If Mark Twain had been as good on guitar as he was on everything else, then, Frank Zappa wouldn’t have seemed so alien to kids back in the day. Zappa emerged while TV was munching its way through its first course of young American minds.
Back then, Americans were worried sick over iron deficiency anemia, also known as tired blood! Guess what is good for tired blood? Snake oil, a.k.a. Geritol. Geritol and Mr. Potato Head are the Eve and Adam that leveled the U.S.A., which , before TV, had looked to all the world like an earthly Garden of Eden.
Geritol was advertised as “twice the iron in a pound of calf’s liver.” If that wasn’t enough to make you a dependable customer, they ginned it up with 12% alcohol!
CannaBiscuit Flour Power Hour is what 6 out of 7 Princeton professors recommend for people who present with Irony Depletion Disorder. And all you moms and dads can rest assured that it’s alcohol-free!!!
Plunk your magic twanger, Froggy!
Bonus content
Back in the day, I scored the remarkable coup of an exclusive post-concert interview with Frank Zappa. His unnecessarily early passing is a compound loss to the country; besides his rare musical genius, his honesty and willingness to engage a tone-deaf public are sorely missed today. So many “rock stars” now are only in it for the money.
One on the funniest songs of the 1960s was Flower Punk, by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. The original drop-outs and anti-war people were not the strangers to irony that Hippies are.