Dogs

Cover of Cruising With Ruben & The Jets.

Cover of Boulez Conducts Zappa: The Perfect Stranger.

Dogs appear regularly in Zappa's work:

• On the cover of Absolutely Free an advertisement for a dog collar can be seen, with the slogan "Buy a Fydo. Fits swell!"
• On the covers of Cruising With Ruben & The Jets, Just Another Band From L.A. and Ahead Of Their Time Zappa and his band members are depicted with dog noses. Illustrator Cal Schenkel did this as a tribute to the dog characters in Carl Barks' comic strips about Donald Duck.
• A dog with sunglasses named Patricia can be seen on the covers of Francesco Zappa, Them Or Us and of Boulez Conducts Zappa: The Perfect Stranger.
• In The Story Of Ruben & The Jets it is revealed that Ruben has three dogs: Benny, Baby and Martha. The names Martha and Benny appeared earlier on the artwork of the cover of Absolutely Free, along with Ruben's name.
• Andy: Dogs can be heard barking during the intro.
• Babbette is about a dog, and includes Arf!
• Cheepnis: "'Cause she just might box yer dog/She just might box yer doggie/ An' leave you a dried-up dog biscuit" (...) the people try to catch Frunobulax by calling "Here Fido, here Fido..."
• Does This Kind Of Life Look Interesting To You?: "A dog, a car, an epidemic of body lice with your own record company"
• Dog Breath, even though the term is also American slang for a person with very bad breath
• Evelyn, A Modified Dog
• Honey Don't You Want A Man Like Me: "He had an Irish setter"
• Later That Night: "You threw my best sharkskin suit out on the lawn, right on top of some dog waste"
• My Head?: "WOOF!"
• Nanook Rubs It: while Nanook is rubbing a chorus sings "Here Fido, here Fido...."
• Stink-Foot: a dog, Fido, is called to fetch some slippers and goes into an argument about the essence of Conceptual Continuity
• Strictly Genteel (The Track): "Reach out your hand to the girl in the dog book."
• Take Me Out To The Ball Game: "That goes for your little dog too!"
• Zomby Woof: "woof" is a sound associated with dogs

Specific articles about dogs

Frank Zappa and Shillelagh. Photo by Anton Corbijn.

• Fido
• Phydeaux III
• Fruney, who inspired Frunobulax
• Dogess
• Shillelagh
• Patricia
• The Dog & Frank Zappa

Specific references to poodles

• The Poodle Lecture
• Dirty Love and Stink-Foot: "The poodle bites, the poodle chews it."
• Hunchentoot and Cheepnis: "The monster which the peasants in this area call Frunobulax and apparently a very large poodle."
• Food Gathering In Post-Industrial America: "as the denizens of New Perfect America dine on rats, poodles,..."

Frank Zappa about dogs as conceptual continuity

People might ask, "Why the dog image?"
Frank Zappa: "I don't even know how that got started. There are certain absurd things about a poodle as a species unto itself. What especially women have decided to do to poodles is probably something that if there were a big guy on the cloud who meted out punishment at the time of your demise, that there would be a lot of women that would be tortured forever in the Lake of Fire for things that they have decided to inflict on poodles. So, that's a pretty good metaphor there if you really think about ..."

For perverse creativity?
Frank Zappa: "No. Look, a poodle is born. It's got hair evenly distributed all over its small, piquant, canine-type body. Figure it out. They don't start looking weird until some woman decides that she wants to shape all that stuff to make it look like a walking shrubbery. Now, that tells you two things: that the dog's co-operative and that the woman's got some problems."

The "mother of invention" has some problems. She's inventing.
Frank Zappa: "Yeah, but did she invent something good? Do you think a partially denuded, small animal is good?"

It seems some people like it, so we have to allow them to have that choice or enjoyment.
Frank Zappa: "Yeah, but doesn't the poodle have some rights here? I mean, we're trying to save the whales. They're stuck up there. There are three whales with their noses sticking out of a hole. Now the Russians want to send an ice-breaker. It's three hundred miles away, the Russians are going to save the whales. What about the poodles? Who's doing anything for the poodles?"

Right, save the poodles?

Carolyn Dean: Who's plucking the poodles?
Frank Zappa: "What?"

'Frank Zappa: "Who's plucking the poodles? Who's plooking? Who's plucking? (all laughing)."

- Quoted from Interview by Bob Marshall, 22 October 1988.

Meta

• The mascot for this wiki is a poodle wearing sunglasses.

See also

• Arf!
• Collars