Steve Allen didn’t know what to make of Frank Zappa. The clean-cut young musician was promising to “play the bicycle” on the set of The Steve Allen Show in 1963, spinning the wheels and tapping on the spokes. The result, with the help of a tuneless orchestra behind him and a confederate in the sound booth adding bursts of recorded noise, was a ridiculous cacophony. Allen, who’d one day present himself as a watchdog for good taste, jokingly told Zappa never to come back.

Four years later, Zappa was probably best known for a poster of him sitting naked on the toilet. The envelope really moves when you push it.

Thorsten Schütte’s new documentary Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words follows the musician’s career without framing it with Behind the Music–style retrospective interviews or narration of any kind. It just presents footage from television appearances, Zappa’s early music videos, concerts, etc., edited and compiled without comment. There’s no explicit attempt to put forth a Grand Unifying Theory of Zappa; Schütte immerses us in the competing aspects of Zappa’s public persona for their own sake. The results are fascinating.