I’m a conservative,” Frank Zappa told Washington Times columnist John Lofton when they debated each other on the CNN program Crossfire in 1986. “You might not like that, but I am.” Lofton didn’t like it, and some of Zappa’s fans may not have either. But Zappa would surely have told them—as he told Lofton on that same broadcast—to kiss his ass. Eat That Question—Frank Zappa in His Own Words includes some performance clips, but German filmmaker Thorsten Schütte concentrates on a cornucopia of Zappa interview footage he’s collected over the years, and his documentary paints a vivid and often surprising portrait of the iconoclastic rocker and classical composer. Despite Zappa’s reputation as a wigged-out wild man, he was primarily a small businessman trying to support a wife and four children. In the movie, this aspect of his life begins to resonate when he clashes publicly with the Parents Music Resource Center, a self-appointed committee of Washington wives who decided to clean up the pop music industry during the Reagan era.
Schütte has really covered the waterfront with these clips, and one of the more fascinating is Zappa’s sit-down with a trooper (and professed Zappa fan) from the Pennsylvania state police in 1981. Zappa favored drug legalization, but he also insisted that his band members leave all drugs behind when they went on tour. In the interview he defends the policy as a business necessity: “Aside from the chemical damage, there’s the legal risk that somebody’s gonna take their freedom away, and I’m gonna be sitting there going, ‘Where’s the drummer?’ ” When the cop asks Zappa if he resents his fans perpetuating the myth of his own drug excess, Zappa blames not the fans but the press. “It’s another way that the media keeps me from getting my point of view across. The more abstract and weird they make me look, the less access that I have to a normal channel of communication with the people who might benefit from what I have to say.”
Directed by Thorsten Schütte
