Lately I’ve been studying the collage art of Frank Zappa and Cal Schenkel from the Mothers of Invention albums. On reading up on this material, including a long interview with Schenkel, I realised that Zappa himself seems to have done a lot of the artwork for the first two Mothers albums, ‘Freak Out’ and ‘Absolutely Free’, with Cal coming in at the end of the latter and doing some of the adverts. What you see below is – as far as I can tell – is mostly the work of Zappa who was a pretty decent visual artist in his own right is seems.
* Also see part 2 of this post for more!
An ‘official New of the Mothers’ would occasionally get printed in the LA Free Press, below is the first one, a four page digest that includes a poster for a forthcoming gig.
Some variations on gig posters
Collage made to illustrate an interview in a music magazine
The original paste up for an advert / flyer
@mike – did you see Pt.2 of this post? Maybe some are in there? I’m not sure the origin of a lot of these pieces, they’re taken from all over the web. If not I’d be interested to see these ads
http://www.djfood.org/frank-zappa-advert-poster-collages-pt-2/
Do you have any of the pictures of the nuts and bolts ads that the Mothers/Zappa used to put in Hit Parader or Song Hits magazines back in 65 or 66? Maybe advertising Freak Out or Absolutely Free? I remember them. They were extremely weird to my 13 year old mind but I can’t find any pix of them.