ZAPPA (2020): A Visionary Mother

If you are a fan of modern music – by which I mean any form of Twentieth Century music, from jazz to rock, from doo-wop to blues, from Berg and Webern to Edgar Varese, from fluffy moon - June love songs to painful laments, from kazoos to shredding guitar riffs, from satire to earnestness – you owe it to yourself to check out the upcoming documentary about the iconoclastic composer-musician Frank Zappa (1940 – 1993). Simply entitled ZAPPA, it opens the day after Thanksgiving in theaters (assuming they are open) and on demand. 

Zappa was a rather unconventional guy to make a name for himself in popular music. He fostered an image of weirdness by his appearance  – with his long face framed by bushy black hair (especially long for the mid-1960s), punctuated by an aquiline nose, full black mustache and matching wide soul patch – as well as his public attitude of satiric otherness: railing against materialism and consumerism, public education, corporate control of music and media, and all forms of groupthink. 

When Zappa burst on the scene with his group The Mothers of Invention [MOI] in 1966 with the album Freak Out, the assumption was that he was a crazy hippie, albeit a very sardonic and musically inventive one, leading a band of wild looking misfits. He and they seemed to embody and proudly wear the epithet “freaks”.  Indeed, the opening song on the album was entitled “Hungry Freaks Daddy”, a song that featured not only rock guitars but kazoos as well, with lyrics like these:

Mister America

Walk on by

Your schools that do not teach

Mister America

Walk on by

The minds that won’t be reached

Mister America

Try to hide

The emptiness that’s you inside

The accusation was sincere, but the image Zappa projected was, in many ways, misleading. In fact, the man was a sober, ambitious, serious-minded perfectionist. He rehearsed his musicians incessantly. He never used drugs, and in fact his early songs frequently poked fun at brainless pot-smoking hippies.  Check out the musically adventurous, lyrically mocking “Who Needs the Peace Corps” from MOI’s third album We’re Only In It for the Money: [Youtube] [Spotify].

Coming to music rather late in his childhood, in his early teens, Zappa taught himself not only how to play, but to read and write music. His first written composition was not a rock song, but an orchestral piece. One of his first musical heroes was the avant-garde composer Edgar Varese. He also dug into rhythm and blues music and was influenced by R&B guitar greats like Johnny Guitar Watson, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown and Elmore James. He was also a somewhat amused fan of the doo wop music that crowded the airwaves in the late 1950s. Zappa became a virtuoso guitarist himself over time. Rolling Stone magazine ranked him as one of the top 25 guitarists of all time. He received this acknowledgment upon his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995:  

"Frank Zappa was rock and roll’s sharpest musical mind and most astute social critic. He was the most prolific composer of his age, and he bridged genres - rock, jazz, classical, avant-garde and even novelty music – with masterful ease.” The previous year, the jazz magazine DownBeat’s critics poll placed him in its hall of fame. Unfamiliar with Zappa’s guitar playing prowess? You might want to check out the number “Rat Tomago’, from his best-selling album Sheik Yerbouti (1979) [Spotify] [Youtube].

I actually had the opportunity to talk with Frank Zappa back in the day. The MOI played a gig on my college campus in February 1968. Afterwards, the group was rumored to be hanging out on fraternity row; so down I went to check it out. It was a typical frat party environment – lots of beer, loud music, throngs of people talking excitedly - and Mr. Zappa sitting by himself on a sofa drinking a soft drink. And looking very bored. So, I went over and expressed my admiration. While I can’t remember the specifics of that long-ago conversation, I was impressed with how gracious, plain-spoken and seemingly normal he was. 

ZAPPA opens near the end of the story, in 1991, with an already ill Frank Zappa being invited to perform in Prague shortly after the “Velvet Revolution” freed Czechoslovakia from Soviet rule. Zappa was something of a hero among the young there for his outspoken opposition to censorship and support for free speech; and he was clearly touched by the honor. From there, the film goes back to the beginning and follows his development and career more or less chronologically. The first section - about his youth, his influences and the beginnings of his life in music - is narrated largely by Zappa himself. Director Alex Winter used bits from various historic interviews and recorded recollections - allowing the man to tell his own story. This material is accompanied by photos and film from his vast archive along with public domain stuff like newspaper headlines, school yearbooks, etc.  As the project moves further along into Zappa’s recordings, performances and public life, his voice is abetted by commentary by a number of others – primarily people who knew Frank Zappa well, from his wife Gail, to musicians who worked with him, like reed player Bunk Gardner (an original member of the MOI), guitar player Steve Vai, bassist Scott Thunes, Kronos Quartet founder and violinist David Harrington and others.

In 1967, Ruth Underwood was a student at Julliard, the music conservatory in New York. She first saw Zappa and MOI when they had a sort-of residency at the Garrick Theater in Greenwich Village. She returned night after night, entranced with the originality of Zappa’s music. “It was a product of everything that was in him, but you couldn't really categorize it. You couldn't say, ‘Oh yeah that's rock and roll, because it wasn't. It's jazz - no, it really wasn't. It's pop-music? No, not at all. Well what the hell is it? It's Zappa!’”  A percussionist, she ended up joining the band. 

One of Zappa’s best-known collaborations was with his teenage daughter, Moon, on the song Valley Girl in 1982. It hilariously satirized the inane “valley speak” of teenage girls in the San Fernando Valley and became a cultural sensation with phrases like “gag me with a spoon” and “grody to the max” echoing on the airways and everywhere else. The story behind this record is funny, too. As related in the film, Moon was not seeing a whole lot of her father - he was always working, either on tour or at his home studio.  So, she wrote him a letter as follows:

            Hey Daddy, 

            Hi! I'm 13 years old. My name is Moon. Up until now, I have been trying to stay out of your way while you record. However, I have come to the conclusion that I would love to sing on your album,  if you would like to put up with me. I have a rather nice voice. For further information contact my agent - Gail Zappa - at 650-4947. I'm available day or night generally speaking. I would love to do my “Encino Accent” or “Surfer Dood Talk” for you. Later Days Dood!! 

                                                

                                                                Love, 

                                                                Moon

                                                                XXX 

ZAPPA is billed as “The First All-Access Documentary on the Life and Times of Frank Zappa”. Gail Zappa, Frank’s wife for 26 years until his death in 1993, granted Winter and producer Glen Zipper exclusive access to Frank Zappa’s vault.  A vault?!!  Yep – Zappa kept everything relating to his music and career in a humongous library/storage room in the basement of his Laurel Canyon home: a trove of thousands of hours of unreleased music, manuscripts, interviews, movies and videos, recordings, master tapes, rehearsals live concerts, and more. So much good stuff, in fact, that in addition to the sixty-plus albums made during Zappa’s lifetime, there have more than forty posthumous releases of “new” material. 

Anyway, as a result of Winter’s exclusive access to all this stuff, ZAPPA contains much never-before-seen material. The result is fascinating, frequently surprising, and rather touching at the end (Zappa dies). Alex Winter is a damned good documentarian, and it shows. His previous docs include Deep Web (2015) about the online black market site, Silk Road, and the trial of its mastermind Ross Ubricht; and The Panama Papers (2018) about what some have called the biggest global corruption scandal in history (executive produced by Laura Poitras).  He’s also rather well known as the actor who portrayed Bill Preston in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) and its two sequels, alongside Keanu Reeves. 

Zappa was so prolific, he did not release and in some cases could not even record a lot of the material that he wrote. This was especially true, to his chagrin, with regard to his orchestral music.  A few of his chamber works were recorded by the Kronos Quartet. He recorded a couple of albums with the London Symphony Orchestra as well. That so much of his work was never performed bothered him, because HE really wanted to hear it. But only if it was done right. “My desires are simple”, he said. “All I want to do is get a good performance and a good recording of everything that I ever wrote. So I can hear it. And if anyone else likes it that’s great too.  … Sounds easy, but it’s actually really hard to do.”

At the end, the film returns to Zappa in Prague at what was to be his last performance playing guitar. He received a ten-minute ovation from the large appreciative crowd. 

Here’s what Alex Winter has said about ZAPPA: “We set out to … tell a story that is not a music doc or a conventional biopic, but the dramatic saga of a great American artist and thinker; a film that would convey the scope of Zappa’s prodigious and varied creative output and the breadth of his extraordinary personal and political life. First and foremost, I wanted to make a very human, universal cinematic experience about an extraordinary individual. … Frank Zappa was not only a creative genius, but also a great and eloquent thinker who articulated the madness of his times with clarity and wit. A legitimate maverick who lived and worked amongst other extraordinary people in historic times. Ultimately ZAPPA is not a retro trip into the past, but a thoroughly modern exploration of a man whose worldview, art and politics were far ahead of their time and profoundly relevant in our changing times.”

I love it when an artist sets ambitious goals; especially if they come through as Winter does with this excellent documentary. 

2 hours 9 minutes

Grade: A-

ZAPPA opens November 27 in theaters and on demand. To find theaters, you can check here.