Album Cover By Neon Park (Weasels Ripped My Flesh)

Neon Park

Neon Park was an American designer and illustrator. His birth name was Martin Muller. His work was released in lots of major magazines like Playboy, National Lampoon, Glass Eye and Dreamworks.

Park created illustrations for album covers of David Bowie, Dr. John, Beach Boys, Little Feat and Zappa's Weasels Ripped My Flesh.

Neon was working as a poster designer with the Family Dog, a San Francisco design group, when he got a phone call from Frank requesting him to come down to Los Angeles. Zappa had seen the paintings Park had done for a group called Dancing Food.

FZ has chosen him to make a subversive image based on a cover story from the September 1956 issue of Man'sLife. The cover story was Weasels Ripped My Flesh which was the adventure of a man, naked to the waist, who was in water. The water was swarming with weasels, and they were all type of climbing on him and nipping him. After showing Neon a version of the magazine, Zappa inquired, "This is it. What can you do that's worse than this?"

The Man's Life cover had been provided to Zappa by a young acolyte, Dan O'Brien, who had acquired it from his brother, who had discovered it during his day job at a pornographic publishing house.

Park came up with his own weird image for the album cover. Influenced by a Schick Razor ad he saw in the October 3, 1953 issue of the Saturday Evening Post, he made a cartoony painting of a nerd in a suit and tie who is shaving himself with what seems to be an, er, electric weasel razor.