Some thank-yous are in order, first to Zappologist Vladimir Sovetov, who suggested that I concoct this site. Check out ARF, his own Zappa domain.

Thanks are also due to my old friend Adam Trionfo for initially helping me excavate modern telecommunications and giving me an Amiga 2500.

Finally, I'd like to thank Zappologist Fredrik Johansson, whose sharp eyes caught a few mistakes. He was especially helpful with the Weasels Ripped My Flesh and Roxy & Elsewhere chapters.

I know I said "finally" up there, but Zappologist Michael Howard has my thanks for his enlightening points in our e-mail conversations.

Words on Music?

     Zappa stated many times that his primary goal was to entertain -- that no matter how seriously he handled compositional nuances, how minutely he expounded upon lyrical themes or how badly he wanted to promote independent thinking, pleasure for himself and his listeners was the chief motive.

     Can the new listener be entertained by Zappa's music without a thick exegesis like this one? Of course. Will the entertainment of both way-back fanatics and new initiates be enhanced and the music put into a more tangible perspective with a book like this? Yup. Frank's library of gamut-running (and -breaking) music is the only one I know of that can be immediately augmented by a big book. But the benefit's feasible only if the text is based on research rather than guesswork, the music addressed solely, bereft of comparisons with the work of other artists. Such comparisons aren't apples vs. oranges; they're apples vs. tiny bits of apples.

     This by-product of some brilliant music is here for your entertainment. If it solves little puzzles for you or enchances your enjoyment of the material it deals with, awreety-awrighty.

Notes To the Reader and Pseudo-Bibliography

     The essential introduction to Frank's view of his own compositions would be his own The Real Frank Zappa Book (w/ Peter Occhiogrosso, (C)1989, Poseidon Press). Therein is a lot of entertaining, illuminating stuff, written in Frank's comfortable, funny, no-bullshit manner.

     The book you're reading is a little harder to get through for the casual reader than the vital Western World textbook mentioned above because it's not meant to be read quickly like biographical anecdotes or face-value sociological observations. This is meant to be a treasury of acute musical and lyrical research that the reader can have a lot of fun with and gain some insight from. Pore through it with the scrutiny of an (at least kinda) intrigued treasure-hunter and I promise you'll find it most satisfying. Sure, reading casually or quickly will often entertain you like a regular book; but a lot of parts will seem tedious to the not-so-intrigued Zappa listener if approached with one eye.

     A handful of books have been written to open more mind-levels during the stimulating enjoyment of Frank's music. At least 90% of what appears in this book is based on my own observations and deductions. The rest is here as a result of (hopefully) successful attempts at whittling down the stuff in those other books, making the content consequential to the music itself and removing it from often bafflingly irrelevant contexts. This research, quote-grabbing and fact-validating was obviously done because no rational idea from another author can be left out when one assembles a complete text about the Zappa canon. So I've picked and chosen those bits based in reality from the following books, freeing good points from within their silly settings and leaving out unsupported conclusion-jumps.

     As far as the book you're currently reading goes, remember to have fun. What's the point otherwise?

Final Introduction (I promise):

What Does "Awake" Really Mean, Anyway?

     So many potential channels of identification work with Frank's music that it becomes an ironically universal ocean in spite of its decidedly inaccessible ignorance of boundaries.

     So here's something I really wanted to point out as an additional possibility for most any Zappa song, but particularly those that aren't meant to be pop parodies or straightforward rock tunes. It's a thing to apply generally, because I think it's on solid ground and really makes some of this music that much more captivating in a certain corner of the listening brain; in fact, it's offered for such enveloping application that I'll hardly mention it again. I'll open the explanation with a quote from good ol' Out To Lunch.

     In dreams, actions and objects of the most complete triviality...can become endowed with great affective power.
          (Watson)

     Zappa's lyrics, with their frequent overemphases on little things and seemingly insignificant images of everyday life (listen to "Billy the Mountain" on 1972's Just Another Band From L.A. for a good example), not to mention the recurrences of those kinds of incidental objects and outwardly nonsensical phrases throughout Zappa's catalogue (sometimes decades after an initial appearance), seem to point to the idea that this music takes place in a dream (or many dreams). The notes and rhythms themselves often possess the peculiar nature of dreams; the frequently non-traditional note groupings, intervals and dissonant chords resemble the awkward reality of subconscious imagery. The music could be coming from the performer/character's subconscious mind, a part of the brain that doesn't adhere to traditional structures of life.

     Dreams reflect those parts of reality that a person's too uncomfortable with or trained against to think about during his waking hours; they act as a housecleaning-type defense against the insanity potentially caused by the accumulation of disturbing mental baggage. Zappa's words deal with those bits of life that are too touchy to be confronted on a level of mass consciousness or too raw-nerved for authorities to address appropriately or change. Dreams are, after all, where we encounter our real fears; a lot of the bad-guy characters in Frank's songs do ridiculous things because they're afraid of confronting their insecurities head-on.

     Although it should be stressed that it is, again, a generalization, not to be applied to every piece of music without hesitation, it would stimulate the listener to be aware of the animated thought-fluidity of a lot of Zappa's pieces and the lyrical images that seem exaggerative of real life. Just like in dreams.

     Going further, the composer frequently attacked those who would keep people (and their kids) ignorant of "taboo" things instead of educating them and rendering them prepared to decide for themselves in prevention of creative discouragement or being taken advantage of in one way or another. This was a basis of his testimonials to censorship advocators. Dreams dig up the dirt like Zappa always did, encouraging everything to be out in the open with nothing kept secret or mystical to become either damaging to the individual spirit or exploited for cash. Watson mentions Frank's "relentless emphasis on the structures that channel desire," explaining, among other things, the lyrics' occasional preoccupations with strange sexual outlets and explaining in a different way the musical comments on the commodity of record albums (see the chapters about Freak Out!, Lumpy Gravy and We're Only In It For the Money elsewhere in this book). Sexual hangups are frequently dealt with in dreams.

     The music takes from a palette of "everything that's ever been" ("The Torture Never Stops" on 1976's Zoot Allures). Zappa had definite views on the God invented by mankind, as one can hear in "Dumb All Over" from 1981's You Are What You Is and as one can read in The Real Frank Zappa Book; in the latter he purports that God is basically saying, "Get smart and I'll fuck you over." This is not a being of complete truth; this, like the government that loves the idea of a God-fearing public, is a being of psychological extortion, and Frank's musical dream-images throw into life all that's blacked-out in this sort of brainwashing. Everything that's ever been is used as a starting ground for potential compositional inclusion, an infinite universe with all its at-first trivial images that can serve as subconscious triggers of the hidden, uncomfortable parts of life that are solved only by being confronted. Nothing that's ever been should be covered up.

     Frank wrote a circular in 1971 for the 200 Motels  press kit that read, in part, "We make a special art in an environment hostile to dreamers." This music's being thrust into an environment that frowns on the unmasking of reality's disturbing bits, a climate hostile to people who like the absolute truth, the music being made for these dissatisfieds. This indicates that the world's a malevolence of holes that the compositions seek to fill with lyrical and musical dream-stuff -- unrestrained sound and overblown images -- therefore creating a sub-world in order to closely examine and even parody the real one. Zappa's magnifying glass contorts images as it's moved over different parts of a map of the world, and it wouldn't take a listener much effort to discern that these abnormalities are rooted in the subconscious, the part of the mind reserved for things we don't want to admit. As one reference to this whole idea, one of Frank's oft-played 1980s pieces was called "While You Were Out."

     The same press kit elsewhere reads, "Somebody out there in that audience knows what we are doing, and that person is getting off on it beyond his/her wildest comprehensions."

     The Ultimate Rule ought to be: "If it sounds GOOD to YOU, it's bitchen; and if it sounds BAD to YOU, it's shitty."
           (The Real Frank Zappa Book)

Freak Out!

     From the beginning of his recording career, Frank Zappa was keenly aware of the promotion-controlled pop trends he wished to obliterate. His first project was to exploit them in order to interject advocations of free thinking -- to appear as another "popular but weird" artist in order to infiltrate the industry's machinery and change it from the inside. One of his initial hopes for his first band, the Mothers of Invention, was that they'd clear the way for the more inventive, less compartmentalized music he believed possible from America's surviving independent minds. This was an optimism that would diminish in time.

     The Mothers' debut album, Freak Out!, was the first step in slyly damaging the mythical barrier between "high" and "low" art; simple pop-rock tunes share equal space with long, symphonic percussive experiments. With this first-ever rock double set, Frank sought to point out the ridiculous limits of the listeners' musical world. In doing so, he came close to insulting them outright; but apart from a select group of fans who "got it," he mostly just confused them. The more accessible songs on the album sounded outdated as far as the 1966 climate went. It was a way of emphasizing and overdoing the mindlessness seen from the vantage point on radio music he sought to provide. It was also a way of asserting, in the contrast between the album's first and second halves, just how unique were free-feeling compositions compared to teen-tailored pop humdrum. While the album fell short of mainstream success, sides 3 and 4 hit a nerve with the burgeoning underground, the album therefore remaining a discernible influence on everything that followed that departed from conventional pop forms. The most commercial example is the Beatles' 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which Paul McCartney has said was partly inspired by Freak Out!, the first conceptual rock album.

     To eager listeners it became a classic in its own time because there hadn't been anything like it before; it excited a lot of people because of its "weirdness" and its existence as a completely separate entity from the radio. It found more listeners than other non-customary works like John Cage's explicitly orchestral material because it presented itself as part of the rock genre. It also must have been fantastic and nearly therapeutic for many younger listeners to hear Frank utterly bash jocks who thought their meeting places were truly "where the action is" ("You're Probably Wondering Why I'm Here") and use the vehicle of predictable pop music to reflect such mundane mindsets. It was probably even more thrilling to hear him use his own uncompromising hard rock to voice unfashionable slams like "Take your TV tube and eat it" ("Trouble Every Day").

     [Freak Out!] was really simultaneously crude and ugly, and incredibly sophisticated. The Beatles were funny, but there was nothing with the kind of sneer that you could feel in the music of Frank Zappa.
           (Simpsons creator Matt Groening; from the 12/17/93 Late-Show Special on BBC2)

     It inspired the avant-garde community, but its point was that there didn't really need to be an avant-garde; things could be mixed up according to the way the artist wanted to present his stuff. But on its most superficial level it was foremost a spoof on America's cheesy popular music, a collection of songs disguised as ditties but meant to highlight stupidity for those who listened closely and with somewhat aloof ears. In this way Frank began his attempts at playing the part in order to change popular music from within (the same infiltration tactic that rendered the suit-and-tie appearance he adopted during his anti-censorship campaigns in the '80s).

     I am trying to use the weapons of a disoriented and unhappy society against itself. The Mothers of Invention are designed to come in the back door and kill you while you're sleeping. One of our main, short-range objectives is to do away with the Top-40 broadcasting format because it is basically wrong, unethical and unmusical.
          (FZ quoted by Robert Shelton in the New York Times, 12/25/67)

     The "freaks" on the streets of late-'60s Los Angeles were both Zappa's example for illustrating certain listeners' discontent with office-fabricated trends and fad-oriented social groups, and his intended initial fans who sought to express themselves freely. As can be read in the album's liner notes, the term "freaks" was essentially sarcastic ("less perceptive individuals" used the word). Also, drastic deviations from standard societal appearance and values never ceased to fascinate him. There was potential there: Individual freaks of nature (exceptions to conditioning) were still possible thanks to the relentless human spirit. Throughout his career he'd mention other exceptions to cultural (and even natural) norms, ever ready to point out the possibility of deviation in a world seeking to remain constant and rule-abiding. Munchkins, Bobby (a guy with a potato-head), an Illinois criminal who forces enemas on girls and a mutated human called Thing-Fish all appear with the strikingly non-standardized aesthetics of the music itself. Even within instrumental pieces, Zappa succeeds in creating an atmosphere in which the abnormal is welcomed; you expect something "strange" to happen anyway, a unique angle that succeeds in turning the music as a total entity into, in part, a countercultural preassumption -- an aspect that gave Zappa and his musicians incredible freedom in regards to their fans' expectations.

     Frank's spotlighting of freaks worked on a mocking, "look how ugly we are!" level as well; the supposedly envied echelons of society saw those straying from life's normal procedures as ugly deformities. This was extended to the way the government detested minorities, gays and (hypocritically enough, in light of much of the daily news) freely sexual people on the Thing-Fish album in 1984. Frank included himself among those seen as freaks by the ruling class and white middle class; onstage in the mid-'70s he called himself Rondo Hatton, the name of an actor known as the "ugliest man in pictures" after poisonous gas deformed him during World War II. This ties into the parallel in 1976's Zoot Allures between America and Nazi Germany ("Pumpin' the gas every night"), casting Frank as one of those who the Nazis in "Plastic People" (Absolutely Free, 1967) want to stop. It also ties into the Thing-Fish character, deformed by the government's alleged biochemical warfare against gays and minorities as part of the right-wing plan to illustrate divine retribution (a'la Frank's theory about how Republicans started AIDS). The resulting "fear of God" helps conservatives get elected, as heard in "Heavenly Bank Account" on 1981's You Are What You Is (similar gospel-style music is heard on Thing-Fish). These connections are cemented by the fact that Zoot Allures and Thing-Fish are tied together overtly; "The Torture Never Stops" appears on both albums (it's called "The Torchum Never Stops" on the latter, consistent with the Thing-Fish's sarcastically exaggerated black language).

     So, looking at freaks in this context, we can see why Frank often encouraged audiences to sardonically indulge in their own images as seen through America's eyes. Even the stereotyped version of an independent person is better than someone led by (or becoming) one of those doing the stereotyping. It's the same reason blacks call each other "nigga": They make fun of the white man's term in order to deflate the impact of his prejudice, sending his feelings of superiority to the corner with a dunce cap. During a live version of "Packard Goose" (from 1979's Joe's Garage) in the late '70s or early '80s, as can be heard on the bootleg album Show & Tell, he tells the audience, "I'd like each and every one of you to fantasize along with me this evening that, in some small way, the process of performing this show will rid you of your own personal demon, whatever it is that's bothering the shit out of you this year [see this book's introduction about dreams]... Today it's time for the people who have been the victims of [the government's] disregard to turn around and disregard something else."

     Freak Out!, like the next few Zappa albums, takes the freak characters of the '60s, those who all looked and listened differently from each other and refused to appear fashionable or even tasteful, and uses them as a protest entity against the methodized, commodity-tuned lifestyles of the modern Western World. What makes this album a bit scary is that it applies today in that context as much as it did in 1966.

     The hippies weren't part of this freak community. Fad-conformist and unoriginal, those lazy minds always come off as being no different than the average dumb American material kids in Zappa songs that mention them (they're the primary targets of the '68 album We're Only In It For the Money). San Francisco's general music community was viewed as an ethnocentric group of fashionables with no ears for original-sounding music.

     Record one of Freak Out! is mostly cheesy pop, occasionally sounding a little less spoofy when cranked out as rhythm and blues. A lot of it is in fact pretty damn enjoyable. Frank was a doo-wop and R&B fan as a kid and had hundreds of singles before he even happened upon his first orchestral album (an Edgar Varese collection, which would partly shape his perspectives on composition and timbral contrasts). But the two-seconds-away-from-cracking-up tone of Ray Collins's singing and the over-echoing ambiance of the production hint that the structure here is deliberately even flimsier than when it's holding up typical pop music. The props and flats are purposefully near-transparent to clue the listener into something sinister going on behind the stage lights of commodity music (among other things).

     The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.
          (FZ quoted by Jim Ladd, Nuggets #7, 5/77)

     That makes Freak Out! a little spookier. Rather than just being, in its first half, a collection of obviously contrived tunes, it attempts to make said scenery a little more detectable than usual. The 200 Motels movie will carry this to a visual extreme in 1971.

     At the same time, Frank manages to illustrate an awareness and scrutiny of the less-than-obvious bits of American bigotry; before starting in with the "unaccessible" music, record two opens with a rock'n'roll protest against both black and white discrimination ("Trouble Every Day") that seems too earnest to fit comfortably with the first two sides of the album. The Watts Riots provide the theme, but the mindsets going on behind them are subject to their own blunt lyricism. Frank's own scenery, at least, is coming down at this point. The contrast between this heartfelt, bluesy anger and the preceding tongue-in-cheek numbers only serves to make the exasperation more sincere and affecting. The rock music to which the Mothers actually commit their skills sounds all the more moving when slotted next spoofs on the kinds of music Americans can be talked into listening to (Elvis and other white performers sounded ridiculous to Frank when copying black music; the Mothers were white, so even rhythm and blues should be heard with a modicum of sarcasm, taking into account Frank's comments on the contrived entertainment industry). Since a lot of Zappa's lyrics make fun of cheap Western things to telescope the inhumanity and unmusicalness of a profit-driven society, racial prejudice and reactionary violence are natural targets; the class system's presented in the music as just another commodity laid on gullible consumers, xenophobia being part of this. Zappa noticed the McCarthy effects prevalent during his childhood:

     [Our family] had two problems. One was the Security Clearance; the other was the fact that my father was born in Sicily and my mother was first-generation, from Italian and French parents. And in most of the places we lived, anybody who was not one hundred percent all-white American was a threat to the community, y'know? And being associated with somebody of a foreign parentage made it tough for me in school and made it tough on them. There was that whole aspect of American life and I never did understand it.
          (FZ, quoted in Gray)

     Understanding the nuances of advertising, partly because he'd worked for a short time for a greeting card company to make ends meet during his first marriage, Frank made sure that the cover of Freak Out! was, above all, eye-catching. Its '60s bubbles and curves, along with the indulgent tinting and back-cover quote from a mythical fan named Suzy Creamcheese complaining that the album was too weird and that she didn't know what some of the lyrics meant, reeled-in the record buyer with the deliberate message that this stuff was both right up his alley and a little mysterious. Strange was in, but it was still rare to see something presented as stranger than the normal, record-businessman-concocted strangeness (not to mention comically self-deprecating). This was brilliantly intensified by the liner notes' claim that Frank himself rarely appeared with the band onstage, which wasn't true but which served to place the composer above the popular scene.

     The gatefold montage of pictures and quotes might've been seen as part of the "let's make fun of pop" motif, but Frank declared himself unhappy with it, so it was mostly a product of MGM design; it wasn't his intention that most of the people couldn't be made out in the badly reproduced photos. But the liner notes were Frank's entirely, endearing the Mothers to their potential listeners with self-aimed humor and challenges to the average pop consumer.

     After "Trouble Every Day" the album becomes an inventive orgasm of vocal playfulness and percussive immensity. Although retaining the album's sarcastic regard of pop in its straightforward series of backbeats -- and remaining at the primitive end of its creative life due to the time-limits imposed on Frank and his bare production staff during the recording of the first two Mothers albums -- its production displays an acute heedfulness of how to keep things spacious and fresh-sounding, indicating that producer Tom Wilson and staff had some help from Frank at least in the mixing stage. The lack of pop scenery and the freedom with which these vocal and percussive explorations of the timbral spectrum were captured and presented put it worlds away from something like the possibly intentional variance on the Stones' "Satisfaction" that opened the album, a simultaneously goofy- and angry-sounding song about hopeful mass dissatisfaction called "Hungry Freaks, Daddy."

     In his Real Frank Zappa Book, Frank says that every song on Freak Out! "had a function within an overall satirical concept." The first piece launches his recording career with a growling fuzz-guitar riff that's catchy if foreboding, its suspiciously sparse sonics notwithstanding. It breathes, at least, finding a freshness in the reverb effects. Frank's Gibson ES-5 Switchmaster guitar grooves and sounds mad at something.

     After two instrumental measures a higher guitar harmonizes with the first, which itself drops into a lower register with added grimace. Frank and Ray sing the words in an almost tuneless jeer that attempts to elicit the listener's anger at the ideas therein, and they sarcastically taunt society to do what it's already doing. It's a communication of disgust: "Mr. America, walk on by your schools that do not teach."

     The sleeve notes about the song are provocative as well:

     Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and EDUCATE YOURSELF if you've got any guts. Some of you like PEP RALLIES and plastic robots who tell you what to read. Forget I mentioned it. THIS SONG HAS NO MESSAGE. Rise for the flag salute.

     The only actual element of cheesy commodity music is a vibe part, sounding like fake-friendly doorbells as it backs the guitars. Come on in; just don't take everything completely seriously. A kazoo sound concludes the two bridges, aligning popular idioms with little-kid music in a cheap-fanfare manner. Zappa molds the garbage of the industrial music machine into aural pictures of pure acidity.

     The lyrics attempt no subtext or actual metaphors for their complaints; America's lies are bluntly addressed, the freaks heralded as the "minds that won't be reached" and lamented as the "left-behinds of the Great Society." Zappa jumped at chances for pointing out exceptions to the nation's politically beneficial "work ethic," any potential he detected in individuals who ridiculed the standards that citizens were normally expected to follow and the "American dreams" they were supposed to believe in.

     The importance placed on a person's financial standing, vocational position or material accumulation is cited as America trying to "hide the emptiness that's you inside"; superficial things are evidently endorsed as being important in order to cover up the wan, frustrated existences of people afraid to try and find the actual special things about themselves and who endeavor to convince themselves and others that their career images are worth a shit. This is a frequent topic throughout Zappa's musical library.

     The song's ultimately optimistic; nothing will "forestall the rising tide of hungry freaks, daddy." But the bridge switches the scene for a moment to cheap urban America, devoid of the main riff's insistence and incorporating sing-songy vocals that depart from the monotone of the verses. The Muzakal icon of the vibes is highlighted and the singers mention the "Great Midwestern hardware store," the first broadly inclusive element of plastic American idealism in a Zappa song. The ultimate listeners are encouraged and toted as "those who aren't afraid to say what's on their minds" and the bridge concludes with the comical kazoo fanfare. Using such musical cliches makes the song an effective protest against herd-mentality because it carries a palpable sense of revelation: The parody's so laughable that it's quite alarming to realize how pervasive these corns are in pop music, how familiar and almost unnoticeable they can be.

     Frank's guitar solo's tempestuous, stopping halfway after a barrage of conclusive blues notes -- which tell the listener that he's now hearing the hungry freaks -- before setting off on a more melodic, almost wistful-sounding solo that comes closer to preparing the ear for the impending return to the main riff, which now sounds intentionally half-witted, as if the music's suddenly remembered that it's supposed to be appealing to a record label's idea of accessibility. The solo has quaked the Fender Deluxe amp, desperate to break from the formula pop and just rock for a moment.

     The last verse has Frank singing alone to highlight the words and add weight to the protests. America's now walking approvingly and apathetically by its "supermarket dream," a phrase that embodies the shallow nature of the cultural icons Frank pans. Now the "liquor store supreme" is introduced, a foreshadowing of things like the pair of "America Drinks" songs on the next album.

     Already we have a prototypical '60s power-riff, huge shops of cheap American junk, empty Western illusions that hide insecurities, uneducated kids and a reference to liquor -- all aspects that tie into future Zappa music to a great extent. This would be a good time to interject the only near-clear statement Frank ever made about his famous "conceptual continuity."

     Perhaps the most unique aspect of the Mothers' work is the CONCEPTUAL CONTINUITY of the group's OUTPUT MACROSTRUCTURE. There is and always has been a conscious control of thematic and structural elements flowing through each album...  Imagine the decades and the pile of stuff on them subjected to EXTENSIVE LONG-RANGE CONCEPTUAL LANDSCAPE MODIFICATION. Houses, offices. People live there and work there. Imagine that YOU could be living there and working there and not even know it. Whether you can imagine it or not, that's what the deal is.
          (1971 FZ interview in International Times #115)

     That's apparently what the deal is with the governmentally and corporately controlled culture we live in -- men in suits constructing the world as their own little microcosm, which succeeds in existing because of how people have allowed themselves to become gullible and mentally lazy. So that's how Zappa clarifies and parodies that culture: with his own microcosm. The themes running through his work are based on us, real people represented in the music as extremes and caricatures that often incorporate elements of nature to remind us of how mortal we are, how separate from these supermarket dreams our actual living energy is and how irrelevant material symbols really are. Parts of real life, trivial bits of everyday existence in a commodity society, are blown up within these reconstructed landscapes to represent magnified fears and insecurities normally restricted to the subconscious mind. Revelation is the key to purging. Zappa lyrics magnify trivialities, since people hide from a lot of parts of reality -- including what they know to be right -- in order to remain safe and yet feel important. But "if you've got any guts..."

     The last verse ends with the divulgence that Mr. America has avoided exceptions to his system by shrugging and stepping aside, wrapped up as he is in his own "savage pride" and refusing to meet the challenge of any independent thought that might threaten his tidy system. After one more bridge, sounding as if it's repeated more for the irony of formula than to build on the climactic effect of the last verse (it weakens it instead), the song closes with the unresolved kazoo note that's been ending each bridge, sounding like a question and leaving the obnoxious odors of the song's cheaper-sounding instruments in the air for contemplation. If the ending note were played on an electric guitar, the song's banality wouldn't sound so mistrusted by the performers. It really does sound like a challenge to the listener: Have you got any guts, really? Are you ready for original-sounding music? It's a fitting front door to the Zappa microcosm in the midst of the empty pop world. A final flurry of low guitar notes reminds us that he's here amidst these things, that he'll explore the landscape for us.

     "Who Are the Brain Police?" asks listeners if their lives would cease to bring them pleasure or meaning if the products set up for them were to suddenly disappear. It uses the record album as a model, asking what we'd do if the label were to come off and the plastic were to melt. Even the chrome of the ('60s) stereo doesn't escape the hypothetical challenge, and it's a terrific cross-reference to the teenager's all-important car in a couple of the album's R&B tunes. Would the music remain intact in our minds, bodiless as it actually is? Would it mean as much if it were pure sound, stripped of its materialistic edge? In pointing out exactly how this anti-establishment music is ironically getting to listeners via the commodity process, Frank and Ray challenge us to figure out who's policing our minds -- to recognize where other records, top-tens, come from exactly.

     "Go Cry On Somebody Else's Shoulder" contains a parody of Pachuco dialect, but the song itself, whether its '50s sound is a semi-joke or not, is actually quite beautiful, with Ray really nailing immemorial doo-wop ad-libs. There are hilarious lines regarding the limited perspectives of teenagers (and even hinting at a desire for the return of young naivete), like "I'm somewhat wiser now/and one whole year older." Most of the simplex songs are a lot of fun if the listener allows himself to indulge in the undiluted joy of sweet-tasting poppy rock. To not give something a chance just because its formula's common indicates the same sort of shallowness as only listening to radio music. Zappa's main point: If something gives you pleasure to listen to, it requires no extraneous validation.

     Whereas "I'm Not Satisfied" is already upstaged by its lovely blues rendition on 1968's Cruising With Ruben & the Jets (assuming one's heard that album), "I Ain't Got No Heart" succeeds in making Frank sound sincere about his steadfast words by contrast to the atypical "revisiting the oldies" feel of the rushed '81 version on Tinseltown Rebellion.

     "The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet," its title personifying the magnetic recording head on a tape machine, contains a segment called "Ritual Dance of the Child-Killer," referring to Frank's advances in the second half of the album on young, naive Suzy Creamcheese and the sexy sounds, violently backed Varese-style, that suggest that he's been successful. A girl from narrow-minded America, a reluctant fan who's written a letter of complaint to the Mothers, has been converted into a groupie. This plot and the words in "Motherly Love" suggest sexually what Zappa said in interviews about sneaking into the public (see above); the reference to back doors makes for an interesting extra meaning! Suzy's late-'60s-style induction into the freaks exemplifies how capable hands with recording technology at their disposal can do whatever they want with supposedly private moments; they can also turn the world into whatever they want in the interest of forging intellectual weaponry against corporate corruption and psychological repression. This won't be the last time Frank illustrates this for us.

Lumpy Gravy

     After the Mothers' first two albums, Zappa proudly presented something to his fans that was an even less orthodox 1967 shelf product than his pop lampooning, blues mutations and operatic exploits had been. After contacting symphonic session musicians through trombonist Kenneth Shroyer, who'd played on Absolutely Free, Frank formed the one-off Abnuceals Emuukha Electric Symphony Orchestra & Chorus, a title given to the musicians and characters as they appeared on the album rather than in any actual live performance; the "Chorus" (speaking cast) was certainly edited together from separate sessions and woven into the musical frames in great premeditated detail.

     In part, making a bunch of contributors appear as a single entity despite their independent performances being assembled to form an ongoing piece was a comment on manufactured bands. These were definitely around -- Gary Lewis and the Playboys, the Monkees, assorted bubblegum groups -- and all were, on their records at least, products of their respective producers. In that sense, Frank himself was really the AEESO & Chorus. An earnest work of creative breakthroughs was therefore sardonically presented in the manner of those pop groups. Implied was that the material itself mattered in this particular composer's case, regardless of how it got onto the master tape (an idea that also inadvertently defended the Monkees and company).

     The album featured only four Mothers: Bunk Gardner, on woodwinds and brass, was the only musical performer, while the other three -- Jimmy Carl Black, Roy Estrada and Jim "Motorhead" Sherwood -- were listed as part of the Chorus: groups of people recorded conversing inside an actual piano during several sessions. The dialogue was edited into compositions via Frank's razor blade, the music as a total comprising these newly angled conversations as well as the songs played by the orchestra and the sound movies made up of percussion and timbral experiments. There aren't any lyrical tunes; the intended vocal facet of the music is the sculpted piano dialogue.

     The grand piano was situated in Apostolic Studios in New York City. According to Frank, he amassed eight or nine hours of recorded dialogue from which to select. The album, one long composition divided into two parts (record sides), is a result of turning gobs of raw material into a striking, provocative program with predetermined atmospherics and succession. In that sense, the Synclavier pieces of twenty-odd years later weren't much different in essential form. Lumpy Gravy  conjures visions, on a purely technical level, of Zappa sitting bent over reels of tape, slicing exacted lengths of sound from this one or that and restructuring them into the presentation he wants us to hear.

     The people in the piano will resurface on the next Mothers album, We're Only In It For the Money, in a few spots on albums in coming years and finally on 1994's posthumous Civilization Phaze III, in which they form the nucleus of the plot, itself a continuation of the accounts in Lumpy Gravy.

     This was the earliest commercial appearance of Zappa's symphonic work and the first of his releases to contain the unsurpassedly explored compositional potential of sounds not normally associated with music, such as taped percussive noises achieved by hitting things other than drums, the speed often altered to get an altogether unique effect. One of the reasons the depth of Frank's symphonic vision wasn't apparent prior to Lumpy Gravy was that he wasn't allowed to take his time with the first two Mothers albums; MGM had held him to a very tight recording schedule back in California, which was one of the reasons he'd start his own record label before the decade was out.

     Lumpy Gravy's creation took about nine months (We're Only In It For the Money, Cruising With Ruben & the Jets and Uncle Meat were in the works at Apostolic at the same time). The dialogue not used in the extensive piece

sat in my tape vault for decades, waiting for the glorious day when audio science would develop tools which might allow for its resurrection...since the ambience would vanish disturbingly at the edit point. ...As a result, what emerged from the texts [to appear on Lumpy Gravy] was a vague plot regarding pigs and ponies threatening the lives of characters who inhabit[ed] a large piano.
          (FZ, from the liner notes of Civilization Phaze III)

     The spontaneous dialogue and the music fashioned out of elements other than (but not necessarily omitting) instrument sounds reflect Zappa's fascination with documenting "real life" and making it part of the frozen time available as the commercial music world. Particular attention's paid to the psycho-sociological reasons behind common behavior, with the strong implication (especially on this album) that among the stimuli are the narrow, enclosed perspectives into which people are trained; the piano's a tangible image of this entrapment. It doesn't necessarily make the average American into an unwitting victim, but rather a self-victim who has but to use his brain to escape confinement (cf. the "educate yourself" liner notes quoted in the Freak Out! section of this book, not to mention the tons of relevant lyrical insinuation and provocation throughout Frank's music). The composer's documentation of society as it exists outside the plotted confines of typical lyricism, or "amateur anthropology" as he called it, would become a standard component of the rest of his library. Further, musical phrases, especially guitar solos, would become based on speech patterns, drawing from the fluid, animated way in which people communicate and reflecting human spirit, whether beautiful, displaced or gnawing.

     To gain another perspective on Zappa's approach to the series of sound shocks that is the Lumpy Gravy album, let's be on familiar terms with his general definition of composition:

     A person with a feel for rhythm can walk into a factory and hear the machine noise as a composition. If we expand that concept to include light, behavior, weather factors, moon phases, anything (whether it's a rhythm that can be HEARD or a rhythm that is PERCEIVED, i.e., a color change OVER TIME -- or a SEASON), it can be CONSUMED as music. If it can be CONCEIVED AS MUSIC, it can be EXECUTED AS MUSIC and PRESENTED TO AN AUDIENCE IN SUCH A WAY THAT THEY WILL PERCEIVE IT AS MUSIC.
     ...Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance space is SCULPTED INTO SOMETHING. This "molecule-sculpture-over-time" is then "looked at" by the ears of the listeners -- or a microphone. ...A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the aid of unsuspecting musicians.

     Want to be a composer? You don't even have to be able to WRITE IT DOWN. The stuff that gets written down is only a recipe... If you can THINK DESIGN, you can EXECUTE DESIGN -- it's only a bunch of air molecules. Who's gonna check up on you?
     JUST FOLLOW THESE SIMPLE INSTRUCTIONS:
     1. Declare your INTENTION to create a "composition."
     2. START a piece at SOME TIME.
     3. Cause SOMETHING TO HAPPEN OVER A PERIOD OF TIME (it doesn't matter what happens in your
        "time hole" -- we have critics to tell us whether it's any good or not, so we won't worry about that
        part).
     4. END THE PIECE AT SOME TIME (or keep it going, telling the audience it is a "work in progress").
     5. Get a part-time job so you can continue to do stuff like this.

     In my compositions, I employ a system of weights, balances, measured tensions and releases. ...If you can conceive of ANY MATERIAL as a "weight" and any IDEA-OVER-TIME as a "balance," you are ready for the next step: the "entertainment objects" that derive from those concepts.
     If a musical point can be made in a more entertaining way by SAYING a word than by SINGING a word, the SPOKEN WORD will win out in the arrangement -- unless a NON-WORD or a MOUTH NOISE gets the point across faster.
          (The Real Frank Zappa Book)

     The "balance" of Lumpy Gravy -- people hiding from pigs and ponies, restricted to the enclosed viewpoints afforded by a piano and surrounded by cheesy or dangerous aspects of commodity America and narrow "job force" rules, trying to buy sympathy like a drug-store product and psychologically battered to the point of reducing themselves and each other to retail objects -- is "weighted" with the tensions and releases of the music itself, the pressurizations and subsequent points of relief.

     These sessions didn't mark the first time Zappa had conducted his orchestral music. As can be heard on 1996's The Lost Episodes, a young Frank first undertook the role in '63 at Mount St. Mary's College in L.A., leading a group of university musicians he'd scraped together. The first recording of his instrumental music occurred two years before that in a Cucamonga, California studio owned by electrical innovator Paul Buff. Pal Studios was eventually renamed Studio Z when Frank took over the lease in '63 with the money he'd gotten for scoring a low-budget film called Run Home Slow; the acquisition of the studio gave him his first solitary experiences at a sound board. But at Pal in '61, an instrumental version of "Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance" (first resurfacing as the closing music for Lumpy Gravy and then appearing as a vocal number on We're Only In It For the Money) was performed by some session musicians he'd found.

     With Lumpy Gravy, Zappa invented an unheard-of genre that could be called "refusal to contemplate genre." This was unmarketable, striking perhaps the hardest blow against the feelings-as-commodities and humans-as-products reality in the piece. Anything's possible in composition, Frank argues in the above quote; why stick to one form of music? Why snobbishly limit yourself? Rather than taking pains to celebrate freedom, he simply acknowledges no alternative. The LP can be considered "important" because it frees tape-collage from the elitist world of lofty artists by placing it into the same context as simple pop tunes.

     The album's title, originally gleaned from a television commercial for Aloma Linda Gravy Quick, is probably used here as a blunt term for the breaking-up of the "smooth" textures of popular orchestral music (more than one kind of pop is ridiculed on the album!). Recycled classical works are unobtrusive and "flawless" in their lack of emotional provocation. The breaking-up's done by compositional freedom and intrusions of reality -- the "lumps" of the imperfect real world. Zappa liked to cut through bullshit and pretentiousness; the lumps are the "meat of the matter," to coin a common saying, and also happen to be the tastiest part of the gravy.

     A neat twist was imposed on the title seventeen years later when Frank made a point about starving modern composers during his speech to the American Society of University Composers. "Mostly what they eat," he stated, "is brown and lumpy."

     The album has an overall rhythm that satisfies that part of the mind not touched by fleeting pop ditties. Its appeal's partly due to its cocksure smashing of conventional forms; it's like hearing someone swear at the teacher or seeing someone knock the supervisor on his ass.

      The ones [who] just really crave [my music] -- maybe [it's] just because it touches them in a weird emotional way or a weird intellectual way that they don't understand...but they like it.
          (FZ in an interview by Gary Steel in T'Mershi Duween, 9/91)

     The front-cover photo, backdropped with gravy-brown, features Zappa in a non-hip, comfortable outfit, staring up at the spectator proudly from his chambers of creation like a worn-out worker after a hard day. He's wearing a shirt occasionally aired onstage that advertises Pipco, a Santa Barbara, California pipe company that has made shirts in sponsorship of little-league teams (although Frank won't learn of the shirt's origins until long after 1967). Except for this photo, the cover and gatefold present the piece as a show or spectacle, ready to be consumed by the masses it unflatteringly mirrors. The back cover shows the composer pining for the camera in a magician-like formal outfit and top-hat, bowing with a held pair of gloves and a cheesy grin. His speech bubble asks, "Is this phase 2 of: We're Only In It For the Money?" Although that album will follow this one, this aural collage does sound like a continuation of that study of restricted perspectives and business-hyped fads that attract young minds like cattle feed. Twenty-seven years later, Civilization Phaze III will conclude the story with the end of the world, scary mock-humans worshipping and dancing around embodiments of more trends, government-maintained myths and repressive trickery. Up through this finale, the people will never leave the piano.

     The inside of the Lumpy Gravy cover continues on the spectacle theme with photos of people dancing formally in a bygone era transposed on some Mothers in their future Money garb, appealing sarcastically to the spectators with hippie-style friendliness. The audience's penchant for tales of excess is lambasted by photos of Mothers posing with nude clothing-store dummies, a hearkening to the plastic people of Absolutely Free. An audience of Franks watches with frowns of skepticism. He's pictured "exploring new territory" in an astronaut's suit, connected to the whole album by a feed line (which is possibly congruous with a studio cable). Among the credits and musicians' names, the liner notes include directions for the thick-minded average consumer ("PARTS LIST: Side One. Side Two.") and the promising demand, "NOTE: listen to side one first AND TURN IT ALL THE WAY UP!!" The Chorus roster's marked with the scrawled instruction "omit last names," making them all similar piano citizens to fit the album's ethic of conformist non-identity.

     One of the dog-faced Mothers from the up-and-coming Uncle Meat storybook (1969) peeks out from behind the illustrations, thinking "Curses!" and looking in the direction of the Chorus credits. As fans will learn from that book, the dog-like noses of the group in these cartoons are necessary to fit their enlarged brains. The insinuation's that anyone with a big brain would say "Curses!" to the idea of lost individuality.

     Zappa's "look behind the scenes" concept makes its first illustrated appearance here: Schematics and blueprints share space with studio photos of Frank and the musicians. In one picture, he shrewdly exploits the kitsch-show concept to depict unfeigned appreciation for his listeners, smiling genuinely and waving at the camera through the control-room window.

"Lumpy Gravy Part One"

     Zappa explored the LP medium's aesthetic potential and made the manual nature of record-player access a fun and often fascinating aspect of some compositions. We're Only In It For the Money played with the randomness of the phonograph needle and teased listeners' impulsive craving for predictable pop by making the stylus sound like it was jumping out of songs. Lumpy Gravy  tended to celebrate the format, the mainstream product ironically being the countercultural composer's only means of reaching listeners besides sporadic concerts.

     The story that's gradually spelled out in the dialogue (improvised within general guidelines provided by Frank from the control room) deals with the horror and humor inherent in a cheapened, commercially driven society and its psychologically cracked inmates. Having such an ominous narrative goal makes the lighter moments on the album all the more hilarious, like remarks that evoke nervous giggles at funerals. Zappa's slick about providing the relief of absurd abandon. The humor nevertheless leaves a dark taste in one's ear when the album's over and the full context felt. The music shakes and shudders from battery by brief, loud pieces of marketed Americana; to effect the desired balance between sarcasm and eerieness, Zappa inserts bits of commodity music found on other such revolving products and seems to ask us if this is what we'd rather hear. The album's even presented like a cheesy stage-show from Vaudeville or Vegas.

     Zappa's quote about "using the weapons of a disoriented and unhappy society against itself" (see the Freak Out! chapter) is applicable here, even though he was talking about the Mothers while Lumpy Gravy's a solo album -- small print under the Orchestra's name on the front cover says "With maybe even some of the Mothers of Invention." Unique, feelable music that isn't commercially driven is indeed being made partly of bits of the targets it satires, pointing out how ridiculous that financial motivation is. Lumpy Gravy also serves as a compressed illustration of all of Zappa's work in that it absolutely shatters the mythical "high/low" divisions that smatter our music, art and society.

     Ignoring the shuttered compartments favored by the leash-trained and prejudiced ear, Zappa simply made music the way he liked it and the way he wanted it heard. Exploration herein should therefore not be confused with finite analysis, which is incidental to the free pleasure of music. Besides promoting the fact that any individual's capable of composing or creating something in his own right, and stressing defiance of categorization and trend sects, Frank did amusing things to show us how easily something's stamped "improper" by a ruling class that wants to keep its citizens in ordered (and feuding) packets to detract from the big picture and discourage new ideas that might expose or break down that ruling class. On Lumpy Gravy, he fittingly chose piano-dweller dialogue involving two main things: working for a living and hiding from predators.

     We owe it to Zappa that the cliched chunks of elevator music rampant in our environment -- deadwood market fulfillment ruining orchestral music for many would-be listeners -- and the overdone formulas of antiquated classical music, devoid of integrity and blueprinted by a ruling class centuries ago, still haven't diminished the creative excitement felt by thousands of current composers even as they occasionally work behind cash registers or grease friers. In the ears of many fans, Frank has grabbed the trapped art of uninhibited creation away from the elitist unimaginatives who analyze it or fund it, and has bestowed it upon one of the more open-minded parts of our culture: kids who like rock music.

     The "cheap show" concept provides a sarcastic introduction to the composition. The facetious statement of Spider Barbour (of the band Chrysalis, also recording at Apostolic at the time) ribs the non-commercial sounds of the imminent album, trying to pass it off as just another family-friendly presentation. It's the very first thing we hear: "The way I see it, Barry, this should be a very dynamite show!" Barry's not identified in the Chorus, so he's probably an intentionally faceless cohost in a mockery of cheesy TV "spectaculars"; Spider sounds like he's been directed by Frank to talk as if reading from a cue-card.

     Although the original release of Lumpy Gravy listed only "Part One" and "Part Two," the reissue decades later broke the halves down into "indexes" named by Frank for easier following. After Spider's opening line, the main theme from Lumpy Gravy is conducted and electric-guitar-laden by Zappa. It's listed under the title "The Way I See It, Barry." It's certainly an ear-grabber, high-spirited like a break through the starting gate; it's also a deliberately poppy evasion of any high-nosed views of such a meticulously orchestrated album. This opening theme, which sounds like a song from a surf-western (were there such a thing), will appear a few years later in "Bwana Dik," a song about a guy's fixation with the size of his penis from the touring stories that will make up the 200 Motels movie. Rather than appearing on the soundtrack record, it'll be heard live on the Fillmore East, June 1971 album. Sneaking a reprise of the main theme of an album dealing in part with the perversion of the male mind in a society of dictated appeal into a song about a guy's view of his genitals is pretty slick.

     "Duodenum" doesn't slap us with the violent sounds appearing later on the album, but it's stunning anyway in its somewhat surprisingly uncynical beauty, setting the scene outside the piano with a gorgeous sunrise and then breaking into an awkward trot amongst chiming vibes, introducing us to the cerebrally lazy job-force fugitives we'll soon hear conversing.

     The aspect of cheesy commercial music -- i.e. the vibes, still hanging around after their appearance in the Mothers' first song, "Hungry Freaks, Daddy," itself a put-down of the "great Midwestern hardware store" -- makes this slow second half of the short "duo" of musical feelings an early scolding of mass-produced thought. The duodenum's the highest segment of the small intestine, right below the stomach. The point is that Americans have to digest some ridiculous things (adding a pretty yucky twist to the term "Lumpy Gravy"). The album's closing comment, "Round things are boring," will be fully explored later, but the hole-boring ants on the cover of 1975's One Size Fits All cast light on a potential reason for the title "Duodenum": Is the round record boring like a bug into the authority-hypnotized audience? Is lumpy gravy the diarrhea of this positive intrusion, superficially gross but undeniably human?

     The snippet leads right into "Oh No," the Muzak-sounding version of a vocal song that will appear on the 1970 collection of after-the-fact Mothers material Weasels Ripped My Flesh. The lyrics will deal with popular ideas of love propagated in the late '60s as opposed to real love, bashing the hippies. Lumpy Gravy's presented as a tie-in to the put-down We're Only In It For the Money. The conformist workers in the piano apparently also buy into the trends of the day; the "Oh No" reprise later on the album concludes a conversation about "switching girls," which features a guy comparing broken relationships to broken cars. "Oh No"'s other version's lyrics sneering at hippies tie the view of women as objects alongside our other advertised commodities into the hippies' "free love" concept.

     Zappa's later songs about sexual adventures come off like a fascinated anthropologist's studies of our society's twisted view of the human body. Since he makes it a point to include a lot of sex in his later lyrics, he seems to be saying, "Look at sex the way you really feel, not the way the media tells you to. Do what you want to do as an individual -- don't let any trendy school of thought tell you that promiscuity's either a triumph or a vulgarity. Do your own thing." A more direct bottom line's definitely, "It's not dirty. It's human." Our ashamedness and taboo-like mystique concerning the human body makes it seem dirty, creating a multimillion-dollar pornography industry and warping sexual feelings and self-esteem. Insecurity about not meeting trumpeted standards drives men to fixate primarily on "conquests" whether they think things like "free love" are right for them or not. This is a package deal, so to speak, and comes complete with penis-size preoccupation and the treatment of women as objects like cars.

     Music that ignores "proper" composing principles and incorporates any sounds at all (and which is sometimes referred to as avant-garde or musique concrete) will be called "free music" throughout the remainder of this book to avoid the repetition of lengthy clarifications like this one.

     A neat sound effect interrupts the too-pleasant "Oh No" with deliberate rudeness, belching or farting into the score from what sounds like a wet plastic tube being growled-through. We then hear either the scraping of an object against a cymbal or someone blowing through a straw (more round things). Spider follows up on this prank: "A bit o' nostalgia for the old folks!" A snippet of surf-music guitar introduces "Bit of Nostalgia."

     Zappa always lambasted the regurgitation of trends (see the FZ quote concerning nostalgia in the Cruising With Ruben & the Jets section), our cultural fixation on making old profit-driven crazes into sentimental yardsticks. "Bit of Nostalgia" presents on the assumed stage a past Americanism and then comments on it with a series of aural shocks that slam inventiveness down on it like a gavel. Piano-dwellers laugh wildly at the listner's (or their own) gullibility in being drawn into the surf hook, and they make snorking sounds amid the composer's dare to the listener as he gives the record a hard spin. We then hear metallic clanks, either factory sounds or insistent independent thought, and then some mock-climactic horror-movie piano chords are pounded out obnoxiously, the western music-business mind lamenting the death of the surf tune with another musical archetype. Then we're inside the piano, zooming in on one particular limited perspective. With a final, sarcastically melodramatic piano chord, the jolts and scratches concluding "Bit of Nostalgia" are neutralized by stupidity as the characters talk amongst themselves about the world outside and how they fit into it: The static-laden metallic music's cut short by the exchange of dialogue entitled "It's From Kansas."

     Gilly Townley, the sister of Apostolic's owner, indicates her peers' needs for graspable trends by kicking off the album's first exchange with "I'm advocating dark clothes." Dark and light will return later on the album and then mutate into metaphors for open- and closed- (clouded-) minded states on Civilization Phaze III. (The subtext of racism should be eschewed; it's the least likely conveyance Frank intended with the "dark vs. light" motif.)

     Monica, the studio's receptionist, seems to wake up from her own preoccupations, startled by Gilly into realizing that she's not as unique as she thought: "If I'm not alone...how long have I been asleep?" Zappa's editing here is brilliant, showing that both of these girls are herd-followers and want to stay awake and caught up with whatever's hip, and that they both occupy the ignorance-maintaining confines of the piano: Gilly answers, "As long as I have."

     A vague shadow of the musical exasperation we heard before now clouds behind the sounds of the voices: A very low instrument makes this metaphorical look at society into a flesh-creep for the listener as Monica typically wonders about other compartments of people, the sky looking bluer to her on the other side of the fence but appearing just as suffocating from the vantage point the composer's given us: "Did you ever live in a drum?" When Gilly says that she hasn't, Monica tries to salvage a sense of individuality or at least self-importance, avoiding the admission of how typecast her persona is: "Well, then, you aren't me!" Gilly admits that the darkness of the piano (contrast the ominous atmosphere here with the sunny beginning of "Duodenum") did make her dream she was in a drum. Individuality seems out of reach for this participant in social doctrine; even her mind's imaginative side, which harbors a subconscious bid for fantasy, is affected by the climate. She's inside a drum even when she's dreaming. Monica qualifies, "Dreaming is hard." Something that should feel natural produces self-doubt.

     The piano wires ring in conversational reverberation as a discussion about the need for something over the head, the protection and validation of a group or image, ensues. A third girl has joined in. The ringing's softest when the idea's brought up about leaving the piano and putting behind this narrow outlook. But nobody seems to know what's outside the dictated frame of existence until Spider wakes up and reveals what it's like out there, living without the shelter of a caste: dark. Nobody's shedding light on things for him, telling him where to go or even how to think and act. Instead of perceiving this freedom, he admits to All-Night John (the studio manager) that pure paranoia keeps his universe from expanding. His "water" stays dark, a metaphor that John's brought up. Spider keeps this murky perspective all over him in order to avoid danger. This is ironic in light of the angle Zappa provides on dangerous authoritarian mind-control. The mention of paranoia also connects to the druggie parody that the conversations might suggest; Spider's proclamation that he's feeling something so typically associated with being stoned makes him sound like he revels in being typecast by his friends. Moreover, the water in his "washing machine" is dark because it's sympathetic; it's home to him, understanding his fears and the reasons for which he's yielded.

     Sympathy's another commodity in this cheap culture: Spider tells John that it can be found at the local drug store. Even emotions have been relegated to the factory line of people making up the world that these folks inhabit. This continues later as relationships, girls and cars take on equal weight as packaged items.

     When John asks how much the sympathy costs, Spider's indirect answer is "It's from Kansas," introducing the segment named likewise. Spider has simply chosen a place he knows nothing about, hoping that somewhere in the Midwest, stereotypically known as barren and unfashionable, some sincere feelings might exist. This exotic sympathy's been imported.

     The "dynamite show" motif returns as "It's From Kansas" blares out joyride music, the trumpets bouncing along like they don't know what kind of album they're on. The product isn't genuine; the tune plays faster than it was recorded. The sympathy's just another shabbily concocted, instantly available product, displayed along with the headache remedies and diet books at the store; the music here reflects this hilariously. If it wasn't meant to be enjoyed as neat music, of course, Frank wouldn't have written it. Songs within an overall concept can also be enjoyable as individual items; the way he pulls off these separate entertainments simultaneously is one of the reasons his stuff hits the ear so powerfully.

     Some heart-pulling free music made up of Frank's percussive tides and crashes interrupts the horns, beginning "Bored Out 90 Over." Motorhead interjects the title, which describes an auto engine and provides the first hint that the term "boring" from later on the album indicates more than mere dullness. The percussion takes on a surfy 4:4 rhythm similar to that in Freak Out!'s "The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet." With the popular beat, the parodies of marketed music on Freak Out! return to haunt us. We can connect the defeat of the percussion over the horns to the Mothers' 1966 infiltration of (and boring into) society, turning that society's own weapons against it.

     More free music, mostly percussive, blows a strong gale over the factory shelves; things are knocked off cabinets and some destruction's caused to perplex the good little numbered citizens who stand by. Zappa doesn't let them clock in; the whine of the breeze holds them at bay as they're shown what should really be done to their habitat. The trumpets are therefore revealed to be a lure; the infiltration method's entertaining in itself. This upsetting musical storm has been the sneaky end to the baiting snippet of commodity music all along.

     Towards the end of the segment, the wind starts to catch electric cables, ripping them from the walls; the wrong one's tripped and a damn funny bit of Oriental music bursts out. Roy Estrada plays the part of the easily enthralled spectator: "Almost Chinese, huh!" The bit of silence before the remark brings us a step back from the snatch of music, making the words even funnier. We hear applause from like-minded people and grunting pigs (reeking of the herd concept on the album). If the pigs in Lumpy Gravy's plot are truly the authorities they're later insinuated as, Zappa's putting the initiators of this silly culture's elements in with the gullible morons they govern; their tastes are no different.

     More pranky snorks begin "Almost Chinese," and are immediately followed by Motorhead's declaration, "'Cause I was makin', uh, $2.71 an hour," previewing his monologue later on the album-side. The Chinese surf music indicates another element of the commercial destruction of musical freedom: the uninformed, prejudicial way in which we're trained to view other cultures. The ruling class discourages ideas that might threaten it; we have to be made to regard other peoples as "wrong." The cheap music derides the ways in which we stereotype foreign cultures and how we're made to glimpse only tiny packets of other civilizations. The surf progression behind the Oriental flavoring is both an obvious reprise of the album's earlier sneer and a joke about how we like to Americanize everything we hear. Some sped-up snorking and coughing tries to eject the bad-tasting pseudo-Chinese music from the body, which isn't accepting what's been distilled into the duodenum for hopeful digestion. Simultaneously, "real" human sounds are turned into music.

     "Switching Girls" begins with Motorhead's rant equating women with products, namely cars; the marketplace stranglehold, mind-dulling work ethic (his priority is "$2.71 an hour") and endorsement of fashion herds all serve to warp sexuality and self-image, making sex both an acquired instant service and a requisite flaunting. Many of the album's previous sociological points thus merge.

     Zappa can strike fear into the listener alongside humor better than any cheap horror movie can. The commercialization of life can even permeate a man's feelings for a woman. Any chance of mental initiative during youth is discouraged by media-fueled typecasting. Cars and girls are often seen together; the way we're brought up equates them in male-fulfillment importance. We'll hear a young man thinking the same way in Uncle Meat's "Dog Breath, in the Year of the Plague." Frank will also show us just how cheap our view of relationships has gotten with the Ruben album.

     "Oh No Again" reprises that song after "Switching Girls" ends with sped-up "dynamite show" instrumental phrases. Girls are dancing plastic dolls on this stage. This spiffy follow-up on the earlier tune switches rhythmic meters toward the end, making it now more attractive than cheesy, although the over-grand strings and horns achieve an extremely sarcastic climax.

     For "At the Gas Station," Motorhead gets in the spotlight with his participant's-eye view of the robotic work force. The unsettling thing's that nothing would seem out of order here if the job stories weren't placed in the context of the album. "Another Pickup" is named after his last remark -- it may as well be "Another Girl," especially considering that girls are "picked up" -- and treats us to some funny, catchy "rough-ridin'" music before "Lumpy Gravy Part One" ends with the unexpected optimism of creative victory: Frank's longest stretch of free music to appear on an album so far.

     After the honking harmonica of "Another Pickup," the free music of "I Don't Know If I Can Go Through This Again" grips the listener in its contrastingly unique air and serves to clear the heart of all we've heard, preparing us to engage part two of the album by prefacing it with a musical view instead of the absurd sociological one with which we've been battered.

     This breathtaking segment's named as such because of All-Night John's comment on having to hear more examples of his own conformity. It's also possibly one of Frank's self-deprecating jokes about his "weird" music. The segment cuts into the free music concluding "Another Pickup" with some orchestration at least as lovely as the beginning of "Duodenum." It in turn is interrupted by free music. The two become intertwined as the piece goes on. One doesn't get the feeling of any impending aural punchline here.

     The fascinating way in which this phase plays with one's mind explains the "craving" Zappa spoke of in the earlier quote. Snorks are given as much musical weight as sped-up piano; attractive snare rolls give way to dramatic horn diatonics emphasized with rumbling thunder; enticing woodwinds explore this world that could be beautiful. Sped-up cabaret music also relinquishes to compelling diatonics; the "show" ethic is more fun when used as a compositional ingredient rather than a general setting. Scary tornados of wet-sounding percussion lead into the death-rattle of teeth (discussed in the Ruben section); a pretty, haunting piano bestows some sympathy (but not the kind from Kansas) for its brainwashed occupants. A foreboding final chord elicits fear for the characters as they prepare to tackle the pigs and ponies in the second act.

"Lumpy Gravy Part Two"

     Nearly every segment on the album is immediately contrasted by a joke or abrupt musical change. The piece comments on itself throughout. The angle-shift's occasionally more gradual: In the first half, Motorhead's materialistic anecdotes in "Another Pickup" come to be balanced by humor as a supportive gathering of brain-dead guys increases in volume. Their macho commentating deals with cars and musical artists as they float from the right speaker to the left. One hard-to-discern utterance even interrupts Motorhead early on for a second in its enthusiastic affirmation of the ambiguous "lubing" subject. This transforms the disheartening robot-worker subtext into an aloof jeer. In the same manner, part two's opener, "Very Distraughtening," reveals the first half's wonderful conclusion as a mere breather; the mind drops out of the free realm and back into the cramped piano.

     The characters duly sound even more moronic than before. The return to the herd of dumb men is introduced with a loud "ba-BOMP-BODDY!" that sounds like a drunk guy trying to sing along with the hokey mainstream music that's been darting in. With the release of the posthumous The Lost Episodes in 1996, this voice will reveal itself as a snippet of "Ronnie Sings?," a recording of Frank's boyhood friend Ronnie Williams making rough-throated scat sounds to Frank's guitar accompaniment in an Ontario living room in 1961 or '62. Ronnie's booger-saving and fart-lighting affinities are among the subjects of "Let's Make the Water Turn Black" on the Money album, that song also cutting momentarily to the voice. Its inclusion on that counterpart album to Lumpy Gravy makes Ronnie and the other piano inhabitants pre-Haight models -- products of programmed western ignorance and bad parenting, like the young walking calamities in "Mom & Dad" and "The Idiot Bastard Son."

     The voice figures into the plot as a "little pig with wings" (although sounding more like an emphysemic sheep). The pig will fly around the piano again on Civilization Phaze III. In the early '70s, Zappa will record a long comical piece called "The Adventures of Greggery Peccary," concerning a pig who sits in an office and comes up with trends for the world's youth to buy into. The flying pig in "Very Distraughtening" is constantly haunting the piano tenants, and they remain at a loss as to what it's doing or whether it's even affecting them. After John identifies the creature, Spider says, "I hear you've been having trouble with pigs and ponies" in his best official-sounding voice, prefaced by a comical "Yi!" and followed by the sound of a door slamming or the pig bonking against the piano's inner surface.

     Obvious "us against them" connotations exist in the inhabitants' fear of all of these animals, especially since pigs are among the creatures ("pigs" of course being hip slang for "cops" and probably used here in broad governmental terms). The animal references were most likely initiated by the composer, since he was often giving suggestions over the studio intercom; but the players' improvisations rendered most of the actual dialogue. Both the pigs and the ponies threaten any pianist (if you will) who meddles with them. The pigs represent unfair control and the ponies, while also feared by the main characters, are confronted by the pigs. The ponies are possibly ignorants in other societal compartments. In "Part Two," we'll hear clues that they may be American soldiers.

     "Lumpy Gravy Part Two" -- or at least most of it, one would think -- was singled out by Frank as his favorite part of the album, referred to as "Pigs and Ponies" although this general title doesn't appear as a subdivision in the reissue's track listing.

      "Pigs and Ponies" really says what I wanted it to say and the performance is as good as I could have hoped for. It is 100% of what I'd intended.
          (FZ in 1968 as quoted in A Visual Documentary by Miles)

     After the first two voices are interrupted by the slamming sound, All-Night John says something that closely resembles "What about us? Don't we get any?," the loudest complaint typically heard in our commodity culture, in which people are made to believe that certain possessions are important and enviable. The class-envy topic will arise frequently in future Zappa songs. John's complaints are backed up by the others; sirens and clanks ring in one speaker and then the other (the "official" guy making a commotion to feign concern?) as the voices, heard likewise, follow up on the greed with "Just the opposite...we don't get any...that's very distraughtening."

     "We don't get any because we're otherwise" is voiced by one of the girls as the clanging gets louder. Then it stops with a thunk -- perhaps someone's closed another varnished, wooden portal to the confusing outside world (or someone out there has done it to stop the noise) -- and we hear a conversation rife with musical metaphors taking place between two stoned-sounding inhabitants as the mic zooms in again on a specific part of the group.

     Frank's repeatedly making the listener a perceptive, intelligent antithesis to these characters, and the whole picture's often seen from different angles. This is a common aspect of his music anyway; while the listener's made to feel, in the interest of education, that he too is guilty of some of the laughable traits of the characters, a vantage point's presented that compliments the fan who really listens by giving him the role of the aware person with whom these anthropological discoveries are being shared.

     "White Ugliness" is a hilarious term for Zappa, classic R&B aficionado, to pick as a track title featuring two easily sold Americans.

     Many compositions that have been accepted as "GREAT ART" through the years reek of these HATEFUL PRACTICES... Tin Pan Alley songs and jazz standards thrive on [the chord progression] II-V-I. To me, this is a HATEFUL PROGRESSION... II-V-I is the essence of bad "WHITE-PERSON MUSIC."
          (The Real Frank Zappa Book)

     Zappa had also never liked what white singers (i.e. Elvis) did to certain black songs.

     Spider's explanation of existence at the end of "Very Distraughtening" (which serves as an introductory speech to the "White Ugliness" part of the conversation) about the universe being one big note, ultimately repeated (with originally excluded bits stuck back in) on Civilization Phaze III, could well be taken as a characterized angle on an abstract truth as Zappa sees it, since we hear in the later version that he proffers the idea from the control room. But in the piano-gang context, it also serves as a parody on the "enlightened" status with which druggies are ordained by themselves and their peers, especially in Lumpy Gravy's era. The characters' ignorance continues to be exposed, element by element.

     When we celebrate Ignorance and make that the National Standard of Excellence, we embarrass ourselves. We celebrate it in hit records, TV sitcoms, most films, most commercials and, to a great extent, in our schools.
     [Separately:] Corporate policy (itself fueled by drugs and alcohol) has decreed the breeding and maintenance of hundreds of millions of helpless illiterates, destined to spend their lives buying useless shit.
          (Ibid.)

     As Spider talks about the "big note" that everything makes up, the concept possibly being included as a sly comment on Zappa's conceptual continuity, he touches on the fact that the good guys and the bad are made of the same essential stuff and are simply trained against one another. Ordaining this kind of character with flashes of insight is the composer's middle finger at the authorities and influences that keep everyone as ignorant as possible; one of his axioms is that there's hope in the individual human spirit (200 Motels's "Strictly Genteel" chimes "God bless the mind of the man in the street," Zappa affecting indifference to his own atheism in the interest of universal identification), no matter how far gone some of the Western World's occupants might appear.

     Catching the intellectual paradox quickly off its "all men are created equal" bounce, a girl says "You mean, just we know that!" It's either Monica, Maxine or Becky (other "girls from Apostolic," as the credits read) continuing with the unwitting bashing of "heightened consciousness." Spider replies with a dry "right" that's pure comedy.

     Like many of the other bits of dialogue, this exchange is followed by some abrupt, harsh music as "Very Distraughtening" crashes to a close, forming a transition from its "big note" theme into the attack recount in "White Ugliness." Spider's "right" is immediately belched-on, and then the speedy percussive debris of his words, once again illustrating the dialogue's confused thought processes with the warped senses of Zappa's imaginative sounds, whirls around from speaker to speaker while more electric shorts occur in this big, mock-factory-made show machine that's presenting the album for us. The boundary between Lumpy Gravy's creative spectacle and real life is breaking down, becoming more transparent as the characters' ignorance and behavior appear so consistently reflective of people we know or are. The spectators in 1984's Thing-Fish gradually talk like the twisted main characters to reveal a similar convergence.

     Another voice of commodity America appears amidst the white noise, the indecipherable but unmistakable sound of a voice on a radio with bad reception. The sound's instant familiarity points out the listener's habitual consumption of radio. "Lonely Little Girl" from We're Only In It For the Money is catchy enough to be a teaser that illuminates our tendancies toward formulated sounds; is this Lumpy Gravy snippet a slick reference to "It's His Voice on the Radio" (the alternate title of that song)?

     The sound fades into the left channel. In the eye of this noise-storm, Zappa's guitar intro from the Money album appears in longer but sped-up form -- it even sounds here like the guitar on "Lonely Little Girl," all but cementing this one of many connections between the albums -- in a backward, Eastern-sounding comment on Hendrix's tone to continue on the theme of fashionable '60s iconology (Zappa nevertheless admired Jimi, and he's on the Money album cover in a tributary fashion). Spider then blasts Californian youth in spite of himself by mocking its sillier music and one of its catch phrases, "doing your thing": "Merry-go-'round, merry-go-'round...and they call that 'doing their thing.'" John replies bemusedly, "Oh, yeah? That's what 'doing your thing' is!" The so-called revolutionary youth of America can't even get it together among themselves to understand each other's vernacular.

     Before Louie interjects with his loud story to Roy Estrada, Spider concludes, "The thing is to put a motor in yourself." This reference to robotic servitude, and its comparison to a merry-go-'round, the subject of a supposedly "do your own thing"-type song -- not to mention the "motor" throwback to Motorhead's mindset -- will spawn the opening piece on Civilization Phaze III.

     This was also a bit of a self-deprecating joke on Frank's part; "Merry-Go-'Round" was a song by Wild Man Fischer, a discovery of Frank's who'd eventually record the tune for an album on Zappa's label. A funny farm ex-con, Larry Fischer's songs were simplistic nursery rhymes with solitary musical ideas (a precursor to Washington's post-punk K Records and the "childlike" ethics of bands like Beat Happening, who influenced local peers like Nirvana).

     In his book, Zappa explains how one of the guys came to be in the Chorus:

     Another regular [at the Garrick Theater concerts in New York, 1967] was a guy we called "Louie the Turkey" -- because of his laugh. His real name was Louis Cuneo. He wound up on the Lumpy Gravy album as one of the people talking about incomprehensible stuff, inside a piano.
     We would always know when Louie was in the theater because we could hear him in the back of the room. I would invite him onstage, give him a stool to sit on, hand him the microphone and stop the music. He would sit there and laugh -- AT NOTHING -- and the whole audience would laugh with him for five minutes. Then we thanked him and he'd leave.
          (Ibid.)

     Louie's excited recount of white ponies trying to kill him and his valiant defense and escape ends up as a joke as he talks about picking up sticks to throw at his assailants and Roy interrupts with "Pickup Sticks?" which refers back to the groping for innocence in "Merry-Go-'Round" (and of course the title of "Another Pickup"). Louie humors him with "Did you ever play that game? That [the exchange] was funny!" and laughs like a turkey.

     Status "races" are now mentioned, like the President and the Pope, and the reference to a cigar in a deliberate-sounding Freudian jibe points back to the sexual dilemmas of "Another Pickup" and the instrumental precursor to "Bwana Dik." Louie and Roy are scared of what's outside, so amidst nervous laughter they pray for safety; but the separations get even more narrow as Roy says, "You do yours and I'll do mine" as an edit-composer's comment on the ludicrousness of organized religion (like the prior mention of the Pope and some appealing religious bashing on Civilization Phaze III, among other albums). What they're concerned about is Motorhead's safety; he's apparently ventured outside their compartment, or possibly even the piano. A brief mention of pimples adds physical self-consciousness to the makeup of these media victims, tying nicely into the kitschy "showtime" ethic. Frank probably didn't mind Roy asking, "Did it have teeth?" after Louie said "White ugliness" (see the Ruben chapter). Such coincidental dialogue goes a long way toward explaining why Zappa liked this part of the album.

     With Roy's "Amen" (thrusting the name of the studio, Apostolic, into conceptual continuity), the segment so-titled begins. Its initial rhythmic fulcrum's a tambourine pointing at the Eastern-sounding beat in Money's "Who Needs the Peace Corps?" Anchored in the right speaker for a while, it darts to the left before sneaking back for this bit's conclusion. A sped-up (or high-pitched), fretless-sounding bass gives us an early whiff of Zappa's upcoming compositional base of jazz/rock; accessibly structured bass patterns will make a real introduction in Uncle Meat's version of "King Kong" and continue into the early seventies. "Little Umbrellas" on 1969's Hot Rats, "Get a Little" on 1970's Weasels Ripped My Flesh and "Twenty Small Cigars" on Chunga's Revenge from that year are all instrumentals whose titles contain "little" references, making one wonder why Frank attaches low notes to smallness. Is it a reference to the lurking evil people in the world, poorly endowed with brains or other things?

     The liquid bass sounds in this first part of "Amen" will make three further long, occasionally improvisational appearances that especially stand out as culminations of the jazz-bass of Zappa's late-'60s period. The first is "Big Swifty" on 1972's Waka/Jawaka: Is this advertising agency full of low, little people too? Pigs, even? A peccary's such an animal, a specialized version of the generalized swine on the Lumpy Gravy album. The other pieces are "Blessed Relief" and "The Grand Wazoo" on the '72 album of which the latter's the title track, originally named after another power-bent character. The Big Swifty agency and the Grand Wazoo will even join up in Grand Wazoo concerts, during which bits of the future "Adventures of Greggery Peccary" (who works at Big Swifty) are played by the brass section. It's the "Who is making those new brown clouds?" refrain in "Peccary," indicating one of the many problems caused by these sorts of small people.

     The bass won't subsequently make such similarly slippery sounds until "Friendly Little [!] Finger" on 1976's Zoot Allures. It comes full-circle (if you'll pardon the expression) in "Rubber Shirt" on Sheik Yerbouti in '79, sounding almost like the same recording as the high sliding in "Amen" despite its new presence in this edit-fabricated piece.

     The tambourine provides a loose frame. The drums are most likely played by Frank himself. It all sounds less like factory clutter than the percussive equivalent to the blundering characters' dialogue and personalities. In the left speaker, we notice, one of the sound's elements has gotten stuck. It malfunctions quietly and comically like a neglected little animal in the corner. It quivers in its attempts to start working again. So much for the full spectacle. It's a compositional smirk at the possibility of a part of this silly society suddenly losing face and revealing itself to be rubbish. The effect's achieved by an electric guitar, a harpsichord or some plucked piano or cello strings.

     Another tambourine's added to escalate the short-circuit, and then a multiple cymbal-crash initiates a different view of the mess, the second half of "Amen." Dissonant horns and strings sound like an alleyway murder off a corrupted street. The rumble changes from the din of idiots to the sounds of dangerous masterminds.

     And so the evil revelation closing this religiously titled segment rumbles to a weeping stop, the sound now stripped of all but the sympathetic horror of a drawn-out chord of horns and strings. Its suspense doesn't let the ear down; a horrible incident of some sort is marked by a quick, jarring drum fill. Its aftermath's a chilling snippet of music. This living, helpless result of wicked intentions fades in and out in pitch and volume, a superbly executed pulsation of images that sounds like impossibly conducted backward music.

     A high tom or conga laughs humorlessly at everything with a sudden bonk. A single right-channel woodblock pop compliments this abrupt turn of timbre with ugly cuteness. An organ or clavier adds a misplaced bit of carnival air left over from the stage-show intentions with a left-channel punctuation, setting off a lumbering series of instrumental comments from keys, drums, woodblocks and the sliding bass. Rats scurry to reconvene for further corruptive strategy. They're the ones saying "Amen."

     Building cymbals and instruments rise to a mock-dramatic finale. "Just One More Time" adds startling but much-needed hilarity, relighting the stage that the real world's been placed on by product-pushers -- perhaps the ultimate point of the album's tongue-in-cheek "dynamite show" facade. The brash smirks of the Captain probably come from Studio Z circa 1963; the vocal's similar to what's heard in the jams on The Lost Episodes.

     Beefheart's line "Come on, boys" makes his closer, "Just one more time," seem to call the dorky characters back to converse some more. The final organ note's replaced by a snork that reflects the cast's antics near the beginning of the album. "Just One More Time"'s small bit of dialogue begins, another snippet that will be repeated in the wider context of "clouded mind" metaphors on Civilization Phaze III. Here, it touches the tip of the iceberg on the clouds of smoke -- empowered people's closed outlooks -- and how their music, as Spider says to John and one of the Apostolic girls, has a dense, impenetrable light and keeps the smoke stationary; the pigs can't question what they do, or everything on which their livelihoods are based will break up (they are, after all, "only in it for the money"). Spider refers to "that thing on their neck," a precursor to the tie markings on Greggery.

     If the ponies move, their growing hair will apparently upset the smoke. John's reply is, "That's the basis of all their nationalism. Like, if they can't salute the smoke [thus moving their heads] every morning when they get up..." This makes a strong argument for the ponies being military personnel, voluntarily trained but every bit as culturally enslaved as the piano's tenants.

     Spider qualifies him: "Yeah, it's a vicious circle. You got it." The phrase "vicious circle" figures into the multitude of indications in the album's last line, "Round things are boring." Like governmental vicious circles? Boring indeed, despite the dangers. And possibly boring into the consciousness of impressionable young minds.

     "A Vicious Circle" begins with sped-up horns and drums providing the musical equivalent of the narrow, self-absorbed comedy of such a circle. A close circle of associates, like at Big Swifty, could also be perceived as vicious in their uncaring, often surprisingly ruthless agendas. Fast bass or guitar joins the design, and John attempts to engage one of the less evil-looking members in either a fight or a talk: "Pony!" he addresses, to no avail. It just stirs them up more.

     With a few more high clunks and clanks, an electronic sound like the switching of a picture at a slide show sparks quickly, and some relatively calm horns and strings prelude a Motown-like bass guitar phrase that segues the album into "King Kong." The title of this first outing of the album-side-long Uncle Meat piece points to Zappa's lifelong fascination with cheap horror movie monsters. Mr. Kong lumbers about in a slow, heavy groove that sounds like the least sarcastic material on the album that isn't free music.

     This incarnation of the tune, consisting of drums, bass and sax-dominated brass, is in 4:4 instead of the gliding swing of the upcoming longer version. Bunk's credited as part of the horn section. This "showtime in Detroit" funk fanfare grooves along for a short while before the creature does some tripping and stumbling in annotated free-music form, the same instruments being joined by subtle piano trickles. It sounds as if the monster's gotten drunk on the way home from a ruthless day at the office.

     Roy Estrada interjects, "Drums are too noisy when you got no corners to hide in." A loud drum can be considered a vicious circle. The line kicks off "Drums Are Too Noisy." A humorously dramatic snare-strings-and-horn movie phrase (concluding the horror film ethic) comments on the statement, and then this segment's banter begins. All-Night John's planning an offensive against some of the animals, poking fun at the 1960s' inept words of revolution. A new animal's mentioned: A guy and a girl say "Oh no, man, kangaroos?" There apparently exist more kinds of bad guys than one can keep up with. One of the girls is now edited-in: "And then they eat it when they get home." John retorts, "If it's still alive." Another force has risen that both the piano inhabitants and the prior hostile animals have to deal with, making their feuds almost moot in the hopelessness of it all (and these creatures have built-in pockets!).

     "Kangaroos" is an ebbing piece of music pitting gliding bowed strings and dark horns against plucked staccato notes. The sneaky attack of the animals on the victims' psyches slips, rises and falls in lovely rhythmic tides before Spider flicks the inner wall of the piano and explains that the battle's even overtaking the hiding dwellers as they wade in their dark water: "...envelops the bathtub!"

     The definition of "envelops" (no latter E) probably represents one way Zappa looked at his surrounding-the-listener mixing of multiple environments (he seized upon the short-lived idea of quadrophonic stereo in the early '70s and suggested a six-speaker set-up as the ideal way to hear his orchestral pieces, actually using such a mix from which to turn 1993's Yellow Shark album into its final, two-channel format). A piece called "Envelopes" (with the E) was eventually played in both an orchestral arrangement and a rock one. This was possibly a joke on the common mispronunciation of the earlier title.

     "Envelops the Bath Tub" begins the stretch of transfixing orchestration that closes Lumpy Gravy before its sarcastic, quite jarring conclusion brackets everything in Showtime Americana. Some offensive horn lines from the pigs' permeating presence quack self-righteous drama into the scene from the right channel, joined by another "low, little" puddle of sneakiness as murky bassoons appear to the left. Bits of the machine, wires ruined in recent events, ring and fizzle in the distance with eerie echoes, and then a lonely horn gives us our overview of this wasteland, a pitying but disgusted line that's eventually complimented by a wistful string section. Drum plunks -- falling bits of debris -- continue at the distant end of the environment as dental percussion mocks with its harbinging of the impersonal and image-irrelevant Grim Reaper. Plucked low strings jut up occasionally from a place much closer to the ear: attempts by the kangaroo battle's various victims to stir, to get a word in about all this uncalled-for creativity. The listener's made to creep around the site. Comely clangs gain a fixed rhythmic presence in the right speaker, imaging the inevitability of a funeral or a soulless march in servitude to the victors (the kangaroos, the pigs or even angels of death, ultimately triumphant over all, making societal hang-ups moot and dumb).

     The bells now kick into a lopsided march. Woodwinds make the marchers sound like drunken puppets; the evil in the shadows of the left channel now asserts itself more. A refined waltz answers it, rife with the squeaks of nervy protestors or yelps of pain as they're whipped back into line.

     The march halts suddenly, bells and marimbas now conversing. The waltzing march starts up again in lurches, pausing occasionally to deal with little incidents. The strings bow a dark climax as we hear more skull-chattering. Gongs and dissonant strings comment fearfully. It all echoes off into the fading, eerily quiet air of intermittent drums, woodwinds and clangs. And as we find out on Zoot Allures, "The Torture Never Stops."

     All-Night John's remark about everything we've heard is "'Cause round things, uh, are boring." It's the concluding declaration of the whole piece, the last statement before the exhibition machine takes over again. It's chilling when considered in the larger context in which this edit takes place.

     The first boring "round thing" to be considered is the repetitiveness of menial work and its striving to meet the bottom lines of supply and demand (i.e. in round-record factories). Pop music has circular, repetitious beats. Zappa found purely commercial stuff, the stuff on the radio that he attacked with the MOI, boring in light of the sheer possiblities offered by music. The round record is a mass-produced item. We can think back to the empowered people's self-enraging melee of insecurity and animosity in "A Vicious Circle": This round thing's boring (dull) in its closed-minded (dark-clouded) pattern. Fad-based symbols heard in youth dialect -- merry-go-'rounds -- are uninspired. We can also think of the round zeroes indicating the wasteland insinuated on the 1974 album Apostrophe (') (each of the first few lines ends with the "o" sound). Frozen vistas abound, and there's always the "vigorous circular motion" (the reduction of society into a barren plain is relentless) performed by Nanook the Eskimo as he rubs urine into the fur-trapper's face. Zeroes are nothing interesting. A dormant landscape's especially boring. This ties in with the opening words on Money: "Zero...empty...space."

     On the back cover of One Size Fits All, "Round things are boring" appears as one of many messages bordering a circular star map, indicating the boredom of the confinement of such a limitless place that "fits all" as the universe to a convenient, measureable shape to accommodate our filtered minds. But the statement also refers to the little drawings at the bottom of the illustration: Ants bore into the "earth's crust" (mentioned in 1971's onstage tale "Billy the Mountain," heard on 1972's Just Another Band From L.A.) and the buildingscape of our toy-like urban living environment. Self-important humans' actual irrelevance is revealed by nature; along with Billy the Mountain, consider the earthquake on said back cover, sending other buildings tumbling into the void. The ants (round things) are boring into the flimsy base that's been set up for us. From the way the bugs are tearing up the cheap-looking city, it would appear that a round thing -- we're back to the record -- is boring into the trained viewpoints in our society and the musical mainstream, causing damage to conformity.

     It's something of a paradox that companies which manufacture and distribute this art form (strictly for profit) might one day be changed or controlled by young people who were motivated to action by the products these companies sell.
          (FZ, in his 1968 essay "The New Rock" -- Thanks to Zappologist Joe Palmer)

     The music's reducing the dictators to bugs' meat right before your very ears whether you notice it or not as you play the record.

     Many bits of conceptual continuity are deliberately double-edged (or, as in this case, multi-edged); therein lies half its fun and one aspect of Zappa's brilliance. The compact disc is a more recent side-player in conceptual continuity, since we've returned to a round product, the obsolescence of vinyl records being immaterial due to the still-applicable concepts of roundness and revolution.

     The unanticipated conclusion to Lumpy Gravy is now relatively hilarious. The instrumental precursor to "Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance" (a song lyricized on Money with the naive idea that eventually, no one will have to worry about his appearance -- a slight tie-in to the future title of One Size Fits All) leaps into the speakers in full-arrangement form, including the orchestra, keyboards and Ventures-type guitar lines. The music is again sped up. The cyclic melody is a blatant round thing. Frank had this song, probably without lyrics, since 1961 (its original version from Studio Z can be heard on The Lost Episodes). The song slams Zappa's sarcasm home most effectively after such attractively unorthodox orchestral music and such a quiet, disturbing ending. It dumps us back into society to decide on it as we may -- and wonder if we're inside our own pianos.

We're Only In It For the Money

     By mid-1967, Frank had the Mothers' correspondence with fans worked out. A standardized letter was sent to each of the 300-odd people who'd written to the group since the release of Freak Out!. It constituted an initial reply and information about how to join the fan club. A second letter was sent to those who joined.

     The first, before being edited to exclude the sexual references (there was some legal reason for this), read:

     We could have sent you a cheesy form letter, all "The Mothers of Invention want to thank you blah blah for writing such a nifty letter blah and they love their fans who are so loyal and thoughtful blah and blah. But they are so busybusybusybusy that it would be virtually impossible for them to even begin to attempt to consider the possibility of any sort of warm personal reply, blah, blah, blaaahhh." We could have sent you that sort of cheesy letter; instead, we have sent you this cheesy letter, the text of which reads:
     "Dearest Wonderful and Perceptive Person: The Mothers of Invention want to thank you blah blah for writing us such a nifty letter, some of which you have written to us on toilet paper -- how wonderfully original. Golly gee, we are so awful busy being thrown out of restaurants and hotels in Montreal, ignored by taxis in New York -- have you had that trouble too? It's getting