(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Mon 16 March 2026 20:30, UK
By the end of the 1970s, Frank Zappa was as popular and busy as ever.
One of the few artists of the counterculture to stroll into the new wave era with an untarnished musical pedigree, the former Mothers of Invention captain breezed through punk’s threat, dropping whatever the hell record he wanted. No less prolific, 1979 alone counted five LPs across orchestral works, jazz fusion, and his hefty three-part rock opera Joe’s Garage.
Dropped in March was his biggest-selling album, Sheik Yerbouti. In typical fashion, his 26th record in the unwieldy Zappaverse sat loosely in the middle of a studio effort and live document, comprised of concert captures from the previous two years and slathered with overdubs to shape the material into new works.
Zappa was clearly in an extra piss-taking mood during this time. As well as playing on KC and the Sunshine Band’s disco hit ‘Shake Your Booty’ for the wry title, and adding a smutty twist to Peter Frampton’s ‘I’m in You’ with ‘I Have Been in You’, Zappa aimed his lampooning pot shot at one of the most lauded songwriters of his generation.
It’s hard to know where Bob Dylan fits in ‘Flakes’. Taken from their January 1978 show at London’s Hammersmith Odeon, Zappa lyrically jumps into a number about supposedly lazy union workers and unreliable labourers, a flash of his arch-libertarianism at play.
He was well-known for his contempt for any form of union protection, claiming to impede artistic autonomy and lamenting the disruption that industrial action could cause. Standing on the West Coast at the time as a term for an unreliable, blue-collar worker, ‘Flakes’ captures Zappa’s capacity for smug superiority potently amid his satirical veneer.
Still, it does contain a cracking Dylan impression, whatever his relevance. Depicting the titanic songsmith as just another California rich guy bemoaning the incompetent ‘flakes’, Zappa roped in then band guitarist Adrian Belew of King Crimson fame to ape the veteran folk singer’s signature nasal croon. Seeing as Zappa relied on Belew for essential live double-ups as he struggled to play and sing at the same time, Belew had little choice.
“When he played ‘Flakes’ for me, he also had to sing it,” Belew elaborated to Gadfly in 1999. “It was kind of unusual. It sounded so bad, it sounded like him doing a Bob Dylan impression to me. It sounded like a folk song, which it was anything but. So jokingly, I started singing along with it in a Bob Dylan imitation, and he said, ‘That’s it, that’s in the show, you’re gonna be doing that.’”
Sure enough, Belew let loose his comic Dylan impression on stage, bottled for eternity as Sheik Yerbouti’s second track. It was all in good fun. Zappa spoke candidly over the years about how Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ was so good it nearly forced him to “quit” music, and years later, Dylan himself would reveal to The Wall Street Journal in 2022 that heavy rotations of The Mothers of Invention’s Freak Out! saw him through the Pandemic lockdown, “Frank Zappa was light-years ahead of his time.”
The Far Out Bob Dylan Newsletter
All the latest stories about Bob Dylan from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.