Frank Zappa – Memphis Flyer

Frank Zappa hated being interviewed. Early in Eat That Question, he calls it the most unnatural thing ever. But the premise of director Thorsten Schotte’s new documentary is that Zappa is best understood when he has no filter, which is just the first of the film’s many contradictions.

Frank Zappa

Eat That Question is comprised entirely of archival footage, completely lacking any contemporary interviews or commentary to put Zappa in context for the twenty first century. Since Zappa succumbed to prostate cancer in 1993, there is a whole generation of music fans who are likely unfamiliar with his work, and Schotte makes no overt effort to reach out to them. For long stretches of the film, his music is treated as an afterthought; it’s Zappa’s ideas that are important. That’s kind of a shame, because Zappa’s ideas about personal and intellectual freedom flowed from his musical mind. The Zappa Schotte exposes makes no bones about his desire to be taken seriously as a musician and composer. And yet, when we first see him as a eager eyed young man appearing on the Steve Allen Show, he’s playing a bicycle and instructing the accompanying musicians to “try to refrain from musical tones”.

Schotte’s quest for the unfiltered Zappa is ultimately doomed for a number of reasons. First, although Zappa is praised for his honesty and no-bullshit attitude, it’s clear from watching him make interviewers squirm for 90 minutes that he thought carefully about everything he said. His ever utterance, from declaring he was “always a freak, never a hippie” to explaining how a Synclavier sampling synthesizer worked to the vapid host of the CBS morning show was an attempt to provoke a reaction in the listener. No one ever got past his filter. Then there’s the filter Schotte’s skillful editing imposes on the man’s memory. The director takes pains to include outtakes and unscripted moments from the no doubt enormous archive Zappa’s widow and children, who are executive producers, provided. But this is still a hagiography, the director is a fan, downplaying the more troubling parts of Zappa’s life, such as his attitudes towards women and homosexuals.

Consider, though, that Zappa was born in 1940, and for a man of his time, his thinking was beyond radical. Zappa described himself as a conservative, but he railed against the mixing of politics and religion. In Germany in the late 1960s, he made fools of Communists protesting a Mothers Of Invention concert, and fifteen years later, he did the same to conservative legislators who tried to make him and Prince the scapegoats for a wave of music censorship. He called the proposal by Tipper Gore’s Parents Music Resource Council to put warning labels on records they deemed obscene “an ill-conceived piece of nonsense”. Like the Mozart of Amadeus, he was obsessed with outré’, scatalogical humor, to the extent that even his instrumental albums were preemptively slapped with “Explicit Lyrics” stickers. His overriding concern was freedom of the mind, and he took no prisoners when he felt that freedom was threatened.

When Schotte does put the music in the foreground, he reaches deep into the catalog. I have a passing knowledge of Zappa’s music from hanging out with freaks for years, but I only recognized some passages from 200 Motels and the song “Dynamo Hum”, which is featured in all its obscene glory in a killer performance shot by a gaggle of Bolex-weilding cinematographers swarming the stage. Like its subject, Eat That Question is a stubborn contrarian film, uncompromising to a fault. It’s sure to speak to both hardcore Zappa fans and the intellectually adventurous music nerds of today, but it’s likely to leave any unsuspecting normals cold and bewildered. And that’s exactly how Zappa would have liked it.

It’s been a busy year for writer and publisher Tom Graves, and August has been an especially busy month. Best of Enemies, a documentary on the famed series of television debates between William Buckley and Gore Vidal by filmmakers Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville, premiered in Memphis on August 14th, and a book signing for the print edition of Graves’ Buckley vs. Vidal: The Historic 1968 ABC News Debates — published by the Devault-Graves Agency (Graves’ Memphis-based publishing house, co-founded by Darrin Devault) — was a few days earlier.

Graves was consulting producer on Best of Enemies, but the other news this month is the arrival in print form (an e-book edition with “bonus” material is also available) of another title, again published by Devault-Graves. This one, though, is all Graves. It’s a “retrospective” of his journalism over the past several decades, a collection that, as Graves says, “reflects me and my muse and my years of toiling away at this thing called writing.”

The book opens with a muse by the name of Louise Brooks and what, by anyone’s measure, was a real coup for a young journalist in Memphis in the early 1980s: Graves’ meeting with Brooks in Rochester, New York, where the reclusive silent-screen actress was living. Graves had planned on writing a full-scale biography of Brooks, and, as Louise Brooks, Frank Zappa, & Other Charmers & Dreamers explains, that biography never happened. But the beginnings (and background) to that project are here, as is an interview with Frank Zappa, which ran in 1987 in Rock & Roll Disc, the magazine Graves edited and published. Among the writers who appeared in that magazine and who also appears in a Q&A conducted by Graves in the e-book edition of Louise Brooks, Frank Zappa, & Other Charmers & Dreamers: music critic Dave Marsh.

There are other musicians featured to reflect Graves’ wide taste: the Blackwood Brothers, Mark Lindsay of Paul Revere & the Raiders, and what Graves calls “a guilty pleasure”: Tennessee Ernie Ford.

For another muse, though, go to actress Linda Haynes. Graves did, thanks to the contact information he received from another Haynes fan: Quentin Tarantino. But when it comes to literature (third in the trio of Graves’ ongoing interests), see the Q&A Graves conducted with Southern grit-lit master, Harry Crews.

Turns out, Graves’ collection is right in line with the mission of the Devault-Graves Agency: bringing out-of-print but deserving titles back to the screen (in e-book form) or into readers’ hands (in traditional print form).

That’s what Devault-Graves will be doing next month with a new print edition of Sun Records: An Oral History by John Floyd, former music editor of the Flyer. (The e-book is available now from Amazon and the Barnes & Noble website.) It’s what Devault-Graves did earlier this year when it received major media attention for publishing Three Early Stories by J.D. Salinger. The company is also restoring, in uncensored print form, Maggie Cassidy by Jack Kerouac. This week, however, the focus of attention is Tom Graves, journalist.

He’s a novelist too (Pullers), a biographer (Crossroads: The Life and Afterlife of Blues Legend Robert Johnson), and co-author (with Devault) of a photography book (Graceland Too Revisited). Louise Brooks, Frank Zappa, & Other Charmers & Dreamers fulfills a dream that is entirely the author’s.

“I wished there was something I had that people could focus on me as a writer — the way I tell a story, my style,” Graves says. “I’d like to think that when people think of Memphis writers that I’d be in that group.”

Not only in that group but in a subset of local writers known for their long-form journalism. From a writer who’s done decades of interviews, there’s really nothing to it. But in Graves’ words: “You’ve got to be very super prepared going in. If you’ve got 50 or so questions, you have to be prepared to not touch ’em once you start the ball rolling. A conversation takes on a life of its own.” And no telling where a series of such conversations can lead. In the case of Tom Graves, it could amount to an impressive career — and to more than a few greatest hits.