BEFORE: I feel like I'm in limbo, waiting to hear about this new job that I interviewed for - my life could change tomorrow, if I get a certain phone call, then again, it might not. What's that line about the only thing I know how to do is to keep on keepin' on? Mentally, that's where I am. In the meantime, I still have to keep going in to the animation studio three days a week, and the movie theater four nights a week - though next week there are no late shows scheduled, so I'm going to get a bit of a break no matter what happens. And I figured out that if I block out all my mornings and work only the late shifts, I might have to sweep but I rarely have to mop the floors, that's a morning thing. It's their loss for cluing me in how the system works, if you show me a system, then I'll try to figure it out and turn that knowledge to my advantage.
Jimi Hendrix carries over from "Woodstock: Three Days that Defined a Generation", to a film directed by Alex Winter - yes, the actor from "Bill & Ted Face the Music".
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words" (Movie #3,031)
THE PLOT: An in-depth look into the life and work of musician Frank Zappa.
AFTER: Well, I did NOT see Jimi Hendrix in this film - is he in there? IMDB says so - but just in case, I've got a back-up to keep my chain going, there's no need to re-organize. Footage of Ronald Reagan also appears, and he was in the Woodstock documentary complaining about hippies at music festivals or something...
Frank Zappa was not a hippie, not exactly anyway. And he claimed to not use drugs, other than caffeine, nicotine and things that doctors would prescribe, like penicillin for an STD after he caught something on the road while touring - I'm sure his wife was thrilled about that. I tend to believe him, because if you're stoned all the time it's more difficult to accomplish things, and Zappa accomplished a lot, so he had to stay focused to write so many songs and release like 60 albums during his lifetime. He was also the focal point of a rotating group of musicians, their boss and once the first line-up of the Mothers of Invention folded, it became a rotating group of people that he wanted to musically connect with, if he liked or admired someone he'd hire them again, and if he didn't like them, they were gone. You know, like a boss. And his personality was such that even if he didn't connect with them personally, or that musician thought he was an asshole, he was THEIR asshole, or an asshole willing to pay that musician, so in essence, all was forgiven.
I came in contact with (some of) Zappa's music through the Dr. Demento syndicated radio show, which played mostly novelty songs, and while Frank himself was something of a novelty, most of his music wasn't - sure, he wrote tunes like "Don't Eat the Yellow Snow", "Let's Make the Water Turn Black" and "Call Any Vegetable", but he also composed rock music, orchestral music, and jazz fusion (only, umm, who the hell wants to listen to jazz fusion?). But he got much more attention for being outrageous, like ripping off the album artwork from the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper" album for his own album, "We're Only in it for the Money". As such, he was practically begging for a lawsuit to happen, because that would only increase publicity, though reportedly he spoke on the phone with Paul McCartney to avoid a lawsuit, only to have McCartney claim that it was out of his hands, the Beatles' lawyers had minds of their own. This confused Zappa, why weren't the Beatles in charge of their own affairs, the way he was in charge of his own?
(The Beatles, by the way, reportedly were inspired to create the "Sgt. Pepper" album by Zappa's first album, "Freak Out" - along with the Beach Boys' "Pet Sounds", of course - because of Zappa's use of innovative instrumentation and collages of sounds. John Lennon later got together with Zappa to perform on stage with Yoko Ono, and a bit of that concert is seen in this documentary - whether you like that or not probably hinges on your opinion of Yoko's "music".)
After his first few albums, Zappa was the composer, musician, record producer for Barking Pumpkin, the CEO of his own little enterprise, chief cook and bottle-washer, as the saying goes. And his first "independent" album was "Shiek Yerbouti", which did pretty well, thanks to the song "Dancin' Fool", which he performed on Saturday Night Live. (While on SNL, it seems that Belushi et al. only wanted to do skits with him that poked fun at the "fact" that Zappa didn't take drugs, what a surprise that this is what cokehead Belushi wanted to make fun of. NOTE: the unexpected appearance of the SNL cast does mean that I COULD watch the "Belushi" doc next, and still end up where I want to be the next day - but I hate to change my plan again. Better to watch the scheduled doc on Netflix that could disappear at any moment.). But still, I have to wonder, why didn't Zappa realize that nicotine is one of the strongest, most addictive drugs on the market?
My point is, though I drifted away from it for a bit there, that in my mind, as a young teen, I had Frank Zappa lumped in with "Weird Al" Yankovic, Spike Jones, Stan Freberg and other comedy artists, but that just wasn't who he was - not entirely, anyway. Zappa had maybe grown up with similar influences as Weird Al, like a love for the Ernie Kovacs show, but instead of the comedy, Zappa was probably more interested in how subversive that show was. Sure, he was interested in ripping off the Beatles, but not as a direct musical parody, he was interested in stealing their ideas, their art style, their album cover, because that would cause the most trouble. When Frank Zappa was a child, his father worked at a chemical plant, so young Frankie Jr. would use materials that his father brought home to blow things up, and in some ways, he just never stopped doing that.
What he really wanted, to do, though, was to build, to compose - he was self-taught on guitar (once he figured out what the frets were for) and self-taught on music notation - a member of the Kronos Quartet points out late in the film that young Frank spent a lot of time by himself in the library, figuring out how to compose music, and the type of work ethic needed to do that is just staggering, obviously Frank Zappa didn't have a lot of friends, which was probably both a good and a bad thing. He may not have been well-liked, he may not have had a lot of fun in his life, but he was incredibly focused on music. Getting an orchestra together to properly play his elaborate compositions, though, was another matter entirely - he eventually had to fund one in Russia just to get CLOSE to hearing his musical vision come to life.
The bulk of his life, though, was spent hanging out with both kinds of musicians - the famous ones, sure, but also the ones who had to work for a living, who would show up, learn the music, then be willing to put on a funny wig or a weird costume and act crazy on stage, for the sake of a paycheck. And thus over decades Zappa built up a contingent of devoted lunatics who were willing to put in the practice time, only they were prevented from getting too close to the man personally, which would generate the risk of them getting fired. Even his most devoted keyboardist, Ruth Underwood, who thought the world of him, got away with complimenting Zappa and thanking him for the decades-long gig ONCE, and she suspects that's only because he was in the midst of dying from cancer.
Yeah, fuck cancer, the gift that keeps on taking, for removing Zappa from this planet, before I really got to understand him or his music. (Hey, at least he didn't commit suicide like a certain celebrity chef I could mention, who also has a documentary about him in theaters right now. I don't mean to criticize people with mental health problems, but if you're feeling suicidal, please, get some help, talk to a professional, and don't just take yourself out of the game, leaving behind a young daughter you only just barely got to know. Not cool.) Zappa ended up winning two competitive Grammys during his lifetime, and a posthumous Lifetime Achievement Grammy in 1998, three years after he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, despite (or due to) being atheist, conservative, counter-counter culture, anti-communist, anti-censorship, anti-religion, very capitalist, and basically a satirical, eccentric genius of some sort.
His influence ran far and wide, from signing Alice Cooper (a story that takes up space in several documentaries) to inspiring Kraftwerk, Devo, Primus, The Tubes, Phish, Black Sabbath, System of a Down, Brian Eno and even, yes, "Weird Al" Yankovic. More inspiring to me is his break from the system and the founding of his own independent record label, which was practically unheard of at the time. There's that famous quote from Brian Eno about the first Velvet Underground record only selling about 10,000 copies, but every person who bought it went out and started a band. Zappa was also a symbol of freedom, somehow, to the citizens of the Czech Republic and served as a cultural ambassador of sorts to that country when it gained independence. Go figure.
The other story is that Frank's daughter, Moon-Unit (or just Moon), only got to record the song "Valley Girl" after she slipped a note under his studio door, introducing herself to her father, as a way to get to spend more time with him. That sort of tells you everything you need to know about Frank Zappa the man, and the difficulty he must have had balancing his professional life with his personal one. And then that song they recorded together, became the biggest hit of his career - I'm sure that didn't bother him at all. (Yeah, as if...)
Great news, after a bit of research, I figured out where Jimi Hendrix appears in this documentary - he was one of the people who posed for the cover of the "We're Only in it for the Money" album, so there's probably footage of him showing up for the photoshoot. Mystery solved - as a result, this is probably the only documentary out there with footage of Hendrix, Vaclav Havel and Kathie Lee Gifford, only who can be sure about such a thing?
Also starring Bunk Gardner, Howard Kaylan, Mike Keneally, Scott Thunes, Ian Underwood, Ruth Underwood, Mark Volman, Ray White (all last seen in "Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words"), Alice Cooper (last seen in "The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years"), Pamela Des Barres, David Harrington, Steve Vai, Gail Zappa,
with archive footage of Frank Zappa (last seen in "Super Duper Alice Cooper"), Arthur Barrow, Adrian Belew, Jimmy Carl Black, Napoleon Brock, George Duke, Aynsley Dunbar, Roy Estrada, Bruce Fowler, Tom Fowler, Ralph Humphrey, Tommy Mars, Jean-Luc Ponty, Don Preston, Euclid James "Motorhead" Sherwood, Jeff Simmons, Chester Thompson, Arthur Dyer Tripp III, Ike Willis, Péter Wolf, Tipper Gore, Vaclav Havel (all last seen in "Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words"), Terry Bozzio, Ray Collins, Vinnie Colaiuta, Patrick O'Hearn,
Dan Aykroyd (last seen in "Everything Is Copy"), Kathie Lee Gifford (ditto), David Letterman (ditto), Charlie Rose (ditto), Jeff Beck, John Belushi, Bruce Bickford, David Bowie (last seen in "Bad Reputation"), Mick Jagger (ditto), Paul McCartney (ditto), Joni Mitchell (ditto), Yoko Ono (ditto), Timothy Carey, Eric Clapton (last seen in "John & Yoko: Above Us Only Sky"), Jane Curtin (last seen in "Ode to Joy"), Mike Douglas (last seen in "Hitsville: The Making of Motown"), George Harrison (ditto), John Lennon (ditto), Ringo Starr (ditto), Sandi Freeman, Al Gore (last seen in "Hillbilly Elegy"), Arsenio Hall (last seen in "Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond"), Brian Jones (last seen in "Muscle Shoals"), Bill Wyman (ditto), Larry King (last seen in "The Accidental President"), Ted Koppel (last seen in "Shock and Awe"), John Lofton, Charles Manson (last seen in "Let's Go to Prison"), Bill Murray (last seen in "The Bill Murray Stories"), Paul Shaffer (ditto), Laraine Newman, Regis Philbin, Ronald Reagan (also last seen in "Woodstock: Three Days that Defined a Generation"), Murray Roman, Cal Schenkel, Don Van Vliet (aka Captain Beefheart), Johnny "Guitar" Watson, Ahmet Zappa, Diva Zappa, Dweezil Zappa, Moon Zappa and the voice of Neil Armstrong (last seen in "Da 5 Bloods").
RATING: 5 out of 10 Edgard Varese compositions
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