Dressed in suit and tie, clean-shaven and neatly combed, a young Frank Zappa made his television debut in 1963 on the Steve Allen show. The footage, included in Eat that Question: Frank Zappa in his Own Words, shows him already seeking out the fringes of modernist classical music: Zappa played a bicycle that triggered electronic effects and cues for Allen’s orchestra that turned them into something like free jazz.
Director Thorsten Schütte assembled Eat that Question from Zappa’s TV appearances in the U.S. and abroad. Some journalists have commented on Zappa’s contempt for journalists, but watching the interviews unearthed by Schütte shows that the Mother Superior of Invention was contemptuous only of the vacuous and the stupid. When confronted by reporters who behaved like poorly programmed robots, Zappa’s dark eyes glowered with sardonic contempt. Engaged with intelligent interviewers, even those with whom he disagreed, Zappa turned into the waggish professor determined to entertain as well as inform. As a guest star on a Hollywood game show, Zappa beamed with gracious good humor.
Several themes emerge from the mass of interviews collected for Eat that Question, the most important being Zappa’s self-identification as a composer and conductor. He cites as influences Edgar Varèse, Igor Stravinsky and Anton Webern, not Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry or Jerry Lee Lewis. While his music was usually presented in a rock band format, often a big rock band, even a cursory listen reveals other influences beating in the heart of his music. During the 1960s and ’70s, lacking any context for Zappa’s compositions, most fans simply embraced them for their weirdness. Detractors were usually left scratching their beards.
Zappa was convinced that, as a whole, American society despised musicians unless they did work they deemed as useful, such as penning jingles for Coke commercials. “They don’t make it easy,” he told an interviewer asking about earning a living in music. “In the United States especially, musicians are regarded as useless adjuncts to society.” According to Zappa, society is duped, trapped in a sticky web of advertising and hype; the spiders of corporate interests devour flies in the form of people who don’t trouble themselves to think clearly.
In the ’60s Zappa’s sardonic lyrics and denunciatory statements linked him in the public mind with hippies and student radicals. But he was an uncomfortable hippie bedfellow with his contempt for naïve idealism and opposition to drugs. As for student radicals, Zappa recounted on German television his confrontation with a Communist youth brigade in West Berlin that tried to enlist him in their scheme to burn down the Allied high command. After telling them no, they attempted to seize the concert hall where he performed that night, waving red flags and chanting “Ho Chi Minh.” Zappa turned up the volume to wall-shattering decibels and sent them fleeing, holding their ears in pain.
Zappa’s disdain for political ideologues, religious fanatics and professional busybodies was a hallmark of his lyrics and interviews. And while his music was a vehicle for his sharply pointed perspective, the music came first. Much of it, he explained, was structured so that improvisation could occur. In this he nodded toward jazz. “I don’t like to get on stage and slop around,” he said. He was a conductor with an electric guitar in place of a baton. “I have survived,” he told an interviewer with evident pleasure. “I have the best job in the world.”
Eat that Question: Frank Zappa in his Own Words
Directed by Thorsten Schütte
Rated R
