If you’re going to include Frank Zappa in a list of essential albums, and you don’t include what I would say is his magnum opus, then something is badly wrong. For my sixth, and final, Seventies suggestion I give you Joe's Garage.
Joe’s Garage is a triple-disc concept album (no, don't run away...), a rock opera of sorts (no, really, stay...) that takes satirical swipes at censorship, organised religion, music critics, and fools of all persuasion, all covered with loads of smut - typical Zappa really.
The album is narrated by Zappa in the guise of The Central Scrutinizer, whose role is to enforce all the laws that haven’t been created yet. According to the sleeve notes, the Scrutinizer resembles a cheap-looking flying saucer covered in nozzles, that is very obviously a prop hanging on wires and operated by a stage hand. The whole album is meant as a parody of the very worthy presentations put on at schools to warn of the dangers of drugs etc. - also parodied by the “Legz Akimbo” group from The League of Gentlemen.
The Central Scrutinizer wants to warn us of the dangers of music – Zappa inspired by the ban on music in the new Islamic Republic of Iran. It tells the story of Joe, an ordinary young man from Canoga Park who plays in a garage band with his friends - “It wasn’t very large, there was just enough room to cram the drums in the corner over by the Dodge (it was a ‘54 with a mashed in door)”. The band brings girls and the promise of fame, but the record deal never materialises and the band break up, but not before getting arrested for causing public disorder.
Joe is warned to “stick closer to church-oriented activities”, so he goes to the Catholic Youth Organisation where he meets Mary; the song Catholic Girls tells of sexual hypocrisy where under the oblivious Father Riley the Catholic girls are “learning to blow all the Catholic boys”. Mary, however, is lured away by a passing rock band (Toad-O) to become a groupie before they dump her and she is forced to enter a wet T-shirt contest to earn the money to get home.
Joe hears of this and turns to the arms of a girl called Lucille ("who works in the Jack-in-the-Box") from whom he catches an STD and ends up heart-broken and confused. In this state he falls prey to L. Ron Hoover of the First Church of Appliantology (guess who *that* is based on...) who takes all Joe’s money and tells him that he is a Latent Appliance Fetishist (“a person who refuses to admit to his or herself that sexual gratification can only be achieved through the use of machines, Fifty bucks please.”). Joe dresses as a German housewife and enters The Closet, a club frequented by the machines, and hooks up with Cy Borg, a “roto-plooker” that looks like “a chrome-plated piggy bank with marital aids stuck all over it”. Joe manages to destroy Sy Borg, however, and is jailed for destruction of government property.
He is sent to a prison full of music executives, including the infamous Bald-Headed John ("who talks a lot, and it's usually wrong"), where he is endlessly abused, withdrawing into his own mind - surely a not-so-subtle commentary on music executives metaphorically screwing the artists. Eventually, Joe is released into a bleak world where music has been outlawed. He wanders, imagining guitar solos and hallucinating a vision of Mary (and a flock of killer bowties), as well as taking imaginary revenge on imaginary music critics. Eventually, Joe returns home, hangs up his imaginary guitar and takes up a job in the Utility Muffin Kitchen, anointing muffins with a Little Green Rosetta of icing.
Absolutely bonkers plot, and you get the full gamut of Zappa-ness, with lengthy jazz-rock guitar solos, great musical variety, and lots and lots of sexual themes. The track Crew Slut is a blues-rock with great harmonica solo, while Lucille Has Messed My Mind Up is a surprisingly melancholy bit of soul/reggae. Why Does It Hurt When I Pee? has a strong rocky element despite the jokiness of the lyrics, there are bits of do-wop (Packard Goose), funk (Keep It Greasy) and all manner of blended prog-like constructions. Although you get tempo changes and style changes within a single track, it doesn’t tend to go down the road of proggy noodling (mostly).
Zappa takes some of his old guitar solos and mixes them into the new songs, a process called xenochrony – some of these are, it has to be admitted, fairly lengthy free-form jazz, and the Sides Five and Six are quite heavily dependent on them, but they get mixed in so well, especially with the drumming of Vinnie Coliauta (also credited with “combustible vapors and optometric abandon”), that to me they’re welcome rather than annoying. Possibly because, I’ll admit, I’m very familiar with them. Watermelon In Easter Hay is a novel solo for this album, a wailing, mournful, Gilmour-esque piece that, according to Dweezil Zappa, was his father’s favourite thing he’d ever performed.
The vocals for Joe are performed by Ike Willis, and he’s got a great soulful voice. Even when singing about sex with a tiny gay Ken doll, he gives it his all and makes it as silky smooth as Marvin Gaye. Props also need to go to bassists Arthur Barrow and Patrick O’Hearn who go from funk to jazz to rock alongside Coliatua’s drums. The final track, A Little Green Rosetta (which borrows elements from the Zappa/Beefheart track The Muffin Man, including "arrogantly pooting forth a little green rosetta of icing from the canvas snoot of a fully-charged icing anointing device") is a chaotic breakdown singalong piece that somehow just about manages to stay together long enough to come back to unity by the end.
I realise that I’ve cheated by inserting it myself, and that there are still roughly 600 albums yet to go, but I’d put this as my favourite album, ever. Unlike many I’ve returned to as part of this project, it still holds up wonderfully, and there are so many different aspects to it that you can revisit. Come for the funny, filthy, lyrics and rocking beat where “my balls feel like a pair of marraccas”, stay for the lush jazz-rock reveries and amazing musicianship. And the production is razor sharp. (There was one problem - I had this on CD and the booklet had a very distinctive and unpleasant smell to it. At around the time I bought it, I also contracted food poisoning, norovirus, something that involved a lot of vomiting. So the smell of the booklet forever made me nauseous. But luckily not the music itself. Just though you'd like to know that).
Tomorrow (in the voice of the Central Scrutinizer, whispering through a cheap plastic megaphone), we return you to your scheduled programming.
But before we do, I throw the floor open to you, Gentle Readers. What are your suggestions for quintessential albums of the 1970s that you feel Robert Dimery and his editorial team overlooked?
It looks just like a Telefunken U47....
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