Dogs
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
- 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.
