Butler's Cinema Scene

“ZAPPA”  My rating: B

129 minutes | No MPAA rating

Alex Winter’s “Zappa” is the first film about the iconoclastic musician to have access to its late subject’s vault of never-released tapes, performance videos, home movies and personal correspondence.

Fans of Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention (present company included) will have plenty to drool over here.

But “Zappa” left me only partially satisfied.  The film chronicles Zappa’s life from suburban teen to his death of prostate cancer in 1993 at age 52.  There are lots of juicy details I didn’t know about.

At the same time, “Zappa” is very much about the man, not his music. Sure, there are snippets of Zappa in performance, snatches of his songs on the soundtrack, but the overriding emphasis here is on the man’s personal story.

And — perhaps it’s because director Winter (yes, the guy who stars opposite Keanu Reeves in the “Bill & Ted” franchise) worked so closely with Zappa’s late widow and executor Gail Zappa in mining the treasure trove —  the film often borders on hagiography.

Would Frank have wanted that?

Whatever. “Zappa” makes the case that Francis Vincent Zappa was one of the 20th century’s most remarkable and accomplished musicians, a guy whose career spanned doo-wop, r&b, rock, jazz and classical idioms, all the while dishing vicious satire against the phoniness he saw all around him: politicians, Flower Power, censorship, consumerism, drug abuse.

Zappa’s father was a chemist who worked in a defense plant producing nerve gas; everyone in the neighborhood was required to have gas masks close at hand in case of a leak. Small wonder that gas masks crept into Zappa’s work as an adult.

The teenage Frank dabbled in homemade explosives. His life turned around when he was turned on to a recording by the atonal composer Edgard Varese. His first band took heat because it was racially integrated.

Frank’s first artistic love was film editing; the doc chronicles a bizarre passage in which young Frank was entrapped into making a “porn” movie (it was a total goof; there was nothing overtly sexual in it), resulting in a criminal conviction.

Zappa was a reluctant rock star who formed the Mothers simply so he could hear his compositions played by accomplished musicians.

“All I want to do is get a good performance and a good recording of everything that I ever wrote so I could hear it,” Zappa says in an old interview, “and if anybody else wants to hear it, that’s great too.”

He was a canny marketer who prided himself on leading an ugly band playing ugly music (his players resented having to look so seedy); his semi-sneering dismissal of his fans (early on he would open concerts with 10 minutes of silence until the crowd threatened to riot) only made them love him all the more.

Indeed, for mainstream  listeners Zappa was known more for his provocative stances than for his music. That was deliberate, according to Alice Cooper, whose first record deal was with Zappa: “I really think Frank was afraid to have a hit record. Because I think Frank could have written hit records all day.”

Zappa hated the music business, but excelled at it.

On the personal side he was a mass of contradictions.  He claimed to have no friends; indeed his players describe him as all-business and laser-focused on getting the sounds he dreamt of.  He spoke openly of his dalliances with groupies on the road; wife Gail tells Winter that if you’re married to a composer/musician you learn not to ask for too many details.

Late in life he became practically a lone voice in the music business for his opposition to content labels on records; it was simply censorship by another name, in  his book.

And weirdly enough Zappa became a cultural god in Czechoslovakia,” where his antiestablishment attitude and often deliberately grating music was embraced by revolutionaries opposed to the Communist Regime.  When teens played rock records, they were told by the authorities to “turn off that Frank Zappa music.”

After the fall of Communism Frank was the first American musician invited to play in the new Czech Republic; in 1991 president Vaclav Havel named him as Czechoslovakia’s Special Ambassador to the West on Trade, Culture, and Tourism.  (The Czechs later took back the appointment under pressure from the U.S. State Department.)

Latter passages show Zappa’s work with classical ensembles around the world, particularly the Kronos Quartet. Before cancer claimed him he recognized his dream of being recognized (outside the U.S. anyway) as a genuine classical composer.

Which is fine, if you like that sort of thing. Give me “Trouble Every Day,” “Oh No/The Orange County Lumber Truck” and the “Hot Rats” album.

| Robert W. Butler