Trivia / Bongo Fury

• Corpsing: Zappa breaks into laughter during the intro of "Muffin Man".
• Real Life Writes the Plot:
  • "Debra Kadabra" refers to Frank and Beefheart's teenage years when they would watch B-horror movies like "The Braniac" on Channel 13 where horror TV show host Bob Guy presented "Jeepers Creepers Theater".^note  Zappa wrote two singles for Guy in 1963, named "Dear Jeepers" and "Letter From Jeepers", where Guy read the lines as his character Jeepers. Jeepers was also mentioned as an influence in the liner notes of Freak Out. The line "Cover my entire body with Avon Cologna/ And drive me to some relative's house in East L.A. Just 'til my skin clears up." refers to a real incident. As Zappa told it:
    "Don's mother, who sold Avon products door to door had all this stuff from Avon stashed at the house, which everybody used. Y'know, it was free beauty aids. Don, being neurotic, and a bit of a narcissist, was quite prone to dumping any kind of beauty aid that he could find onto his body. He made the unfortunate mistake of taking some Avon Cologne and putting it in his hair, one day, which made it start falling out. He also put some sort of Avon cream on his face which made him break out in this giant rash. His face looked like an alligator. He was losing a great deal of status at the high school, and he moved out of our little desert community, Lancaster, where we went to school, and moved down to east L.A. to live with his aunt for a while (till) he got his chops back together."^note . Quoted from an interview with Zappa in "Society Pages" No. 7, September 1991, quoted on page 221 of Mike Barnes, "Captain Beefheart", Quartet Books, Ltd., 2000.
  • During an interview with Dutch journalist Co De Kloet, available on "The Supplement Tape" (1990) Zappa explained the origin of "Carolina Hard-Core Ecstasy".
    '"That was written actually for the girl who played the gong ^note Lee Clement in (...) "Eat That Question" ^note a song from The Grand Wazoo. She used to work at the recording studio and she was from South Carolina. That was when I was in the wheelchair and I was working there on the The Grand Wazoo and Waka/Jawaka albums. And I needed to have a gong overdubbed. And the way we were working, I wasn't in a regular studio, it was in a mix room and in order to do an overdub, since we didn't have a studio facility was there we had to run a microphone into the toilet which had joined the mix room. So we had this girl in this little tiled toilet off to the side of this thing playing this gong. I think she never had so much fun in her life while just thrashing this gong near the Fade Out of "Eat That Question". The song was based on stories she had told me."
  • "Poofter's Wroth Wyoming Plans Ahead" was written with the then current 200th birthday of the United States in 1976 in mind.
  • "Cucamonga" is a nostalgic song about Zappa's early recording studio in 1963, located in Cucamonga, California.

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