Blood On The Canvas

Side Projects
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Blood On The Canvas
Released
See also: Eric Bogosian

Players

• Frank Zappa
• Eric Bogosian

Side 1

Blood On The Canvas:

1. Bobby, This Is Tony
2. Cue 1
3. WXTC
4. Massagio Galore (BOTC)
5. Cue 2
6. It's The Eighties
7. Cue 3
8. Get The Makeup
9. Cue 4
10. I Can Get Us In
11. Cue 5
12. I'm Going To Have To Put You On Medication
13. Cue 6
14. We're Gonna Kill Ya
15. Cue 7
16. Chewin' On The Wires
17. Reagan At Bitburg (BOTC)

Side 2

• Interview With Eric Bogosian And Frank Zappa 11/7/86 conducted by Greg Fitzgerald from WGBH, Boston.

Audio

Blood On The Canvas: a FZ/Eric Bogosian project 1986 (YouTube)

Comments

Blood On The Canvas was commissioned by the Los Angeles Museum Of Contemporary Art. It featured interviews and Synclavier music by FZ, and was supposed to be available on cassette from the museum's bookstore (1986/1987). No copies are known to have been released. The entire program had a warning about its language content and discretion was advised.

Blood On The Canvas was produced by FZ, while the Fitzgerald interview was produced by WGBH in association with the Museum Of Contemporary Art.

"I was fortunate to know Frank Zappa before he passed away and he was the kind of guy who would sort of do this artsy stuff, but he’d have this great sense of humor behind it, too."

"From Rock 'n' Roll to Buy and Hold", Patricia A. Dreyfus, Money magazine, September 1986 (v15, p66):

Iconoclastic rocker Frank Zappa became notorious in 1967 when he was photographed sitting on the john. Today, Zappa still revels in outraging the bourgeoisie. His latest effort, in collaboration with monologist Eric Bogosian, is a satire on show business entitled Blood On The Canvas. It can be described as a musical comedy about onstage castration and death. 'It's probably the most blasphemous thing anyone has ever heard', Zappa gloats with a devilish gleam in his black-brown eyes.

Film director Richard Linklater interviewing Eric Bogosian The Austin Chronicle, November 1995:

RL: In 1986, you worked with another hero of mine on a radio piece, 'Blood On The Canvas. How was it working with Frank Zappa?
EB: It was great working with him. It was strange, like I had never met my real parents or something, and then one day, I'm sitting with this person and going, "Oh, he's got eyes like me, he's got hair like me, I'm related to this guy". It was like that psychically, you know. I'd forgotten that before there was Richard Pryor, before there was Richard Foreman or Richard anybody, Frank Zappa had shaped my nascent teenage mind with a certain brand of cynicism and a certain sense of humor. Basically in the Sixties, it was MAD Magazine and Frank Zappa that told me the way I was going to think about the world.
RL: There was a certain Dadaist kind of notion, just music, performance, and poking fun at everything.
EB: I suddenly said, "Wow, I'm at the source, you know". At the time, he was very involved with the Dead Kennedys thing because they had gotten censored. So he wanted to make a tape that basically had to be censored. In fact, no one ever played it on the radio. It was censored in every radio station except for Boston. We had a deal with the Museum of Modern Art in LA that they could only make 10,000 copies. So these 10,000 copies were made and that was it. It was very extreme. It has these little bits of music in it, and these funny characters that talk about all these innuendo sexual experiences.

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

Bob Stone said it was never released because: "The version I heard involved a dispute over royalty participation, with Eric wanting more than Frank was willing to concede for his participation".

From Eric Bogosian:

You want the real deal, here it is. Frank and I made the tape in 1986 in his studio in the Hollywood hills. After the tape was finished, Frank wanted to control the copyright. Since his death, Frank's estate has continued to want total control of the copyright. I have been advised not to relinquish this. Which makes sense since I wrote and performed (excepting the music) the whole thing. Frank edited and produced my stuff. So there it stands. Neither side will give in. I think it's a drag. I've offered to share the copyright and they're not interested. I love the piece and I would love people to hear it, especially Zappa fans, since I have been one since the mid-Sixties.