BEFORE: Here in Phase 3 of the Summer Rock Music Concert series, we're really getting into the nuts and bolts of the record-making process. The way that Brian Wilson crafted an album full of music soundscapes to evoke certain moods, and the way that the Wrecking Crew could arrange music on the fly. The process of getting in the studio and creatively working out the kinks, a composer crafting a song, that's what I'm inadvertently learning more about this week, it seems. I bet this trend will continue with today's film.
Frank Zappa carries over from "The Wrecking Crew", via archive footage in both films. Last night he basically just weighed in on what it meant to have a large studio musician Tommy Tedesco appear on "The Gong Show" wearing a ballerina outfit, and performing a song about what it means to be a studio musician. But it was only a short clip, and it looks like today Mr. Zappa will have a lot more to say.
AFTER: The poster for this film shows four images of Frank Zappa, in different colors, arranged in sort of an Andy Warhol fashion, and that ends up saying something about him, that he was art-oriented, and also subversive in that same way that Warhol was. Warhol often pushed the boundaries of art, questioned what could constitute art (could a soup can REALLY be considered as a piece of art?) and Zappa did the same thing with music and lyrics. What does it MEAN if I say these words, do they just have shock value, are they obscene, or is there even such a thing? At one point in this film he states his belief that there is no such thing as a "dirty word", there are only words, and none of them have the power to send you to hell, so if you can't take them, that's your hang-up, man.
But for many years, I only saw one aspect of Zappa, and that's because of how I first learned about his music, through the Dr. Demento radio show in the early 1980's. This was a syndicated radio show that broadcast from Westwood, CA (which confused me when I was a kid because I was living in Westwood, MA. How could there be another town with the SAME NAME as mine, somewhere else out there in the world?) and they played only novelty songs on this show, from people like Weird Al Yankovic (before he was a mega-star), Cheech & Chong, Stan Freberg and comedians like George Carlin and Steve Martin. They sometimes included weird rock songs, like stuff from Devo and Kraftwerk, and they played quite a bit of Zappa, but only the funny or unusual stuff, like "Don't Eat the Yellow Snow", "Call Any Vegetable" and "What's the Ugliest Part of Your Body?"
So because he had long hair and his music seemed funny, I thought of him as a comedian, and my brain lumped him in with Cheech & Chong and other "stoner" culture icons. But that's not the whole picture of the man, not by a longshot. That would be like judging him solely on the hit single "Valley Girl" and ignoring the other 60 albums released during his lifetime, and the other 50 or so that came later. I wasn't thinking about Zappa the composer, or Zappa the band leader, or Zappa the businessman, or Zappa the political activist. Remember all that fuss that got made in the 1990's about warning labels on records? Zappa was one of the most outspoken critics against censorship, of course he had a vested interest in free expression, since he'd been censored by radio stations and the FCC for years. For the radio stations, the censorship usually came in the form of just not playing his records - I know I never would have heard them if not for that syndicated show.
Decades later, after college, marriage, divorce and other things, I got exposed to some of Zappa's music again from another source, my new (2nd) brother-in-law was a fan, and he played me some tracks from Zappa's rock opera "Joe's Garage", and also the very explicit track "Dinah-Moe Humm", which is all about a man's struggle trying to give a woman an orgasm. Again, remember, there are no dirty words, only dirty ways to feel about regular words, so if you find this subject matter obscene or inappropriate, you may need to take a long look at yourself. What could be a more noble act than trying to bring pleasure to someone you care about?
From what's shown in this film, a concert featuring Zappa and his Mothers of Invention seems like it was a truly unusual affair, you never knew which songs from his Library of Congress-sized catalog he was going to perform, along with a collection of covers of rock songs like "Whipping Post" or "Happy Together", and for that matter, whether his band was playing those songs seriously, or completely tongue-in-cheek. But that's the problem with someone who was so enigmatic that you didn't always know where he was coming from, especially when you're trying to assemble a documentary film based on interviews with him, and he was often evasive when answering questions.
Surprisingly, Zappa claimed during these interviews to not take a lot of drugs, other than what doctors might prescribe, but who knows for sure if this was true? On some level, it sounds like just the sort of thing that a drug addict would say. But if I take him at his word, he said he only smoked about 10 joints over the course of 9 years, and nothing harder than that. And he didn't allow his band members to take drugs on the road, because if they did, there was always the chance that one would get busted at the airport, or do something while under the influence that would get them in trouble, and then he'd be missing band members when the concert was about to start. So it seems he was a businessman first, and was keenly aware that drug use could interfere with this business, so that trumped everything else. If the band wanted to drink or take drugs at home when the tour was over, they were free to do that, because that didn't affect his bottom line. And even though he looked like a real hippie, it seems that he may have mostly stuck with good old caffeine and nicotine as his drugs.
I wish Zappa were still around, not for the sake of his music, but because I'd love to know what his take on our current political situation would be. He identified as a conservative, but as an artist he stood in favor of free expression, and there's a bit of a disconnect right there. He fought against the conservatives who were in favor of censorship and warning labels, but that didn't seem to make him a liberal in any sense - if anything, it made him seem more like an anarchist than a socialist. But then again, there are plenty of conservatives today who are against any government involvement in people's lives, except for when it comes to something they don't like, such as abortion.
Why do the people who claim we need "smaller government" also want the government to pass more regulations on things like abortion, but not gun control? Zappa hit the nail right on the head when he railed against a "political theocracy", where lawmakers vote according to their morals, yet still find a way to pretend that they believe in a separation between church and state. A senator who votes against abortion rights because his (or her) God told him too, that's a direct violation of the Constitution. Matters of state are not supposed to be influenced by a senator's priest or rabbi or imam or whatever.
But when Zappa blames the media for "getting in the way" between himself and his fans, or for radio stations for not choosing to play his records (which would have had to been full of bleeps if they aired, anyway...) his complaints sound a lot like Donald Trump complaining about "fake news" and preaching directly to the masses via Twitter. Zappa probably needed Twitter and Facebook to connect with more fans, only they didn't exist while he was alive, which is a shame. But still I wonder what Zappa would have thought about Trump, since Zappa had money he might have felt that he was good for business, but I'd also like to think that Zappa was smart enough to see right through Trump's B.S. and peg him as the charlatan that he is. But then I think another part of him might have championed Trump as a political savior, just because saying that would piss off the most people.
There's a clip in this film from very early in Zappa's career, when he appeared on Steve Allen's TV show to play a bicycle like a musical instrument. He identifies himself only as a composer (later he mentions a period in his life when he was just writing Baroque and Victorian music, and again, you have to wonder if he was being serious or not) and then proceeds to use the bicycle as both a percussion and string instrument, while asking the show's band to join in, if they feel the inclination to, only they can't play their instruments in the usual way. And that performance is part music, part art, part anarchy and part madness - and that just about sums up Zappa in one little clip.
Many years later, I remember reading something in the news about Zappa being very upset that his songs weren't given the same treatment as songs from other artists, like you never would hear his songs played via Muzak, that service that used to provide instrumental "lite" versions of pop songs in department stores, elevators and other places. So he did what any businessman might do, he bought a controlling interest in the Muzak service, in order to get his songs, and the songs of his friends and associates, played in other venues to create another method of securing income. Then one day I was in a grocery store and I heard an instrumental version of a song, and it took me a minute to identify it as Warren Zevon's "Lawyers, Guns and Money". All I could think about was the change that Zappa managed to bring to the corporate side of muzak, and music. If you told that son of a bitch he couldn't do something, he'd make it his mission to accomplish it somehow.
Also starring (all via archive footage) Arthur Barrow, Jimmy Carl Black, Napoleon Murphy Brock, George Duke, Aynsley Dunbar, Roy Estrada, Bruce Fowler, Tom Fowler, Bunk Gardner, Howard Kaylan, Ralph Humphrey, Mike Keneally, Martin Lickert, Ed Mann, Tommy Mars, Jean-Luc Ponty, Don Preston, Peter Rundel, Euclid James Sherwood, Jeff Simmons, Chester Thompson, Scott Thunes, Arthur Dyer Tripp III, Ian Underwood, Ruth Underwood, Mark Volman, Denny Walley, Ray White, Ike Willis, Steve Allen (last seen in "Elvis Presley: The Searcher"), Adrian Belew, Theodore Bikel, Tom Brokaw, Wally Bruner, Connie Chung, Katie Couric (last seen in "Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives"), Mike Douglas (last seen in "Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown"), Arlene Francis, Jamie Gangel, Tipper Gore, Vaclav Havel, June Lockhart, Keith Moon (last seen in "History of the Eagles"), Robert D. Novak, Gene Rayburn, Soupy Sales, Harry Smith, Ringo Starr (last seen in "20 Feet from Stardom"), Peter Wolf.
RATING: 5 out of 10 little creatures on display
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