This is a brand new exhaustive 166 minute documentary on the record labels Frank Zappa had with Warner Bros./Reprise: Bizarre and Straight. If you know your Zappa music or the significance of the labels, then you'll know what's covered. For Zappaphiles, there's absolutely no mention of DiscReet Records, another label Zappa did with manager Herb Cohen so this is direct and to the point.

My review:

http://www.thisisbooksmusic.com/2012/04/05/dvd-review-frank-zappa-from-straight-to-bizarre/
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It’s a documentary movie about Frank Zappa without the assistance from the Zappa Family Trust, so what’s the purpose of this? To shine the light on a record label that a lot of people enjoyed, but is now caught up by record industry (and perhaps familial) bullshit.

From Straight To Bizarre (Sexy Intellectual) is a documentary that is being pushed as being “unauthorized” because it has no input from ZFT, but a lot of times the best information comes from those who did work with ths topic at hand. In this case, it’s the two labels given to Zappa by Warner Bros./Reprise when Zappa was frustrated with working with Verve, the label who gave him his initial exposure to the mainstream. The film takes a look at the music Zappa discovered, along with his exposure to what is called the “freaks”, a close-knit community of musicians, artists, and individuals who did things on their own and were truly outcasts, not unlike the category Zappa was put into throughout his life. It explores the origins of the label with Zappa’s manager, Herb Cohen, and what lead to the discoveries of Captain Beefheart, Wild Man Fischer, and The GTO’s, complete with interviews from various members of The Magic Band, and Pamela Des Barres. While some had pointed the finger at Zappa for exploiting some of these artists as inside jokes, others say he was nothing more than a documentarian not afraid to cover what most people would turn their heads away from.

It also looks at how Alice Cooper got into the label, first as a band and then the band which turned into the identity of the man, and how Cooper being an outcast eventually lead him and the group outside of Zappa’s circles. It was only a matter of time before Cooper jumped ship, but not without having to deal with a few legal issues, which are briefly touched upon here. With that said, there are many who feel that Cooper’s first two albums on Straight are incredibly impressive, with a small minority feeling he and the band have never done anything better since.

From Straight To Bizarre would have been a perfect film in 1991 when a small handful of albums on the Bizarre and Straight labels were being reissued on CD for the first time. This is one of the more impressive and highly researched documentaries I’ve seen, it will definitely appeal to all of the record and Zappa nerds out there, but is its close-to-180-minute length a bit too much? To a degree, yes, but if you wish to watch it as two halves, feel free. The one thing that this movie will make you do is hunt down these albums not only by the artists mentioned, but other records released on the labels, including Jeff Simmons, Tim Buckley, and Lenny Bruce. The sad disgrace is that, most of these albums are out of print, the collector’s market have priced them ridiculously, and you’re not going to find them on iTunes, eMusic, or any of the legitimate music distribution websites out there. What to do? Hunt down these albums on blogs made by fans who have archived the music far better than the industry has ever done. It’s frowned upon by the Zappa Family Trust, but really, this movie serves as an audio and visual booklet to a box set that doesn’t and will never exist. It will be up to the fan to rediscover what made all of this music odd, trippy, unusual, and great. If anything, the film reveals the disgrace in not having this music widely available to anyone who wishes to seek it. Zappa himself frowned upon the fetishism of people who crave black discs in cardboard, but he realized when it came to the music, people were willing to do anything just to hear it. How he would interpret today’s digital distribution of music is anyone’s guess, but the film shows the passion and humor he had when it came to presenting the creativity of outcasts, from someone who may have felt like an outcast himself. The music he worked with was very much a documentary of his life and musical interests, in the hopes people would seek, find, and listen. Now it comes full circle.
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