poster like that … more people knew me for that poster than for my music. I said, ‘Well, that’s not fair.’ So I said, ‘I’m either going to do something drastic about it or just let it go’ and I figured, ‘Well, kiss it off.’ You can’t really change the public’s attitude about that.”

Ironic that FZ himself was probably the person most offended by that poster, no?

Dreamed I was an Eskimo

Frozen wind began to blow

Under my boots ‘n’ around my toe

Frost had bit the ground below

Was a hundred degrees below zero

And my momma cried: Boo-a-hoo hoo-ooo.

Well, OK, it’s not a hundred below. I’m not an Eskimo. And my momma’s dead. But it is chilly, and the white stuff is coming down, and by morning I’ll bet you a pancake breakfast at St. Alphonzo’s that the deadly yellow snow will be lying about the joint in abundance come morning.

http://www.youtube.com/v/Mm9RqatOby0

Back to college, 1974, and this time it was “Apostrophe” on the turntable (“Now is that a real poncho or is that a Sears poncho?”). We were the Sears-poncho type, I fear. But it was fun, anyway, even without the crystal ball and the oil of Aphrodite, because we had more than enough of the dust of the Grand Wazoo.

Meanwhile, if you want to know who’s wearing the Real Poncho, check out these folks, a bunch of Chicago workers who got laid off, but refused to fade away. Too bad The Newspaper Guild never had the stones these folks do. A couple thousand Gannett folks might still be on the job.

Journalism’s kinda scary

And of it we should be wary.

—Packard Goose

My initial exposure to Frank Zappa didn’t come in high school, or even college, but on my first “real” job, as a copy boy at a now-defunct Bibleburg newspaper back in 1973.

I had dropped out of college (a miserable little four-year robot factory in Assahola, Colorado) and taken up a series of fascinating jobs: day laborer; janitor; installer of screens on various barracks at Fort Cartoon and patio covers and/or storm windows on civilian dwellings; that sort of thing. No advanced degree required.

After a falling out with my boss and co-worker, I found my applying for and getting the copy-boy gig. It was something of a change of pace, to be sure. Smoking dope on the job was frowned upon, for example, as were ragged jeans and T-shirts. But the money was phenomenal — $64.94 each and every week, after taxes. The big time.

The Bibleburg of the mid-Seventies was not unlike the Bibleburg of today, a place of both uniforms and uniformity (white and elderly, with a veneer of John Birch Society). Its leading newspaper was the Gazette-Telegraph, a drab bumwad owned by the starkly libertarian Freedom Newspapers, which promoted an editorial philosophy just to the right of Gens. Curtis LeMay, Augusto Pincochet and Francisco Franco.

Happily, I was working at the Sun, a decidedly smaller, less doctrinaire outfit owned by Hank Greenspun out of Las Vegas, and it had a very good, semi-hip staff, many of whom went on to bigger and better things (Bill Busenberg to National Public Radio; Neil Westergaard to The Denver Post; George Gladney to the University of Wyoming’s Department of Communication and Journalism). I quickly learned that I was not the only stoner in the newsroom, or even the lone weirdo, and before long I was burning fatties and drinking beer with a small clot of like-minded oddballs.

One of them was a Mothers fan, and turned me on to FZ with “The Mothers: Fillmore East, June 1971.” What an album that was and is, a mighty departure from what I’d been listening to (a diverse mix of blend of Beatles, Stones, Elton John, Allman Brothers, Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath and whatnot). Insanely complex and fascinating music mated to genially perverse lyrics (“All groupies must bow down/In the sacred presence of the Latex Solar Beef”); Flo and Eddie rippin’ it on “Happy Together”; and a killer version of the Zappa classic “Peaches en Regalia.” I mean, what’s not to like?

It was my first real inkling that a guy could drop back in, earn a living and still have a good time. So I went back to college (this time up north at the ConAgra School of Journalism in Greality, Colorado), graduated, and set off on a 15-year, circular tear through a series of mostly undistinguished Western newspapers that dropped me off right back here, where I started — in scenic metropolitan Bibleburg, Colorado, listening to the Mothers.

Do the Mud Shark, baby.

This just in: The Rocky Mountain News is for sale, but the wiseguys think it will follow the Sun into the hellbox of newspaper history. It’s not my fault; I never worked there, though I applied several times.