Revisiting John Lennon and Frank Zappa’s Hilarious Exchange That Disproved Their Assumptions About Each Other

No one is as acutely aware of how fame can create wild, true rumors about someone quite like a fellow rock star. Yet, even these iconic musicians sometimes buy into the myths and rumors about their contemporaries. John Lennon and Frank Zappa certainly had plenty of preconceptions about the other, all of which they (mostly) disproved during their first fateful meeting in a hotel apartment in 1971.

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Lennon met Zappa by tagging along with Village Voice columnist and broadcaster Howard Smith, who previously told the ex-Beatle he was interviewing Zappa later that day. The “Imagine” singer told Smith how much he revered Zappa, saying, “He’s at least trying to do something different with the form,” per Barry Miles’ Zappa: A Biography.

“I’m very impressed by the kind of discipline he can bring to rock that nobody else can seem to bring to it,” Lennon told Smith. However, not even Zappa’s impressive rock ‘n’ roll discipline was enough to dispel some of the rumors Lennon believed about him.

John Lennon and Frank Zappa Proved Each Other Wrong Simultaneously

In Barry Miles’ biography of Frank Zappa, he described the Mothers of Invention bandleader as “absolutely deadpan” when he opened his hotel-apartment door and saw John Lennon standing in the hallway with Howard Smith. Speaking of the experience with Smith on his radio show later that day, Lennon said, “I don’t know why I should have believed it because I should know better, having had all that guff written about me.”

“But I expected a sort of grubby maniac with naked women all over the place, you know,” Lennon continued. “Sitting on the toilet. The first thing I said was, ‘Wow, you look so different. You look great!’ And he said, ‘You look clean, too.’ He was expecting a couple of nude freaks.”

Smith remembered Lennon was being “very deferential” to Zappa, downplaying his own worldwide fame and suggesting that Zappa was the real star, not him. The meeting, if not a little clunky, was a success. By the end of the visit, Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, had agreed to come on stage with Zappa at his Fillmore East show that weekend.

Conflicts over the recordings from that concert grew into a full-out feud between Lennon and Zappa. But for a brief few moments on the corner of 5th Avenue and 8th Street, the two musicians were reminded of just how powerful misconceptions about celebrities—including themselves—can really be.

Photo by Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns