A Melting Pot of Mayhem

Weasels Ripped My Flesh

“Hey look, Bowie.”

These are some of our favorite Men’s Mag covers. They usually have a shirtless man sometimes accompanied by a woman in varying states of undress getting attacked by a wild animal in some desolate location. It’s really everything you want. You don’t need to read the story, you already know, dude’s fucked. There’s no way around it.

Scroll down to see more images of people getting ripped apart by piranhas, turtles and the like. But first I have to talk about Frank Zappa, because I can’t post one of those pictures without someone bringing him up.

Here’s the art for Frank Zappa’s (Actually it’s for his band Mother’s of Invention) album, Weasels Ripped My Flesh. Unlike most of Zappa’s albums the art was not done by his normal illustrator Cal Schenkel, it was Neon Park who did the artwork.

Zappa showed Park a couple of men’s magazines, including the September 1956 issue of Man’s Life (the one above) which had a cover story by Mike Kamens titled ‘Weasels Ripped My Flesh‘ Frank told Park his next album would have the same title and said to Park “What can you do that’s worse than this?” (Obviously, worse as in, horrifying. Not like, ‘hey can you make some shitty artwork?’)

Park drew inspiration from a magazine advertisement for a Schick electric razor (above) and the cover of ‘Weasels Ripped My Flesh’ was born.

Zappa loved it and went through a lot of trouble trying to convince Warner Brothers to use the cover art. When the executives finally relented, both the printer and his assistant were absolutely horrified by it. The assistant didn’t even want to touch the image. So Zappa knew they were onto something.

Neon Park also did some artwork for David Bowie and Little Feat.

Great Album I might add.

OK here’s the other animals attacking humans covers, some obviously inspired by weasels. Others I just find really funny.

When Animals Attack:

This one’s by our favorite artist, Mort Künstler
Who wore it better?
This lady should stop going on safaris.
Not a cover, but this Mort Künstler painting is awesome.

If you’re into these, I highly suggest this book by Robert Deis aka Subtropic Bob.

Click on the cover, it’ll take you to Amazon where you can buy that and all of Bob’s books. And here’s Subtropic Bob’s website.

One thought on “Weasels Ripped My Flesh”

Comments are closed.