Gas masks
Gas masks often return in Zappa's work, as part of his Conceptual Continuity.
- Prelude To The Afternoon Of A Sexually Aroused Gas Mask
- In the film Baby Snakes (The Film) Roy Estrada wore a gas mask around his neck on stage and was also credited as such: Roy Estrada: certifiable insanity, gas mask. According to Zappa, he plays a "lonely boy of European extraction (...) falling in love with a sexually aroused gas mask.". His performance can be seen and heard in Baby Snakes (The Film) during Conehead/"All You Need To Know", King Kong/Roy's Halloween Gas Mask and The Demise Of The Imported Rubber Goods Mask. In Interview: Frank Zappa (Charlene Keel, Genesis, April 1979), Zappa said that the original title of Baby Snakes was Gas Masks, Martian Love Secrets.
- The sleeve of Joe's Garage features a collage including a group of men wearing gas masks.
- On Money Demos: Gas Mask Variations.
Quotes
In Zappa's youth, when his father Francis Zappa worked at the Edgewood Arsenal Chemical Warfare, there were always gas masks around the place.
"I opened mine up with a can opener to see what was inside," Zappa says. "I was probably the only one in the compound who did that. But it made it much easier to breath without the stuff inside. We were real poor. It was my only toy. The crazy thing is, if the gas tanks had leaked I would have suffocated."- Frank Zappa, That Ol' "Fish Thing", The Washington Post, 30 August 1984.
Your father worked with poison gas for a living. Did you understand the implications of that?
Frank Zappa: "Yeah. I just took it as a fact of life. We lived in a place where we were obliged to have gas masks hanging on the wall in case the tanks broke, because you could die. Thinking back on it, if those tanks had broken, those gas masks wouldn't have saved us."
How close were the tanks?
Frank Zappa: "There were tanks of mustard gas next to the Army housing we lived in. We were right down the street from this shit. We had a rack in the hall, with Daddy's mask, Momma's mask and Frank's mask hanging on it. I used to wear mine all the time. It was my space helmet. There was a can at the end of the hose that had the filtration unit in it, and I always wondered what was in it. I took a can opener and unscrewed it to find out how it worked. My father got very upset when I opened it up because I broke it and he would have to get me another one, which he never did. I was defenseless."
- Frank Zappa. Interview in Playboy, 2 May 1993.
