SCREEN

Alex Winter-directed profile of this most singular artist and social provocateur. By David Fricke.

Completely Frank, A-to-Zappa.

Zappa

★★★★★ MAGNOLIA PICTURES. C/ST

“MY DESIRES are simple,” Frank Zappa declares in this long-awaited feature-length portrait of the American composer, bandleader, guitarist and social provocateur. “All I want to do is get a good performance, a good recording of everything I ever wrote, so I can hear it. And if anybody else wants to hear it, that’s great too.” There is a pause. “Sounds easy,” he adds with the hint of a smile between that signature moustache and soul patch, “but it’s really hard to do.”

Directed by Alex Winter and five years in the making (with the help of a Kickstarter campaign that set a record for a documentary), Zappa is a dazzling and gripping account of what its star achieved in that mission before his death in 1993, aged 52. The whirlwind of rare concert footage, previously unseen home movies and punctuative commentary – the best of it, inevitably, from Zappa’s many candid and lethally funny interviews – also reveals what that iron drive cost him, with no regrets, in success, bandmates and even family life. “In the five years I was with Frank, he shook my hand once and said, ‘Good job,’” recalls saxophonist Bunk Gardner, a member of the storied, ’60s version of The Mothers Of Invention.

Yet Zappa could write with startling, romantic grace, as percussionist Ruth Underwood proves when she performs the winding melody of Oh No from 1970’s

Weasels Ripped My Flesh on piano. “Even in the ugliest chord he ever wrote,” says Zappa’s ’80s guitarist Steve Vai, “there is a ray of hope.”

Zappa was a natural contrarian. Born in Baltimore to parents who were “opposed” to music, as he puts it drily, the teenager reacted by caring about nothing else after the family moved to southern California in 1952: falling for the French avant-garde composer Edgard Varèse; joining a racially mixed R&B band; opening his own Studio Z in Cucamonga, living on the premises without hot water on a diet of peanut butter and instant mashed potatoes. Alex Winter made Zappa with the approval of the Zappa Family Trust and open access to the artist’s legendary tape-andfilm vault, which means extraordinary you-are-there moments such as the Mothers at New York’s Garrick Theatre during their legendary 1967 residency and the actual photo session for the cross-dressing-Sgt. Pepper spoof cover of We’re Only In It For The Money.

Winter also had final cut, not the Trust.

We learn that Zappa’s devotion to his wife Gail

(they married in 1967) did not hinder his hurtful, first-hand research of the groupie phenomenon, and the 1982 novelty hit Valley

Girl with eldest daughter Moon Unit resulted from a note she slipped under her workaholic dad’s studio door, looking for some attention. Frank was “a slave to his inner ear,” Vai says, and that is evident from the film’s first minutes – Zappa barely paying attention to a film crew, notating a score as he talks about his childhood – to his last days, after the 1991 announcement of his prostate cancer. In a TV interview shortly before his death, Zappa is asked about the effect of the disease on his composing and recording. “On a good day, I can go from 9.30 to 6.30,” he replies; bearded, tired and working to the end.

“In the five years I was with Frank, he shook my hand once.” BUNK GARDNER

Looking for the grand wazoo: (main) Frank Zappa with engineer Kerry McNabb in a scene from Zappa; (top) Frank in later years; (above) on-stage with The Mothers Of Invention. WHAT WE’VE LEARNT ● As a child, Zappa suffered from severe asthma and, as he says, “almost checked out a few times.” His father moved the family to California “for the air.” Despite his condition, Frank was a lifelong smoker. ● When MGM Records baulked at the Sgt. Pepperparody cover for We’re Only In It For The Money, Zappa phoned Paul McCartney in Britain, asking him to assure the label that The Beatles would not sue. McCartney declined. ● In 1969, Zappa abruptly disbanded the original Mothers, explaining that after taking $400 out of his bank account to go on tour, he returned $10,000 in debt. It was “not a lifestyle I wish to continue.”