Zapped

 By coincidence, while we've been watching/rewatching the Bill & Ted trilogy, we find that Alex Winters' documentary Zappa (2020) is available. We love Frank so we queued it up.

It starts with Zappa approaching death from prostate cancer at 52, then goes back over his life. His introduction to Varese as a beautiful composer derided as unlistenable. That sort of became Zappa's ambition. We see him in bounteous archive footage at many points in his life, and hear at least parts of many of his various styles and stylings. We also see a lot of the actual archives - a roomful of shelves, stacked with tapes, film and video. We meet his wife Gail and hear her talk about the groupies in his life (she doesn't seem happy, but understanding). We hear that his Laurel Canyon home was a social center for everyone from Joni Mitchell, through Eric Clapton and the Beatles. We get some heartfelt words from his brilliant percussionist Ruth Underwood ("On Ruth - On Ruth... That's Ruth!").

But with all this outstanding material, I don't think I ever got a real feeling for Frank. Maybe that's partly the idea - he was always hiding himself. Was it because he didn't want you to know him, or because he wanted you to concentrate on the music? Would this have been a better doc if there were more music, less Frank? More of the band - Are any of the Mothers left around? Were the Mothers ever a thing? Since he couldn't really pay a band fulltime, he would only hire musicians when he needed them, and cut them loose when he didn't. You know they didn't love that, but Ruth talks about how she would give up good steady classical music gigs to play with Frank - because of what the music means.

In the end that message was: Zappa was a composer. He had music in his head and on paper that he wanted to hear performed. It was difficult to get it to sound the way he wanted, and it was expensive and didn't really pay. Everything else, the jokes, the politics, the asshole personality, that is secondary. I suppose this applies to the documentary as well.