Back To The Garage

By Paul Morley

New Musical Express, 12 January 1980

FRANK ZAPPA
Joe's Garage Acts II & III
(CBS)

FRANK Zappa always seemed like a defiant anachronism with a knack of appearing timeless. Above it all. Away from it all. On this double disc parts 2 & 3 and scenes 9 to 18 of his hard-hearted story, Zappa seems simply lost, floating in a void though rolling in money. But that's OK. He can probably qualify his malevolent and moralistic ramble as much as I can scorn its inadequacy and indulgence. In my world it sucks; in his it's probably a definitive statement.

Funny, I used to think Todd Rundgren was going to end up like this, unwillingly shocked info an uncomfortable intellectual poignancy and making marketable use of superior tastes to soothe the half-opened ears of a despicable nation. Zappa always wanted to be violently temperamental but, when he's so normal, it hurts. His compensation was to match his awkward talents with a spiteful churlishness that became quite endearing, but very unconvincing.

The three parts of 'Joe's Garage' is all or nothing of Zappa's worldview. Zappa's projection is a society deep in a grotesque, machinistic slumber following psychological, technological, economic and democratic breakdown, laced with faceless authority and hollow characters, where music is eventually banned – for its corrupting influences and its potential as a leader of man.

'Joe' is not autobiographical, Zappa has stressed, but who can't recognise a character seething with pent-up paranoia and condescension and naivety at the injustice of the world when all he wants to do is play his guitar, thereforev ends up moving through nightmares and farces of helplessness, isolation and orgy, taking refuge in playing imaginary guitar inside his head.

This allows numerous opportunities, especially in the latter scenes, for Zappa to fret his way through some of his more sterile, and particular solos in years. Breathtaking.

'Joe's Garage' is a twisted fable of the human will in the face of inhuman opposition, a fairy tale of decadence, manipulation and competition. Joe journeys towards death or the blinding light, but he seems alright, a booji boy even. As a story, it plods, the plot slops all over the place, here dense, there shallow, loving a cheap shock and getting caught up in its own obvious, open-ended destination. It's elaborately asepmbled, but its American success will have been due more to its soft sounds and lovable eccentricity than to any craft or intention. Musically it's a light, complex but undemanding match of fairycake funk and wishy-washy psychedelia, with idiotic voices (Zappa and others) merrily or gravely intoning lines for the mass public to giggle at.

Zappa's become an anonymous and ignorant adult entertainer, neither hero nor anti-hero, tangled in the excess and programming he thinks he parodies and berverts. But who cares? The guy's a prat, for all his vocabulary.