Note: Because I'm discussing Frank Zappa lyrics, this post is somewhat more explicit than my usual fare. May the reader beware. Blame Zappa if you can't take it, I suppose.
After the garbage fire that was progressive rock's 1978, 1979 is a pretty quiet year, in terms of both outright masterpieces and howling stinkers. Pink Floyd released The Wall, though that album is no more proggy than the concept albums put out by The Who, and Jethro Tull put out Stormwatch, which finds the erstwhile proggers fully back in hard rock/folk mode. You've also got ex-Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett releasing his third solo album, Spectral Mornings, and ex-Yes/King Crimson drummer Bill Bruford released the jazz-fusion-y One of a Kind. And that's about all we get as far as major releases from prog's old guard goes—few of them "major" and none of them all that proggy. 1979 is the smoldering ashes of 1978, the limbo between progressive rock's first age and its reborn second age in the '80s. In that vein, the most significant prog event in 1979 is probably the formation of Marillion, a group that would make up the vanguard of '80s prog. But I'm dealing with tangible releases in this series, so formation without production means little to me here.
But you know who actually did produce during this sleepy year? You know who, depending on how you slice it, had either five or six releases (including multiple double-LPs) during this year when the rest of prog took an early/forced retirement? Why, none other than that mustachio'd rapscallion, that smarmy satirist, that greasy Voltaire of Southern California: Frank Vincent Zappa.
Those of you with very good memories might remember Frank Zappa from way earlier in this series—the earliest part of the series, actually, when I named his debut album with the Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!, as one of the important precedents of progressive rock. At the time I wrote that initial post, that album was my sole exposure to Zappa outside of some of his footprint on novelty rock ("Valley Girl," "Don't Eat Yellow Snow," etc.), and I mistakenly assumed he was a kind of novelty, cult act, like a Boomer iteration of They Might Be Giants. Which isn't entirely wrong (though the They Might Be Giants comparison definitely is); in the popular consciousness, Zappa exists almost entirely as a novelty figure: he named his kids Moon Unit and Dweezil (and Ahmet and Diva, though those names aren't nearly so fun)! He talks about poop and STDs in his songs! He's got that wicked mustache! And his fandom is for sure cultish and obsessive—it would have to be to keep up with an artist who, between posthumous and humous(?) releases, has over 100 studio albums to his name[1]. The overwhelming breadth of Zappa's discography and the purported significance by his fans of every inch of its first couple decades is part of what took me so long to research and write this post, once I'd decided that Zappa in general and Joe's Garage specifically was going to be its subject.
But that doesn't even cover the half of what makes Zappa Zappa. What I didn't realize at the time of writing that original post was that in addition to all those little bizarre garnishes I was already familiar with, Frank Zappa is alongside Robert Fripp and Brian Eno as one of the central figures in the development of rock music's experimental wing. His mid-to-late '60s work with the Mothers of Invention juxtaposed dadaism and tape loops with rock music (almost certainly inspiring The Residents, among others), while his late-'60s work like Hot Rats shows an early innovation of jazz fusion and his later work includes the integration of orchestral and modern-classical flourishes. And he's at least as involved with the evolution of the rock concept album as the more canonically recognized folks like Pete Townsend and Roger Waters. I don't know if you're keeping count, but this description is ticking a lot of progressive rock boxes. The sheer genre diversity of Zappa's catalog makes it hard to call him an exclusively prog artist—his music is kind of a universe unto itself—and it's unclear to me how much the highly California, highly American Zappa even cared about the likes of Yes and Genesis and whatever. But it's undeniable that there's a lot of prog there throughout his career, and in fact, with his use of classical, jazz, and avant-garde modes in bending blues, rock 'n roll, and doo-wop sounds into these ambitious and sprawling compositions, it could be argued that his music is actually one of the purer applications of the tenets of progressive rock's underlying aesthetic philosophy. And it all kind of comes to a head on Joe's Garage, Zappa's two-hour, triple-LP rock opera and (I'd say) the most important work of progressive rock of 1979.
It's funny that Joe's Garage came out the same year as Pink Floyd's The Wall, because the two albums share a lot of similarities. Both are rock operas, both have plots about alienated young men in bands who succumb to mental illness and sexual deviancy (and by that turn, both are sexist to varying degrees), both are stylistically diverse, drawing from both contemporary modes like disco (in the case of The Wall) and R&B (in the case of Joe's Garage) as well as older forms like doo-wop and jazz standards, both represent the end of an era for their respective artists. But for as much as these albums share, though, Zappa himself couldn't have been more different from the serious-minded Brits running the Pink Floyd outfit, and both albums are unmistakably the products (perhaps the epitomes) of their creators' psyches. Whereas The Wall shares Pink Floyd's (and more specifically, Roger Waters's) obsession with existentialism and psychological interiority and the shadow European fascism cast over the postwar generation, Joe's Garage is a 115-minute exploration of Zappa's pet fascinations of sexual liberation, censorship, scatology, and the oppressive threat of large government. Which is an elaborate way of saying that of the two big 1979 rock operas, there's only one that has a song about a wet T-shirt contest. And one about getting gonorrhea. And one about getting a blow job from a robot (and then killing the robot because you go too hard). Can you guess which one it is?
Okay, so here's the gist: Joe's Garage is the tale of the titular Joe, who starts a rock band in his garage until his neighbor calls the cops on him, who send him to the local Catholic's youth group to try to reform him, but unbeknownst to the police, there's a girl named Mary at the CYO who's become a groupie for another local rock band (Catholic girls... amirite, fellas? [huge eyeroll]) and who gets Joe involved with them, too. This sends ol' Joe into this whole spiral of sexual activity that eventually culminates in him getting his heart broken and contracting an STD and then killing that robot during fellatio (see above). I guess robots are protected citizens in the world of the album, because then Joe's sent to prison, and by the time he gets out, the government has outlawed music completely because of rock degenerates like him, and he kind of just putters around this music-free society until he loses all his memory of music and then gets a "respectable" job in a factory. The end. The twist is, this whole time, the album's being narrated by some character named The Central Scrutinizer, who is a government employee tasked with telling us all a story to teach us how awful and destructive music is—which reveals the text of the album to be metafiction, itself a piece of government propaganda from the evil, oppressive, anti-music state, making Joe's whole story basically Zappa's cautionary tale about government censorship disguised as a cautionary tale about rock and roll excess.
On paper, this is all really interesting and hilarious. It's like how people watch Reefer Madness nowadays with the intention of mocking its clearly uninformed, hyperbolic scaremongering about marijuana; with Joe's Garage, Zappa created the rock music version of this experience, relentlessly skewering the pearl-clutching moralizers by creating a comically absurd iteration of the way that they perceive the genre's dangers. There's a huge chasm between, say, believing that Led Zeppelin put backwards satanic messages into "Stairway to Heaven" and believing that rock music will eventually compell you to murder a robot with your penis, but the two ideas do exist somewhere in the same laughably alarmist universe. And it's a great joke.
However, in practice, the effect is quite different. However indeed.
Look, there's making fun of moral alarmists and censors, and then there's making a song called "Why Does It Hurt When I Pee?"; there's writing lyrics about how Catholic girls are "learning to blow all the Catholic boys"; there's making a whole melodic hook out of the line "fuck me, you ugly son of a bitch" in the track "Stick It Out." This is all technically in the name of satire, and it's not not satirical (as I said earlier, the album's central conceit isn't all that subtle). But Zappa clearly relishes the puerility of this stuff, too. This isn't some stoic thesis on the dangers of reactionary morality or government censorship; it's a radical free speech argument by way of dick jokes. And I do me love some puerile humor, don't get me wrong. For years before diving into his broader discography, I got a lot of joy from the out-of-context listening to "Don't Eat Yellow Snow" and "Why Does It Hurt When I Pee?", back when I assumed novelty was Zappa's sole M.O. And there's this kind of fun thing the album is doing where it's both making fun of and baiting the moral gatekeepers—a two-pronged attack! But also, the extent to which this humor happens at the expense of the album's female characters and women in general gives me great pause, to say the least. In theory, this is probably just more commentary about the sexism of moral puritanism, which is cool, I guess, but the enthusiasm with which Zappa dishes it all out feels definitely like he's also tasting of the forbidden fruit at the same time he's chastising it. And even if I can just hand-wave away the record's face-value sexism as just another iteration of the album's concept, that doesn't change that even though I basically agree with the right to free speech that Zappa's defending, protecting the right to make stupid sexual jokes is basically the least-interesting utility for free speech of all time.
To his credit, he doesn't use "free speech" as a way to prop up Nazi ideology or the other reprehensible stuff the "free speech movement" is defending in 2019 [2]—on a lot of social issues, Zappa's dedicated ideology gives him a perspective that has aged well (at least, compared to some of his peers), and he even would put little notices on his album covers and in his liner notes about how his listeners needed to register to vote and stuff. It's not unreasonable to call him an activist in addition to a musician [3]. So why doesn't he make that the crux of his triple-album opus on government censorship? The most obvious answer is that Zappa, like most adult men, still giggles at the same things middle school boys do, and in this case, I think the most obvious answer is the correct one. Zappa's on record saying that he mostly wrote music and lyrics to amuse himself, and even if that seems a little rich for someone whose ethos is so intricate and cultish, that definitely seems to be a large animating force behind something like "Sy Borg" (or, to be fair, the "Suzy Creamcheese" interludes from his Mothers of Invention days—Zappa's always had a penchant for the grotesque and the prurient, though in his early work it's rarely so dialed up as it is here and in subsequent, equally icky albums). It's political theater as performed in the locker room. More power to anyone who can peel back the layers of irony and adolescence to get to Zappa's undeniably impressive brain beneath, but I certainly don't feel like doing that.
So it's a relief that if you entirely ignore the lyrics, the actual music is front-to-back great. Typical of Zappa, it's a stylistic grab-bag, with everything from smirking pastiches of old rock and soul modes to avant-garde tape loops and musique concrète touches to full-on jazz-rock freakouts. Like I said earlier, Zappa's not a prog purist, but this specific mixture of styles definitely dips into the genre, with the general rule that the longer an album's compositions are, the closer to prog it will sound. With the exception of the "Scrutinizer" narrative interludes, the tracks on Joe's Garage very rarely dip below five minutes, and a good many of them are up in the 8-10 minute range, which means that Joe's Garage is proggy, baby! The first couple tracks might fool you with their more-or-less conventional run of blues rock and doo-wop; in fact, most of Act I (the album is split into three acts, the first of which was released as a standalone standard LP) is more or less prog-free except for "On the Bus," an instrumental groove anchored by a towering Zappa guitar solo. But as the album transitions into its second act, the music increasingly features those odd time signatures, long compositions, and twisty instrumental passages we all know and love from progressive rock, with "Keep It Greasy" in particular being another great showcase for Zappa's guitar—this time hewing a bit closer to the jazzy, improvisation-heavy sound you might hear from John McLaughlin or Robert Fripp in his more straightforward moments. And then comes Act III—the final LP and by far the proggiest. "He Used to Cut Grass," which opens the act, is an eight-minute soundscape in which Zappa's guitar is slowly overwhelmed by a vocal sample, and the rest of the LP follows suit, with lengthy guitar passages fighting for dominance over deranged vocal loops or uneasy doo-wop interruptions. The best of these, by far, is "Watermelon in Easter Hay," in which Zappa abandons the jazz-rock style entirely in favor of a sweeping, melodic guitar work reminiscent of Pink Floyd's David Gilmour. It's a gorgeous composition, one of the best Zappa ever composed, and a great climax for the album before its goofy curtain call, "A Little Green Rosetta." The best thing about Act III? Hardly any lyrics. Release it as a standalone LP, and it's one of the best prog records of the '70s.
Ah, but Act III isn't standalone, of course. To consider Act III is necessarily to consider its proximity to and connection with Acts I & II, and to do that is to contemplate yet again Zappa's lyrics. Such is life. Such is prog itself—the great residing right alongside the embarrassing. 1979, everyone!
There is, to bring this review full circle, something fascinating about the fact that Pink Floyd and Frank Zappa both released their sweeping rock opera statement albums right here at the dusk of prog's first full decade, just a couple weeks apart from one another in November of that year. Neither Floyd nor Zappa were every completely at home within prog's gates—Floyd being at least as close to hard rock and psychedelic funk as they ever were to the mathy complexity of, like, Close to the Edge, while Zappa's restless style and iconoclastic persona made him an outsider pretty much everywhere except rock music's weird fringes. And both artists are old souls of sorts among the progressive rockers, both in terms of their decidedly grounded thematic concerns (in contrast to the art-school mythical fancies of prog's mainstream) and in terms of the sheer realities of the prog timeline; both Floyd and Zappa hail from that primordial, pre-prog mid-'60s era in which psychedelia hadn't quite yet branched off into all its little substreams and instead occupied the nebulous but potent space of the Counterculture, which put these musicians rubbing shoulders with political activists and journalists and poets and all measure of influential folks.
Prog of the '60s and '70s always had a lingering whiff of the Counterculture in the sense that a lot of rock music of the era did, having been birthed from that whole swarming pool [4], but at least within the most visible wings of progressive rock, the genre was always a bit too insular and bookish to really engage much in direct politics. That progressive rock's mainstream also flamed out from the bloat of its own solipsism and materialism is telling on a political front, too; I'm not going to go so far as to say that they all went on to support Reagan and Thatcher, though there's certainly something about the exhaustion of the immediately pre-Reagan/Thatcher era that dovetails neatly with prog's dying gasps and the buttoned-up, bottom-line-obsessed posturing of the Reagan/Thatcher era itself that feels of a piece with a lot of these bands' rebirths as friendly pop-rock groups in the '80s—the fate of all revolutionaries more interested in the style of a rebellion than its substance [5]. But with Frank Zappa and Pink Floyd (or at least Roger Waters, who by most accounts was calling the shots in 1979), there is a much more concerted effort throughout the '70s to engage directly with the realities of political ideologies that comes to a head in their respective rock operas of 1979.
This makes both artists something close to the "true believers" of prog's countercultural genes and therefore a fascinating look under the hood, if you will, at the underlying, often subconscious ideologies embedded in progressive rock's DNA—even more fascinating when you consider that, at least by 1979, each artist embodied the two symbiotic but ultimately divergent belief systems that the Counterculture united under a shared resentment of the repressive postwar regime [6]: Pink Floyd with the anti-capitalist, anti-fascist left, and Frank Zappa with the libertarian, hyper-individualized right. It seems to me that there's no better exhibition of the differences between these two ideologies than in the differences between The Wall and Joe's Garage—fitting that, with all the capes and mysticism and Tarkuses of progressive rock crumbled away, we're left with the naked subtexts of the genre fighting for space among the wreckage. I don't know a ton about '80s prog, so it will be interested to see which sensibility won out in progressive rock's second full decade.
Here we go. So long to the '70s and the familiar territory of prog's golden age; hello to the '80s and the uncharted waters of prog's niche years.
See you in 1980! [7]
1] And for what it's worth, the combined obsessiveness of his fans and the sheer magnitude of his output birthed one of the all-timer Onion articles.
2] Though you really don't have to work hard to draw a line between Zappa's methodology and those of the modern "edgelord."
3] He even famously testified before Congress, and if you didn't hear about him because of your weird older brother/cousin or because of "Valley Girl" or because of his weird names for his kids, you probably heard about him because your cool high school English teacher made you read his congressional hearing for a class assignment.
4] You can detect that Counterculture flavor most in prog's more socially conscious corners, like Genesis's Peter Gabriel albums, and less so in a band like Yes, which took Eastern mysticism (another genetic link to that whole psychedelic/Counterculture soup) as more of a metaphysical aesthetic than anything revolutionary in a truth-to-power sense.
5] Symbolically, of course. I have nothing personally against pop-rock, and I actually quite like at least Yes in the '80s.
6] At least, the two belief systems white dudes in the Counterculture tended to have—women and especially people of color often had their own reasons for resisting the Man, of course.
7] Even after listening to his oeuvre for months, I'm still very much a Zappa neophyte, which means that in this post, I've not even touched all the continuity between his earlier albums and Joe's Garage or all the Easter Eggs embedded in the album or any of that fan culture stuff. I'll let it to all you Zappa experts out there to let me know what I missed in this department!
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