JOE'S GARAGE, ACTS I, II & III

I'll stick my review of this here as opposed to under the individual album entries since really they all form one single piece. Joe's Garage is an epic narrative concept album by Zappa in which Zappa really doesn't show that much interest in maintaining a narrative but goes about shoehorning one in anyway through his narration as the "Central Scrutinizer", which certainly takes a while to warm up to (though at least it's not as overbearing as, say, Ike Willis's constant interjections in Thing-Fish, which as a score for an off-Broadway musical is perhaps the release closest to this in terms of providing a narrative).

Don't get me wrong - there's some fun material on here. True, Acts I and II continue Zappa's pandering to a novelty rock crowd, though at least Catholic Girls and Why Does It Hurt When I Pee are catchy. And Act III has some nice guitar solos if classic rock guitar heroism is your thing. That's all fine. But the narrative chunks tend to hurt the flow of the album and don't really disguise the fact that Zappa took a bunch of utterly unrelated songs and crammed them into something resembling a story.

And on top of that, even though there are good moments such as I have outlined, they're hardly of the standard of the material on Uncle Meat, We're Only In It For the Money, One Size Fits All or other classic Zappa creations. It's far from Zappa's worst concept album - that would have to be the horrendous Thing-Fish, with its shamelessly recycled material botched with mammy-isms and the horrible acting from the "cast" - but it's a long way from his best concept album, or his best novelty rock record, or his best fusion album, or his best guitar solo collection.

That said, it's far from his worst of any of those either, and it's certainly one of his most stylistically wide-reaching studio albums since Uncle Meat. The doo-wop tribute of the title track, the novelty rock of Catholic Girls or Why Does It Hurt When I Pee, the electric blues of Lucille Has Made My Mind Up... there's no denying that Act I is an astonishingly *catchy* set of tracks.

And that makes sense given the act structure going on - Act I is all about the dream and promise of music as a means of rebellion and freedom and how bands start with these high ideals before getting distracted by hedonism on the road so it's got all the really poppy stuff, Act II is all about big systems that exploit musicians, ranging from Scientology to record companies (the latter coinciding with Joe being sent to jail, which perhaps best describes how Zappa felt about his legal ordeal with Warner Brothers), and so it's got some of the more experimental songs and the more uncomfortable lyrics, and Act III is about coping with a world when you've become disillusioned about the scope of music to give freedom (or when that freedom has been taken from you), so it's most oriented towards long-form progressive flights of fancy before rounding everything off with a jaunty final bow tune, A Little Green Rosetta. I have to be in a mood for a real broad smorgasboard of Zappa treats before listening to Joe's Garage, but every so often that mood will come around and it hits the spot.