Lumpy Gravy
Without pausing for breath after the first two albums, Frank proudly offered something that was an even less orthodox shelf product than his pop lampooning, blues mutations and operatic exploits had been. He wasn't happy with Absolutely Free, the Mothers' second collection; it was funny and still quite innovative for 1967, but the brief recording sessions had been inadequate for getting optimal takes, fully exploring ideas or achieving satisfactory sound quality during the mixing stage.
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, made up of the musicians and characters as they appeared piecemeal on the album rather than in any actual cooperative performances. The "Chorus" (speaking cast) was certainly edited together from separate sessions and woven into the arrangement in great premeditated detail.
Making several contributors appear as a single, unified group, in spite of the fact that their separately recorded bits were later assembled into an ongoing piece, satirized manufactured bands. These were definitely around -- Gary Lewis and the Playboys, the Monkees, assorted bubble-gum groups -- and all were, on the records at least, products of their respective producers. In that sense, Frank himself was really the AEESO & Chorus. A painstakingly crafted display of creative breakthroughs was, at least in the sleeve notes and credits, being sardonically presented in the manner of those pop groups' throwaway ditties.
With this album, Zappa invented an unheard-of genre that could be called "refusal to contemplate genre." Anything's possible in composition, Frank argued in his book; why stick to one form of music? Why snobbishly limit oneself? Rather than taking pains to celebrate freedom, he simply acknowledged no alternative. The record album as a medium could be considered important to this controlled abandon, because it freed tape-collage from the elitist world of lofty artists and placed it into the same context as accessible rock tunes.
The album featured only four Mothers: Bunk Gardner played woodwinds and brass, while the other three -- Jimmy Carl Black, Roy Estrada and Jim "Motorhead" Sherwood -- were listed as members of the Chorus: groups of people recorded conversing inside a Steinway grand piano during several sessions. The dialogue was edited into the composition via Frank's razor blade, the music as a total comprising these newly angled conversations along with the songs played by the orchestra, the sound movies made up of percussive and electronic experiments, and fragments of old pop numbers. There weren't any lyrical tunes in this long medley; the intended vocal facet of the music was the sculpted piano dialogue.
The piano was inside Apostolic Studios in New York City. According to Frank, he'd amassed eight or nine hours of recorded conversation from which to select. The album, one long composition divided into two parts (record sides), was the result of shaping gobs of raw material into a striking, provocative program. Lumpy Gravy conjures visions, on a purely technical level, of Zappa sitting hunched over his editing desk, slicing exacted lengths of sound from this tape-reel or that, and restructuring them into the presentation he wants us to hear.
The people in the piano would resurface on the subsequent Mothers album, We're Only In It For the Money; they'd also be heard in a few spots on following albums and finally on 1994's Civilization, Phaze III, which would continue the plot from where it left off on Lumpy Gravy.
Completed in 1967, this represented the earliest commercial appearance of Zappa's orchestral work, and it was the first release to feature his unrestrained exploration of the compositional potential of sounds not normally associated with music (like snorks, static and percussive noises achieved by hitting things other than drums). The speed of these sounds was often altered to get a novel effect. The depth of Frank's symphonic vision hadn't been apparent prior to Lumpy Gravy because he hadn't been allowed to take his time with the first two albums; MGM had held him to a very tight recording schedule back in California, which was one of the reasons he'd soon start his own record label. But he was able to work on this album until he was satisfied with it, even getting some material recorded by a fifty-piece orchestra in L.A., as it had been commissioned by Nik Venet of Capitol Records (who'd formerly signed the Beach Boys). It had been assumed that Frank was contractually free to compose and conduct, since MGM had only signed him as a rock musician and vocalist along with the rest of the Mothers. The latter company disagreed, threatened to sue, and finally bought the master tapes. It was just as well; Capitol's engineers had messed up the countless edits, requiring Frank to reconstruct the album. He and technician Gary Kellgren labored over this unexpected task at Mayfair Studios, eager for the album's release, which had been delayed for over a year due to the legal wranglings. (It will nonetheless be referred to as a 1967 album in this book, due to its initial date of completion.)
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," Frank wrote in the CD booklet for Civilization, Phaze III. "...The ambience would vanish disturbingly at the edit point... 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." The ambience problem was overcome in the '90s by a computerized equalization and filtering tool called Sonic Solutions.
The spontaneous dialogue, along with the music fashioned out of elements other than (but not necessarily omitting) instrument sounds, reflects Zappa's fascination with documenting "real life" and making it part of the frozen time available as public music. Particular attention's paid to the psychological reasons behind common behavior, with the strong implication that among the stimuli are the enclosed and deficient 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 portrays a gang of self-victimized people who've but to use their brains to escape confinement (cf. the "educate yourself" gatefold notes quoted in the Freak Out! section of this book, not to mention the tons of relevant lyrical provocation throughout Frank's music).
The composer's documentation of society as it existed in the real world beyond the plotted confines of typical rock lyricism, or "amateur anthropology" as he called it, would become a standard component of the rest of his library. Musical phrases, especially guitar solos, would be based on speech patterns, drawing from the fluid, animated way in which people communicate and reflecting human spirit, whether beautiful, displaced or gnawing.
In 1916, when the German poet Ernie Ball opened a dictionary to a random page in order to find a term for his new artistic movement, he arrived at "dada," which meant "goodbye" in German and "hobby horse" in French. It would soon have a third meaning, applicable around the world, that would usurp the other two. Zappa explained it with the phrase "anything, anytime, anywhere, for no reason at all," and continued its tradition of the comic derision of society's fixtures. The Dadaists supplemented this approach with the belief in the interconnectedness, on one level or another, of everything and everyone. "No Not Now" from 1982's Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch provides a great example: a single addictive, melodious rock song manages to poke fun at truckers, Mormons, truckers hauling string beans (a popular Mormon food), Mormon entertainers Donny and Marie Osmond, Hawaiian Punch (for which the siblings once sang a TV jingle, which can be heard instrumentally after a remark about Hawaiian shirts in "Drowning Witch" later on the Ship album, as well as during other concert pieces), and the '60s TV show Hawaii Five-O -- all inside less than six minutes. The humorous free association and the gloriously tenuous connections between these things epitomize Frank's version of Dada -- a hobby horse is even mentioned in the song.
In forcing connections between seemingly unrelated things, Dada sought to question the value of certain types or works of art over others. This is a general motif behind Zappa's inclusion of unconventional ingredients within pieces framed and presented as music. Vacuum pumps, documentaries and mistakes make art out of real life, not some transcendent state. Why shouldn't snorks have the same "validity" or "authenticity" as woodwind sounds? Why can't monologues about girls, cars and jobs stand alongside opera vocals? Why can't one of those singers, for that matter, sing about hot broth and "tinsel cocks"? Why shouldn't guitar solos be transcribed as brass harmonies? Can't fuzzy dice and bongos serve as icons of an era's values just as effectively as a painting of the Last Supper? The question lurking in the background is "Who, exactly, has told us that certain things are more meaningful or important than others?"
Lumpy Gravy likewise mixes ingredients never combined in the smooth, safe, often blasè gravy of any fixed and labeled form of music. Connections that aren't usually detected between certain musical and lyrical themes supply the album's very structure.
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 fenced-in point of view afforded by a piano, surrounded by cheap or dangerous aspects of a money-hungry culture, and psychologically pummeled to the point of metaphorically reducing their own feelings to retail items -- is "weighted" with the tensions and releases of the music itself.
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 had 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 '64 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" had been performed by some session musicians he'd met. He'd tried in vain to lease the song, at that time called "Never on Sunday," to various record companies. Original Sound and others had released a few products of the Pal era, but this one wouldn't be heard until it resurfaced as the closing music for Lumpy Gravy and then appeared as a vocal number on We're Only in It For the Money.
The album's title, originally garnered from a television commercial for Aloma Linda Gravy Quick, is probably used here to describe Zappa's congealing of the "smooth" textures of popular orchestral music (more than one kind of pop is ridiculed on the album!). Recycled classical works are unobtrusive in their lack of emotional prodding. Frank's breaking-up of this uniformity is achieved via compositional freedom and intrusions of reality: the "lumps" of the imperfect real world. He likes to cut through bullshit and pretentiousness; the lumps are the "meat of the matter," to coin a common saying (and part of a future Mothers album title), and also happen to be the tastiest part of the gravy.
A neat twist will be imposed on the title in seventeen years, when Frank mentions the impoverished writers of modern music during his speech to the American Society of University Composers: "Mostly what they eat is brown and lumpy." In America, creative freedom apparently means starvation.
The album has an overall rhythm and a series of sound-shocks that satisfy that part of the mind not touched by fleeting pop refrains. Like a lot of Frank's music, its appeal is 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 proudly up at the spectator 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 popular fads that attract young minds like cattle feed. Twenty-seven years later, Civilization, Phaze III will conclude the story with the dances of scary mock-humans who worship more trends, the surreal personifications of oppressive trickery, and the end of the world. Up through this finale, the people will never leave the piano.
The inside of the Lumpy Gravy cover continues 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 back to the plastic people of Absolutely Free. A crowd full of Franks watches with frowns of skepticism. He's also 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 chorus members is listed as "Pumpkin," although one is hard-pressed to hear Gail Zappa's voice anywhere in the piece.
One of the dog-faced Mothers from the up-and-coming Uncle Meat story book (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 is that anyone with a big brain would say "Curses!" to the idea of robbed 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.
Part One
Zappa has fun with the LP medium's aesthetic potential and makes the manual nature of record-player access the basis for transitions between some pieces. We're Only in It For the Money will play with the randomness of the moveable phonograph needle, teasing the listener's inclination to latch onto predictable pop by making it sound as if the stylus is jumping out of songs. Lumpy Gravy tends to celebrate the format, this mainstream product ironically being the countercultural composer's only means of truly reaching listeners besides sporadic concerts.
The story gradually spelled out in the dialogue (improvised within general guidelines provided by Frank from the control room) deals with the humor and horror inherent in a cheapened, commercially driven culture and its psychologically cracked inmates. Such an ominous narrative goal makes the lighter moments on the album all the more hilarious, like remarks that evoke nervous giggles at funerals. Frank's suave 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. Frank'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, arresting music that isn't commercially driven is indeed being made partly of bits of the targets it satirizes, pointing out how ridiculous that explicitly financial motivation is in the face of music's unlimited possibilities. The long piece also serves as a compressed illustration of all of Zappa's work, in that it absolutely shatters the imaginary "high/low" divisions that smatter our music and other arts.
Ignoring the shuttered compartments favored by the 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 technical analysis, which is incidental to the visceral pleasures of music. Frank did amusing things with sound to please the recipient and, when applicable, illustrate the world as he saw it -- but sometimes there was a point behind the music, even if it wouldn't have suffered without. For Lumpy Gravy's "balance," Frank fittingly chose piano-dweller dialogue involving two main things: working for a living and hiding from predators.
We partly owe it to him that the clichèd chunks of elevator music rampant in our environment -- market-fulfilling deadwood that ruins 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 grabbed the trapped splendor of uninhibited creation away from the dull elitists and bestowed it upon one of the more open-minded parts of society: people who like rock music.
The "cheap show" concept provides a splendidly sarcastic introduction. The facetious statement of Spider Barbour (of the band Chrysalis, also recording at Apostolic at the time) ribs the uncommon 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 co-host 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 kicks right in, listed under the title "Duodenum." 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. The melody, which here sounds like a theme 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 that deals in part with the perversion of the male mind in a society of dictated appeal into a song about a guy's description of his own genitals is pretty crafty.
The peaceful introduction to "Oh No" is a revisited 1962 theme that Frank wrote for the World's Greatest Sinner soundtrack. It doesn't slap us with the violent sounds appearing later on the album, but it's stunning 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 duodenum's the highest segment of the small intestine, located just below the stomach. The point gleaned from the pre-dialogue use of vibes, still hanging around after their appearance in "Hungry Freaks, Daddy" (itself a put-down of the "great midwestern hardware store"), 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 discussed in a bit, but for now, we can see the hole-boring ants on the cover of 1975's One Size Fits All casting light on a possible reason for the title "Duodenum": Is the round record boring like a bug into the consciousness of the trend-hypnotized audience? Is lumpy gravy the waste product of this positive intrusion, unappealing but undeniably human?
"Oh No" is the Muzak-sounding version of the vocal song appearing on the 1970 collection of after-the-fact Mothers material Weasels Ripped My Flesh. The lyrics, actually written well before Lumpy Gravy, deal with popular ideas of love propagated in the late '60s as opposed to real love. Lumpy Gravy's presented as a tie-in to the hippie put-down We're Only in It For the Money. The conformist workers in the piano apparently also buy into stylish current attitudes; the "Oh No" reprise later on the album concludes a conversation about "switching girls," which features a guy comparing broken relationships to broken cars.
Music that ignores "proper" composing principles and also incorporates sounds not made by instruments, at least in the conventional ways (and which is sometimes referred to as musique concrète ), 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 into. 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 disruptive prank: "A bit o' nostalgia for the old folks!" A snippet of surf guitar from the 1963 song "Hurricane," which Frank produced for Conrad & the Hurricane Strings at Studio Z, introduces "Bit of Nostalgia."
Zappa frequently lambastes the regurgitation of trends -- our cultural fixation on making old profit-driven crazes into sentimental yardsticks. "Bit of Nostalgia" places on the assumed stage a past Americanism and then comments on it with a series of aural jolts that slam creativity 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. Mock-climactic horror-movie piano chords are pounded out obnoxiously, the western 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 melodramatic final chord, the jarring sounds 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 fads 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, is surprised at Gilly's presence: "If I'm not alone...how long have I been asleep?" At first, this gives the impression that she was alone before nodding off; but Zappa's editing here is brilliant, showing that both of these girls simply want to stay awake and caught up with whatever's hip, and that they both occupy the restrictive piano: Gilly answers, "As long as I have."
A vague shadow of the instrumental exasperation we heard before now clouds behind the sounds of the voices. The low instrument makes this metaphorical look at society into a flesh-creep for the listener as Monica typically wonders about other people's compartments. The sky looks bluer to her on the other side of the fence, but it appears to be 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 self-importance, avoiding the admission of how typecast her persona is: "Well, then, you aren't me!"
Gilly goes on to admit that the darkness of the piano (contrast the ominous atmosphere here with the sunny beginning of "Oh No") 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 is affected by the climate. She's confined to a drum even while dreaming. Monica qualifies, "Dreaming is hard." Perhaps in an "environment hostile to dreamers."
A discussion about the need for something over the head, the protection and validation of a group, ensues. A third girl has joined in. Nobody really seems to know what's outside this prescribed 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 how to 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 symbol that John's brought up. Spider stays submerged in murky perceptions in order to avoid danger. 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 seem to revel in being typecast by his friends. Moreover, the water in his "washing machine" is dark because it's sympathetic; it understands his fears, protecting him from forthright perceptions and cleansing all the ensuing guilt right off him.
Sympathy's apparently a product like anything else: Spider tells John that it can be found at the local drug store. Even emotions have been relegated to the officially approved factory-line system. This continues later as people and their relationships take on equal weight with cars.
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 shabby, instantly available packaged item, displayed along with the headache remedies and magazines at the store; the music here reflects this hilariously. We can even hear the scratches from the record it's recorded off of.
Some heart-pulling free music made up of Frank's crashing percussive tides 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 (it's presently used as a verb rather than an adjective). The percussion switches gears entirely, assuming 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 that debut return to haunt us.
More free music, again mostly percussive, sounds like a storm upsetting the factory machinery: the sneaky end to the baiting snippets of commodity music all along. Toward the end of the segment, the wind starts to catch electric cables, ripping them from the walls; the wrong one's tripped and a quick Oriental melody bursts out. Larry Fanoga (Motorhead's alter-ego) 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 the silly cultural elements in with the gullible morons they govern; their own tastes are bland, so the world becomes such.
More pranky snorks begin "Almost Chinese." They're immediately followed by Motorhead's (real-voice) declaration, "'Cause I was makin', uh, $2.71 an hour," previewing his monologue later on the album-side. The Chinese surf music and "Larry's" remark underscore another aspect of the commercial destruction of musical freedom: the 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 dissimilar people 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 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 swallowed into the duodenum. Simultaneously, "real" human sounds are turned into music; it's nature's drum set.
"Switching Girls" begins with Motorhead's rant equating women with products, namely cars; he talks about his habit of going steady with a girl until he blows out her car's engine. The stranglehold of marketing has served to warp sexuality and self-image, making sex both an acquired instant service and a requisite flaunting, just like a car.
Zappa can strike fear into the listener alongside humor better than any horror movie can. Life's slow but sure transformation into merchandise 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, appearing equally important to male fulfillment. We'll hear a young man thinking the same way in Uncle Meat's "Dog Breath, in the Year of the Plague."
"Oh No Again" reprises that song after "Switching Girls" ends with sped-up, instrumental "dynamite show" phrases. Girls are dancing plastic dolls on this stage. This spiffy follow-up on the earlier tune switches rhythmic meters toward the end, and suddenly it's more attractive than cheesy, although the over-grand strings and horns achieve an extremely sarcastic climax.
During "At the Gas Station," Motorhead's in the spotlight, recalling an ex-girlfriend who had borrowed his vehicle and damaged it. "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 a funny, catchy "rough-ridin'" song. If it wasn't meant to be enjoyed as a nifty bit of music, of course, Frank wouldn't have included 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 with such power. Part one of the album now ends with an unexpected creative victory: Frank's longest stretch of orchestral music to appear on an album so far.
After the honking harmonica of "Another Pickup," the unrestrained "I Don't Know If I Can Go Through This Again" grips the listener in its contrasting air-stream, prefacing part two with a musical stance instead of the sociological one with which we've been battered.
This breathtaking segment's named as such because of All-Night John's comment about 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 introduction to "Oh No." It in turn is interrupted by free music. The two become intertwined as the piece goes on. One doesn't expect 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 horns emphasized with rumbling thunder; enticing woodwinds explore this world that could be beautiful. Sped-up cabaret music relinquishes to compelling, drawn-out intervals; the "show" ethic is more fun when used as one compositional ingredient among many, rather than a general setting. Scary tornados of wet-sounding percussion lead into the ominous rattling of teeth; 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.
Part Two
Nearly every segment on the album is immediately followed by a joke or abrupt musical change. Zappa's obviously interested in the effects that sharp contrasts have on the listener. Here, they serve a greater purpose: Lumpy Gravy comments on itself throughout. The 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 barely discernible utterance even interrupts Motorhead early on for a second in its affirmation of the ambiguous "lubing" subject. Part two's opener, "Very Distraughtening," reveals that the first half's wonderful conclusion was a mere breather; we drop 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 and out. With the release of the The Lost Episodes, this voice will reveal itself as a fragment 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 cuts momentarily to the voice. Its inclusion on that counterpart album to Lumpy Gravy draws a parallel between the piano inhabitants and Ronnie: They're products of bad parenting, like the young walking tragedies in "Mom & Dad" and "The Idiot Bastard Son."
The voice figures into the plot as a "little pig with wings" (even though it sounds more like a sheep with emphysema). The pig will fly around the piano again on Civilization, Phaze III. In 1975, Zappa will record a long, comical piece called "The Adventures of Greggery Peccary," concerning a pig who sits in his office and comes up with trends to sell to the world's youth. 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 humorous "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 these different animals, especially since pigs are among them ("pigs" of course being hip jargon for "cops" and probably used here in broad governmental terms -- Frank is undoubtedly aware of the slang term). The animal references are most likely initiated by the composer over the studio intercom, but the players' improvisations render most of the actual dialogue. Both the pigs and the ponies threaten any pianist (so to speak) who meddles with them. The pigs apparently 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.
The second half of the album -- or at least most of it -- will later be singled out by Frank as his favorite part, referred to as "Pigs and Ponies" even though 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 Barry 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 as the voices, heard likewise, follow up on the greed with "Just the opposite...we don't get any...that's very distraughtening."
One of the girls says, "We don't get any because we're otherwise" as the clanging gets louder. It stops with a thunk -- perhaps someone here has closed another varnished, wooden portal to the confusing outside world (or someone out there has done it to block out the racket) -- and we hear a conversation rife with musical metaphors taking place between two stoned-sounding piano people as the microphone zooms in again on a specific part of the group.
By sharing his view of the proceedings, Frank's making the listener a perceptive, intelligent antithesis to these characters, and the picture's often seen from more than one angle. This is a common aspect of his music anyway; while the listener's made to feel, in the interest of education and even purging, 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 Frank, 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 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) regards the universe as one big note. This is repeated (with originally excluded bits stuck back in) on Civilization, Phaze III, and could well be taken as an abstract truth as Zappa sees it, since we hear in the later version that he himself 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' credulity and badly informed states of mind continue 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 included as a sly reference to 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 real insight is the composer's middle finger at the influences and authorities who aspire to keep everyone in the dark; one of his axioms is that there's hope in the individual human spirit, no matter how far gone some folks might appear ( 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).
Quickly catching the intellectual paradox 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 spoof on "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 conversation'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 "spectacle" posture and real life is breaking down, becoming more transparent as the characters' behavior appears so consistently reflective of people we know. The spectators in 1984's Thing-Fish gradually talk like the twisted main characters to reveal a similar convergence.
Another marketed American product pops up amidst the white noise, the indecipherable but unmistakable sound of a voice on a radio with bad reception. The noise's instant familiarity points out the listener's habitual consumption of certain media. "Lonely Little Girl" from We're Only in It For the Money is so catchy that it amounts to a teaser, illuminating our tendencies toward formulaic sounds; is this Lumpy Gravy moment a slick allusion 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 assuring this particular connection between the albums) in a backward, Eastern-sounding comment on Hendrix's tone to continue on the theme of fashionable '60s iconology (Zappa nevertheless admires Jimi, and he'll appear 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, 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 one of Zappa's labels. 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 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, incidentally, to 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 defined 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 well-being; he's apparently ventured outside the piano. A brief mention of pimples adds physical self-consciousness to the makeup of these media victims, also tying nicely into the kitschy "showtime" ethic.
Frank probably didn't mind Roy asking, "Did it have teeth?" after Louie said "White ugliness" -- teeth-rattling during part one's closing piece reminded the listener that people, strive as they might to appear important and physically flawless, are all equal in their mortality and will wind up looking the same after a little while in their graves. Such coincidental dialogue goes a long way toward explaining why Zappa liked this part of the album. Teeth will be seen to prominent and disturbing effect on the front and back covers of Uncle Meat. The real "Dental Hygiene Dilemma" that Jeff Simmons will face in 200 Motels is whether to play shiny, contrived music or real, "living" music. It gives a whole new meaning to the amusing words about farming dental floss in "Montana" from 1973's Over-Nite Sensation.
With Roy's "Amen" (thrusting the name of the studio, Apostolic, into conceptual continuity), the segment so titled begins. Its initial rhythmic fulcrum is a tambourine that's anchored in the right speaker for a while, dashing to the left before sneaking back in 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. "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 same 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 bass won't subsequently make such similarly slippery sounds until "Friendly Little [!] Finger" on 1976's Zoot Allures.
The tambourine provides a loose frame. The drums are most likely played by Frank himself. In the left speaker, we notice that one of the overall 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 flawless spectacle. It can be heard as 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 dismay 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 is an extremely chilling musical morsel. 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."
The music swells to a mock-dramatic finale with the help of building cymbals. "Just One More Time" adds startling but much-needed hilarity, relighting the stage that the real world's been placed onto by product-pushers. The brash smirks of Captain Beefheart probably come from Studio Z circa 1963; the vocal's similar to what's heard in the jams on The Lost Episodes.
The Captain's "Come on, boys" line makes his closer, "Just one more time," seem to call the dorky characters back to converse some more. The final organ note's replaced with a snork that reflects the cast's antics near the beginning of the album, which is revolving in more ways than one. "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. Spider explains that the smoke is kept 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 in the way it manipulates their media.
"A Vicious Circle" begins with sped-up horns and drums providing the musical equivalent of the 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 chat: "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. Some relatively calm horns and strings prelude the 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 alludes 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 orchestral or 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 a member of the horn section. This "showtime in Detroit" funk fanfare grooves along for a little while before the creature does some tripping and stumbling, and the instruments are joined by subtle piano trickles. It sounds as if the monster's gotten drunk on the way home from a particularly ruthless day at the office.
Motorhead (as Larry) 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 movie phrase of strings, horns and a snare drum (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 girl say "Oh no, man, kangaroos? " There apparently exist more types 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-dwellers and the prior hostile animals have to deal with, making their feuds futile in the hopelessness of it all (and these creatures have built-in pockets for their cash!).
"Kangaroos" is an ebbing piece of music that pits slithering bowed strings and dark horns against plucked staccato notes. The animals' sneaky attack 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 inhabitants as they wade in their dark water: "...envelops the bathtub!"
The definition of "envelops" (no latter E) probably represents one way in which Zappa looks at his listener-surrounding mixture of multiple environments. He'll seize upon the short-lived idea of quadrophonic stereo in the early '70s, later telling a few interviewers that a six-speaker set-up would be the ideal way to hear his orchestral pieces; he'll wind up using such a mix for the Yellow Shark concerts in 1992. A piece called "Envelopes" (with the third E this time -- it's possibly a joke on the common mispronunciation of the earlier title) will be played in both orchestral and rock arrangements in the '70s and '80s.
"Envelops the Bath Tub" begins the stretch of transfixing orchestration that closes Lumpy Gravy before its smart-ass, quite startling conclusion brackets everything in Showtime Americana (along with the opening music). Some offensive horn lines from the pigs' permeating presence snort silly drama into the scene from the right channel, joined by another "low, little" puddle of sneakiness as bassoons appear to the left. Bits of the spectacle 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 percussion mocks the poignancy. Low, plucked strings jut up occasionally from a place much closer to the ear: attempts by the kangaroo battle's various victims to stir?
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 soulless march in servitude to the victors (the kangaroos, the pigs or even death itself, ultimately triumphant over all, making societal hang-ups moot and dumb -- this will especially hit home at the end of Civilization, Phaze III ).
The bells now jerk into a lopsided march. Woodwinds make the marchers sound like injured puppets; the evil in the shadows of the left channel asserts itself more. A waltz answers it, rife with the squeaks of nervy protestors or yelps of pain as they're whipped back into line.
Everything 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 skulls chattering away. Gongs and dissonant strings comment fearfully. It all echoes off into the fading, eerily understated air of intermittent drums, woodwinds and clangs. 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.
There are many boring round things to be considered. We have the circular repetitiveness of menial work and its striving to meet the bottom lines of supply and demand (i.e. in round-record factories -- or at the gas station). Pop music has circular, repetitious beats; Frank finds purely commercial stuff, the stuff on the radio that he attacks with the MOI, boring in light of the sheer possiblities offered by music. 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 an eventually barren plain is relentless) performed by Nanook the Eskimo as he rubs urine into the fur-trapper's eyes (also a metaphor for masturbation, which myth says will make you blind -- such repression contributes to the cultural demise). 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 just to accommodate our filtered minds. But the statement also refers to the little drawings at the bottom of the illustration: Ants are boring into the "earth's crust" (mentioned in the onstage tale "Billy the Mountain," to which the future cover will make further references) and the buildings of our toy-like urban environment. Self-important humans' actual irrelevance is revealed by nature; along with Billy the Mountain, consider the San Andreas earthquake on said back cover, sending other buildings tumbling into the void. The ants (round things) bore 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 trained viewpoints and the musical mainstream, causing damage to boring (dull) social structures.
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)
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 participant 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 the now relatively hilarious instrumental rendition of "Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance" (lyricized on Money with the laughably innocent 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 ). It leaps into the speakers in full-arrangement form, including the orche
