Joes Garage Acts I,II & III

Joes Garage Acts I,II,III

It starts on a good note, upbeat and highly enjoyable, a good mix of serious music and some comedy thrown in, but the listener is then subjected to what I call the music version of soft porn; the character, named "Joe (as portrayed by Ike Willis) gets into trouble with the law and is betrayed by the groupie, named "Mary" (portrayed delightfully by Dale Bozzio; you gotta love her), where he has a tryst with some other woman resulting in a bad case of venereal disease. This particular bit is a textbook case of the Frank Zappa dichotomy: The music to such tracks as "Why Does It Hurt When I Pee?" is dramatic and powerful, but the lyrics are just what one would expect from seeing the title. Such puerile lyric content, and such spectacular music thrown together has a strange effect; instrumentally, it holds up against anything out there, but the lyrics come off as something a drunk 18-year-old would write. Very strange.

And speaking of strange, after Joe gives all his money to "The First Church Of Appliantology," he has a series of sexual encounters with a "modified Gay Bob" doll, shorting it out in an act of depravity. Although I'm no prude, this stuff just pushes the envelope; after Joe is sent to prison, more depravity ensues, as lonely men in prison, short of conjugals, can only be gratified by hand, mouth, or buttock, and the story just derails. But, as Zappa has said over the years, he used lyrics to make his music more listenable. Like I said, this is very good music, with very good singing, and really great sound quality (this release's strongest trait), but the storyline degenerates into a shambles. On a positive note, the more gratuitous material does have a good, humorous feel to it, it's just unlikely to ever be played on a broadcast. But Frank's fan base has accepted this side of his material as part of his whole body of work.

The set's penultimate number, the silly-titled, serious instrumental "Watermelon In Easter Hay" is Frank playing possibly his most expressive guitar solo, just beautiful, the opening and closing themes (I think are played by Warren Cuccurulo) sounding like Carlos Santana, and the whole body of the number just Frank letting his guitar speak. He is at his finest here, and the set closes with "A Little Green Rosetta," a sing-along two chord vamp with lots of ad-libbing, a do-as-you-feel number with a party atmosphere.

"This is the CENTRAL SCRUTINIZER... again. Hi!...It's me again, the CENTRAL SCRUTINIZER... Joe says Lucille has messed his mind up, but, was it the girl or was it the music? As you can see... girls, music, disease, heartbreak.. .they all go together... Joe found out the hard way, but his troubles were just beginning... his mind was so messed up... he could hardly do nothin'... He was in a quandary... being devoured by the swirling cesspool of his own steaming desires... the guy was a reck... so... what does he do? For once, he does something SMART... he goes out... and pays a lot of money to L. Ron Hoover... at the First Church of Appliantology!"

"(Eventually it was discovered that God did not want us to be all the same. This was BAD NEWS for the Governments of The World as it seemed contrary to the doctrine of Portion Controlled Servings. Mankind must be made more uniformly if THE FUTURE was going to work. Various ways were sought to bind us all together, but, alas SAMENESS was unenforceable. It was about this time that someone came up with the idea of TOTAL CRIMINALIZATION based on the principle that if we were ALL crooks, we could at last be uniform to some degree in the eyes of THE LAW. Shrewdly our legislators calculated that most people were too lazy to perform a REAL CRIME. So new laws were manufactured, making it possible for anyone to violate them any time of the day or night, and, once we had all broken some kind of law, we'd all be in the same big happy club, right up there with the President, the most exalted industrialists, and the clerical big shots of all your favorite religions. TOTAL CRIMINALIZATION was the greatest idea of its time and was vastly popular, except with those people who didn't want to be crooks or outlaws. So, of course, they had to be TRICKED INTO IT... which is one of the reasons why music was eventually made Illegal.)"