I am eager to let Alex Winter know this Zoom interview for his new film isn’t with some noob. When he pops up on my screen to discuss Zappa, the first documentary with access to the heralded “Zappa Vault,” I am wearing my (officially licensed) Zappa mustache coronavirus mask. Now, hopefully, he knows I mean business.

While Winter’s previous docs (Downloaded, Deep Web) have certainly held my interest, the actor-director recently seen with old pal Keanu Reeves in Bill & Ted Face the Music, has now made something close to my heart. I am one of those admittedly annoying acolytes of the iconoclastic ’60s freak-rocker, ’70s ax-shredder, ’80s free speech warrior, and ’90s synclavier-programmer Frank Zappa who won’t shut up about “conceptual continuity” in the late musician’s résumé, his breathtaking guitar technique, or the outstanding performers who were in his orbit. (I tend to keep mum about his lyrics, though; they aren’t often a selling point.) 

As such, I was thrilled to contribute to Winter’s Kickstarter campaign for this film, in theaters and available on demand November 27, when it was announced five years ago. I just checked and turns out I was the 23rd backer! (I did, however, only pitch in a few bucks.)

Zappa boasts the largest amount raised via crowdfunding for a documentary—and Winter needed the money because it took two years just to excavate the riches. Zappa was always recording; 53 official albums have come out since his death, for a total of 116 before you start counting “the boots.” Filmmaking was always a part of his process, and he kept the brilliant claymation artist Bruce Bickford on his payroll for years. Having “access to the vault” does not mean all that material is ready to go. But it does mean fans can now finally see footage of the first Mothers lineup during their six-month residency at New York’s Garrick Theatre in 1967, man! 

Crowdfunding also dovetails with Zappa’s insistence on independence. He hated corporations and also hated handouts. This was a man who, when he accidentally fell into a pop hit (the 1982 novelty track “Valley Girl” recorded with his teen daughter Moon Unit Zappa) he never for a moment thought of trying for a repeat, but went out and hired the London Symphony Orchestra to play some of his complex symphonic work, mostly so he could finally hear what it sounded like. For better or worse, Frank Zappa was driven by what was going on in his head.  

Below is an edited transcript of my conversation with Winter. 

Vanity Fair: Most culturally literate people know the name Frank Zappa and they know the mustache. But few have actually heard his music. Tell me why Frank Zappa matters.

Alex Winter: There are no short answers with Zappa, but I think he matters because he is now generally accepted as one of the great 20th-century avant-garde composers. He has a huge reputation in that world and his music is constantly performed, even if he’s been somewhat abandoned by the rock community. They never really accepted him anyway, from Lou Reed to Christgau, but I don’t think he cared about that anyway.

Zappa mattered to the culture I grew up in, even if I was not a Zappa fanatic at the time. This is partially why Gail Zappa approved me to direct this film. She’d been approached countless times by fanatics who only wanted to talk about xenochrony [Zappa’s method of mixing tracks from different recordings, sometimes across decades, to form new material] or, you know, what key changes and time signatures were used on various album. And I think that makes her eyes glaze over. 

He was a titanic presence. Seeing him on Saturday Night Live, seeing him engaged with politics, he was culturally relevant even without the music. The “weird” is maybe the least interesting thing about him. I stuck with this for five years not just because he was culturally relevant, but because his biography was compelling…. Zappa is a great American 20th-century figure. 

He was so prolific, and had so many contours to his life and career. How much did you agonize over leaving stuff out? You’ve got Thing-Fish, and a dozen other highlights on the cutting-room floor. 

It goes beyond “killing your babies” to “killing your audience.” I did not enter with the interest of satisfying fan service. There are so many other Zappa documentaries out there. There’s a doc just on Uncle Meat, there’s the fantastic doc on the Roxy concerts. There’s Eat the Question, which has its own perspective of how Zappa presented himself to media. We had a specific film in mind. We did not set out to make the definitive Zappa doc, it was to tell a story about this guy, and we did not even think about including material that didn’t serve that story. 

So it didn’t occur to me to, say, use the clip of him with the bicycle on The Steve Allen Show. That’s for YouTube. But certainly we debated biographical points. Do you include the first marriage, do you include each time he moved back to Los Angeles? All this would have made the first act four hours long. 

Ultimately it’s about a man somewhat tormented by complex musical sounds in his head, and his constant struggle to get them into the world just to hear them. And it’s so very hard to get there. Even hiring dynamos like Steve Vai doesn’t necessarily do the trick. Is this ultimately a tragic story?

It’s a human story. Tragedy and triumph…. We found that shot of him sitting on that case backstage after the Yellow Shark concert in Germany. He’s dying of cancer, but he finally got an orchestra to play his music well, and he received a 20-minute standing ovation. I had people working on this film say that shot is so depressing, while others have said, “Oh, it’s so triumphant.”

I don’t have a secret code for it. I will say, though, that Zappa, like many great artists, was a bit grumbly. 

I am not a psychiatrist, but hearing people talk about his lack of social graces, and how he treated his musicians, some might wonder if he was on the spectrum.

Maybe he had some OCD? Maybe Asperger’s syndrome? It’s possible. He had an artistic drive, though, that forced him out of his comfort zone. I don’t think you can diagnose that. He made a philosophical commitment to live his life a certain way, and he paid the price for it. 

My wife can’t stand when I play my Zappa albums. She leaves the room. It’s real “dude rock.” But I love that you spend a lot of time with percussionist Ruth Underwood. She was not just “a woman in the band,” she was a clutch part of his sound for around a decade.

Zappa is definitely someone associated with “dude-rock” fixations, but there is an enormous female fan base. When we did the Kickstarter we got a lot of data research. There are people who respond to certain kinds of music, and also who respond to him. He was also a very sexually dynamic guy at the forefront of the sexual revolution. So that doesn’t hurt. 

But men and women, there are people who just don’t like Frank Zappa. And if you don’t like him, you vehemently don’t like him. 

What’s your on-ramp album for newcomers?

Listen to Hot Rats [a guitar-driven album from after the first Mothers period in 1969] and listen to The Yellow Shark [a live, orchestral album released in 1993, just before Zappa’s death]. Listen to both ends of the spectrum. There is so much beautiful music in Yellow Shark and it can open up what is beautiful in the aggressive-rock stuff, which can maybe be hard for some people. Start with those two, which are accessible in their own way.

I love the rock heyday stuff like Apostrophe and Over-Nite Sensation too, but I think if you get in a little earlier and a little later and this can lead you everywhere. But I’m a fan; I could list 70 individual tracks. 

Obviously you are an evangelist, as you spent five years making this film, but were you one lending tapes to friends? “You gotta hear this solo?” I’ve tried and no one will listen to my playlists.

Well, you can lead a horse to water. I was on the receiving end of some of that myself. My brother’s friends saying, You aren’t listening to the right stuff, you gotta hear “Chunga’s Revenge,” and I was like, I don’t get it, I don’t get it. Then, in my 20s, I got it. 

You devote a section to Zappa’s battle against the PMRC and First Amendment rights. This was a huge deal in the mid 1980s. It did get me wondering if Frank were around today would he be canceled into oblivion?

It’s a fickle landscape, so it is hard to know. But the film, I think, shows a maturation process. We don’t ram it down your throat, but the Zappa that we meet in the ’60s and ’70s is defiantly misogynistic, and his politics are boilerplate rock star. He’s arrogant, “let’s have a revolution,” fuck it. The type of stuff John Lennon would say and—even if he meant well—it would cause people to ruin their lives. 

Then it becomes about a man who is so sober and mature, he just rolls up the sleeves and goes out on the news with a suit on. From a family perspective, he’s also much less of an asshole by this point. Had Zappa lived he would be 80 now. I don’t think he would be canceled. He was a much more humble and realistic person as he got older. It’s one of the things I love about watching this film. Without a lot of fanfare, he just put his money where his mouth was, and took profound and self-sacrificing action as he got older.

The song “Trouble Every Day” from the very first album in 1966 was progressive for its time about race relations, but there are disquieting moments over his career—like the Joe’s Garage cover—that perhaps foreshadow the “dirtbag left” attitude, the “I’m clearly not racist, so I can make racist jokes” vibe.

I personally did not find Zappa to be racist, but I did find him to be misogynistic. So we outlined it, and, maybe not let him hang himself, but lay out his own misogynistic manifesto. But he was very far ahead of his time in integrating his bands, even as a child. That thread [about race] didn’t really have any substance to me, so I didn’t pull it. The sexual politics and the dualities and contradictions of the whole generation, however, was important to me. 

What percentage of what we see and hear in this is from the vault, and hasn’t been seen before?

The lion’s share. The Kickstarter was all about preserving the endangered material, it took two years. Most of the movie is unseen and unheard. All the narration, pulled from a gazillion different tapes, has never been heard. But our attitude was whatever was best for the story. We’d take from YouTube if that’s what we needed to fill a hole. It was a collage, but Zappa was a collagist anyway. He would take a piece of Super 8mm film he shot in 1970, transfer it to videotape in 1985, then recut it and transfer again in 1990—it made it a nightmare for us!

I remember when the newly formed Czech Republic announced him as a cultural attaché [the Special Ambassador to the West on Trade, Culture and Tourism] but I didn’t know that James Baker reportedly strong-armed Václav Havel’s government into dropping it, because Baker’s wife was in the PMRC.

We didn’t add this in the film because it was hard to prove, but he was effectively blacklisted Frank from radio too. Going up against the government definitely hurt him.

And Dweezil had a mini-hit around that time, and Moon Unit was always on MTV as a personality, so, in theory, a follow-up to the success of “Valley Girl” could have happened. Eh, he probably didn’t care. 

I don’t think he cared about the radio, but he was probably upset about the Czech thing.

It’s sad, because at the end of the day he loved entrepreneurialism. He was a patriot.

Here was this radical, long-haired freak, but also a patriarchal, macho, relatively conservative Italian dad…. Now that he’s gone, and we live in such a politically fraught world, I see fans try to take ownership of Zappa. The far-left take ownership, the libertarians take ownership, and I think he was all of it and none. He was, though, rabidly anti-Bush and anti-Reagan. He maintained a powerful anti-authoritarian, anti-fascist streak, and pro-citizens rights. It carried through his whole life.  

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