(Credits: Alamy)
Wed 11 February 2026 22:00, UK
Frank Zappa remains one of the most bizarre musical minds to ever whistle a tune, but even he was thrown off course every now and then.
Zappa is a cornerstone in the worlds of psychedelic and progressive rock, both of which are genres that famously have few restrictions. Cooper always revelled in the free-flowing nature of these musical styles and would allow his mind to run wild with ideas as he perfected genres that didn’t have many creative restrictions.
His bizarre nature trickled into his live shows as well as his recorded music, to the extent that he and his band, Mothers of Invention, managed to develop a reputation as one of the wackiest live acts out there. Rumours began to circulate about what their shows consisted of; some of the stories were true, meanwhile others were complete works of fantasy. Zappa had to openly deny having gross-out contests on stage in a bid to clear up some of the strange stories circulating surrounding his gigs.
“There never was a gross-out contest. That was a rumour. Somebody’s imagination ran wild. Chemically bonded imagination,” said the prog icon. “The rumour was that I went so far as to eat shit onstage. There were people who were terribly disappointed that I never ate shit onstage. But no, there never was anything resembling a gross-out contest.”
So, a strange man indeed, and yet, there were some bands out there who had such a haphazard sound that even a mind like Zappa’s struggled to make sense of them. This is what happened when he worked with Alice Cooper and his band on their debut record, Pretties for You. The band had gone through many phases before settling on whatever you would classify as the sound of this first record. They allowed their style to change depending on who they were influenced by, as they were called The Earwigs, The Nass, and then eventually settled on this bizarre character of Alice Cooper.
“I was creating a fantasy,” said Cooper when discussing the original idea. “I looked all around me and saw all these Peter Pans with no Captain Hook. I saw the Black Queen in Barbarella and said, ‘That’s Alice, right there.‘ I immediately related and knew a piece of Alice had to look like that; the black gloves with the switchblades coming out of the end, the black make-up with the patch over her eye.”
He continued, “Then I would see something else in a comic book and go ‘Oh, that’s definitely Alice’. So I started stitching all these characters together, and pretty soon, there he was. All I had to do was put his skin on and feel comfortable in there.”
Through a mutual friend, they were eventually put in touch with Frank Zappa, a musician the entire band was a fan of because of his erratic nature and limitless approach to sound. Zappa liked whatever it was Cooper and Co were doing, and so agreed to help them put together their debut album; however, when he was presented with their overarching style, both in terms of sound, influence, and image, even an artist like Zappa struggled to make sense of it. Whether this is a compliment or an insult, I’ll let you be the judge.
“Well, first of all, we had Frank Zappa running the boards,” recalled Cooper. “And here we are with these really insane little songs. Songs like ‘BB On Mars’ and ‘10 Minutes Before The Worm’, pieces like that.”
Concluding, “He was going, ‘What’s with these songs? What are you talking about?’ And I’d go, ‘I don’t know’. It would be like a minute and a half song with 35 changes. And he’d say, ‘I don’t get it! I like you guys, but I don’t get it!’ And I would say: ‘Well, I don’t get it either, but these are our songs’.”