My wife can handle my snoring and my tendency to forget to do the dishes, but all bets are off when I drag out my Frank Zappa albums. To the great many people who just can’t stand the man’s music, it is an antic mess of arpeggios, endless guitar solos, puerile baby noises, irritating musique concrète and vulgar lyrics. (I’ll agree to a lot of this, and that’s coming from a diehard fan.) German director Thorsten Schütte’s documentary Eat That Question: Frank Zappa In His Own Words would finally, I think, get her to understand just what it is that I love about the foul-mouthed mustachioed freak. That is, if I could ever convince her to watch it.

Like Steven Soderbergh’s documentary on Spalding Gray, And Everything Is Going Fine, Eat That Question is made up entirely from pre-existing interview footage and live performances. There are no talking heads, there are no inter-titles with facts and figures. What we get are frank conversations: sometimes a little combative, sometimes a little bit showboating, but mostly well-articulated positions about the importance of art, independence and refusing to do anything the easy way. And while everyone knows the dude is irreverent (like Yoko Ono, he’s one of the 20th century’s most famous musicians that few people have actually heard) the man himself may surprise you. He doesn’t do drugs! He is an anti-Communist! For a guy some wanted to shrug off as just another late 60s joker, Zappa, if nothing else, will at least impress with his work ethic.

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As a solo act or with his band the Mothers (originally called the Mothers of Invention), he has released roughly 70 albums, three feature films, multiple home video releases, and has written a musical and an autobiography. A 90 minute film is, for a true fan, just going to scratch the surface. My list of grievances at what was left out is tremendous, but you aren’t going to catch me complaining. What we do get, in mostly chronological order, is Zappa’s philosophy refracted through most of his career highlights.

Zappa’s first albums in the late 1960s mixed doo-wop, guitars, snorting and grunting and cheeseball lyrics, but from the get-go he pitched himself as a composer of serious orchestral music. His idols were Igor Stravinsky, Edgar Varèse and Anton Webern, even if he looked like a burned-out pot dealer. His flamboyant appearance was a double-edged sword. It gave him great visibility, as did a famous poster of him sitting naked on the toilet (one that I owned until the woman who later became my wife said “this has to go”), but it attracted press headlines calling him a pervert. His lyrics aided in that corner as well, but for those willing to listen to his music (to open oneself up to excellence, Frank might say) there was a lot to offer.

Eat That Question does a good job of giving us just a taste of nearly every era in Zappa’s multifaceted career. There’s the early, woodwind-heavy Mothers, the “Flo and Eddie” shoo-be-doo theatrics, the serious funk of Roxy & Elsewhere, the guitar-heavy Baby Snakes period, the enormous Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life productions and the synclavier experimentation he was working on at the time of his death. The focus is entirely on Frank, so we’ll have to wait for another documentary to discuss the diverse racial makeup of the group, and the fact that this most dude-centric artist features a woman (the great Ruth Underwood) front and centre on vibraphone for many peak years.

To newcomers, though, the twist is his symphonic work, including his London Symphony Orchestra albums, recorded at the Barbican in 1983. Much is made of the fact that he hired the orchestra on his own dime without any grants or sponsorship, mainly because he had some music in his head and wanted to hear a top shelf outfit play it for him. He packaged the difficult material on his own label, so maybe he even made a profit on the deal. Zappa’s libertarian streak manifests itself most famously when he took on Tipper Gore and the Parents Music Resource Center, accusing their attempts to label obscene lyrics as the first step toward an Orwellian theocracy. Zappa could be crusty in an interview, but he was frequently funny as hell. His final chat, during what should have been a victory lap after a 1992 orchestral tour in Germany and Austria, turns rather touching as the cancer-stricken musician acknowledges his waning strength.

Now, I said I wouldn’t gripe about what was left out, but I do feel Schütte does a major disservice by not including at least one lengthy, blazing guitar jam. There’s only a few seconds (a Scandinavian clip of Cosmik Debris) where we really see him wail on his chosen instrument. Zappa is a lot of things to a lot of people, but for me he is tied with maybe only two or three other guys for greatest soloist that ever lived. How is there not one Black Napkins? Or Watermelon In Easter Hay? Or the middle section of Pygmy Twylyte from the 1974 Helsinki concert? Or The Orange County Lumber Truck from Ahead of Their Time?

Okay, so if you aren’t a Zappa fan – and that means most people – I can see you rolling your eyes like my wife. But maybe this documentary changes that a bit. To rant and rave about the music would be the greatest honour we could give the film – or the man himself.