Frank's turn, part 2

'While we're at it, we have a sort of a cowboy song we'd like to do for ya. This is a song that deals with the rapidly approaching 2[5]0th birthday of the United States of America, ladies and gentlemen! This is a song that warns you in advance that next year everybody is gonna try and sell you things that maybe you shouldn't oughtta buy; and not only that, they've been planning it for years.

'The name of this song is—pardon me—"Poofter's Froth, Wyoming, Plans Ahead"'

With me so far? That is Frank Zappa's spoken introduction to the cited song, appearing on the 1975 album he made from his joint gigs with Captain Beefheart (né Don Van Vliet, a.k.a. this beautiful, insane motherfucker:

) titled Bongo Fury.

This record, by the by, is one of the most glorious grotesqueries in the Zappa catalog—and that, obv., is saying something. 

The song in question takes on crazy significance 50 years later as we approach the [alas there appears to be no consensus on a latinate verbal orgy to designate a quarter-millennium] birthday of the United States, ladies and gentlemen! Having been around in the run-up to the 'Buy-Cent-Any-All'—I remember first being made aware of the imphending Phnomenon in fourth grade in 1975 by Mr. Bill Stokes, to whom eternal thanks and love—I'm not sure I can make it through another round, especially with the present government and political climate.

Anyway, told ya that to tell ya this: 

The Zappa oeuvre is of course full of self-references and callbacks; and his projects always offer weird glimpses into such mental images as were stuck in his brain at the time: in We're Only In It for the Money it's freaks and hair; in Over-Nite Sensation it's tweezers. Here—stick with me a minute—it's DICKS.

I don't really mean anything profound by saying this. I'm not sure it even means anything. But the aforementioned song, echoing its title, contains, amongst a catalog of the products and services to be vended in 1976 in the titular Wyoming hamlet:

'Little Poofter's froth anointments'

Clearly, 'poofter's froth', lowercase, refers to ejaculate—unless Zappa was describing 'Santorum' 28 years before Dan Savage did, while actual Rick Santorum was 17 years old and, presumably, a freak with hair growing out every hole in him. Either way, this is the half of it.

The other half is in the last song on the same record, called 'Muffin Man', whose spoken-word lyrics include:

Arrogantly twisting the sterile canvas

Snoot of a fully charged icing anointment utensil,

He poots forths a quarter-ounce green rosette ... 

Near the summit of a dense,

But radiant muffin of his own design.

'Poot' is, of course, a favorite FZ word; but 'anointment' to my knowledge appears only on this record—and in a derivative or alternate approach to 'Muffin Man' (using a nearly identical spoken-word introduction) called 'A Little Green Rosetta' that ended up at the end of Joe's Garage Acts II and III (1979). Likewise 'poofter' (an Aussie gay slur, I believe?) appears only here—again, to my knowledge, which is not concordancial. I'm not sure whether there's anything to be said for the assonance of 'poot' and 'poofter', but the analogous imagery of 'little poofter's froth anointments' and 'a fully charged icing anointment utensil' cannot have been entirely separate in Zappa's brain. 

Thus: every time Mr. Zappa pooted forth a muffin-crowning rosette in the Utility Muffin Research Kitchen, he was, as they say, rubbing one out.

While we're at it, I have a sort of cowboy fuckhead attitude to share. Next time you think of Frank Zappa as some sort of purveyor of enlightened if cynical views re the humans around him, I want you should ponder this quote, with which he deemed fit to festoon page 11 of Them Or Us (The Book) (1984):

You got lotsa guys like that now. Everybody thinks they're terrific . . . who'll be the 'Mozart' of your century? David Bowie?  

 

The people of your century no longer require the service of composers. A composer is as useful to a person in a jogging suit as a dinosaur turd in the middle of his runway.  

 

Your age is ugly and loveless, and when they eventually write you up in the leather book with the red silk thing hanging out the side, YOUR nasty little 'Mozart' will be a sort of egalitarian-affirmative action non-person of indeterminate sex, chosen by a committee who will seek advice from a group of accountants who will consult a tan lawyer who will negotiate with a clothing manufacturer who will sponsor a series which will feature a simulation of a lip-synced version of the troubled life of a white boy with special hair who achieves musical greatness through abnormally large sales figures.

That's some fucking assholery right there. So, ok, maybe Frank just never forgave Bowie for hiring Adrian Belew out from under him in 1978. (Belew memoired an accidental meeting in a restaurant in Köln in which FZ refused to say anything to Bowie but 'Fuck you, Captain Tom.') But I put it to you that it was Bowie's gender-fucking perceived faggotry that put Zappa's sterile canvas snoot in the air; that Zappa was, in fact, a homo- and transphobe (and should you care to drag out the ol' he-made-fun-of-errbody defense? Fuck you, Uncle Tom); and that his irredeemable prejudice blinded Zappa from seeing that David Bowie, in a mien at violent variance with Zappa's own, was doing his own Varèse present-day-composer thang, every bit as well as Frank.