From Straight to Bizarre

Along with blazing his own path as one of the most original musician/composers to ever sing about Yellow Snow or the problems of Stink Foot, Frank Zappa helped a wide variety of disparate talents find a home on his Bizarre and Straight record labels. Some of them, like the certifiably insane paranoid schizophrenic/songwriter Wild Man Fischer were weird novelty acts who recorded a song or two and quickly faded away. Others, like Capt. Beefheart or Alice Cooper, went on to become both successful and influential. While it does a great job of detailing the history of the label and the performers, not to mention chronicling the LA music scene they were part of, the real fun of watching the documentary comes from the insight it gives you into Zappa as a businessman/producer of other’s work.