In 1967, Zappa and his band relocated from L.A. to New York, escaping the artistically gentrifying Sunset Strip for the relative obscurity of Manhattan. There, businessmen in rolled-up shirtsleeves were still mass-producing pop hits at the Brill Building, and the nascent rock scene had a demonstrably artier bent. The Mothers installed themselves in the dingy Garrick Theater for an extended residency, honing both their increasingly complex music and their progressively confrontational antics. One notable performance from this period had Zappa inviting a group of U.S. Marines onstage to dismember a plastic doll dressed up as a Vietnamese baby. Another saw concertgoers sprayed with whipped cream through a hose fed through the hind quarters of a toy giraffe. As Zappa put it, in a quote immortalized on a poster enjoying pride of place in my teenage bedroom: “You can’t write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say sometimes, so you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.”
The extent to which you find such stunts meaningfully confrontational, crass, or merely juvenile likely boils down to personal taste. Not everyone was impressed. Lou Reed lambasted Zappa as “probably the single most untalented person I’ve heard in my life” and “a loser.” (Reed would subsequently honor Zappa at his 1995 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction.) What’s undeniable is that these performances and performers were unique. Zappa and his band distinguished themselves from the popular, and profitable, peace-and-love set. And that NYC residency earned the band plenty of faithful fellow travelers—among them Ruth Underwood, a young timpanist studying at Juilliard. “All of that,” she explains in Zappa, “just crashed and burned when I heard my first Frank Zappa concert.” She ditched her Juilliard baroque composition classes and joined his band, enjoying a lengthy tenure as a percussionist, contributing virtuoso playing to Zappa’s run of remarkable mid-’70s records. From that fateful encounter, Underwood saw Zappa as he saw himself: not as a rock musician or provocateur but a “living composer.”
If there’s a single idea of Zappa that Alex Winter’s Zappa propagates, it’s this one. The film develops an image of him as a self-taught composer of modernist music, in the style of Stravinsky or Edgard Varèse, but forced by the demands of the marketplace to ply his trade in the guise of a rock star. He was the sort of guy who talks, incessantly, about The Work. The difficulty of that work seemed inseparable from his personality. And nothing could distract him from it.
This shaped his rather unfashionable (for the time, anyway) approach to drugs, which so galled the hippies, both real and fictional. It’s not merely that Zappa didn’t use drugs. He abhorred them, and he prohibited his bandmates from indulging. Indeed, Zappa so detested the notoriously drug-permissible Grateful Dead, ostensible countercultural contemporaries, that he forbade his band members from fraternizing with the group. Such holier-than-thou moralism betrays Zappa’s image as defiant iconoclast. He was, in a word, conservative.