Musically, the album’s two side-long suites (much as I’d have liked to get something broken into individual segments a la the track listing below into my iTunes playlists, Lumpy Gravy works perfectly well as an extended listen) deliver fifteen minute chunks combining classical, jazz and rock (particularly surf music) elements with the spoken word bits holding the thing together.
There are recognizable chunks of tunes that turn up elsewhere in the Zappa catalogue (recurring takes on Oh No from Weasels Ripped My Flesh, a quote from Uncle Meat's King Kong) and the record closes with a Ventures-style instrumental take on Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance.
There’s some nice stuff here, part cliche, part parody, part experiment, part sonic weirdness warped together into a collage of sound and dialogue that might have struck people was weird at the time but doesn’t sound particularly extreme forty-something years later.
Sure, in the days of digital rather than analogue media, you could do the editing with a computer rather than a razor blade which would make the whole thing easier (and quite possibly better, I’ve seen a couple of gripes about the crudity of the editing) but when you look back to the context of the time it delivered a package that few other sixties musical visionaries could have matched. Listen to Lumpy Gravy alongside, say Revolution #9 from The Beatles and you may well rate the Zappa performance on top.
It mightn’t be the pinnacle of Zappa’s achievement as far as ‘serious’ music is concerned and beginners are probably better off heading towards Freak Out, Absolutely Free and We’re Only In It For The Money, Lumpy Gravy is worth investigating, an interesting listen that provides a partial blueprint for the works that followed.
As one reviewer put it: The record sounds somewhat like a radio playing. In a circus big top. On the moon. (Source here).
Track listings:
1967 version:
Sink Trap, Gum Joy, Up and Down, Local Butcher, Gypsy Airs, Hunchy Punchy, Foamy Soaky, Let's Eat Out, Teenage Grand Finale
1968 version, part one
The Way I See It, Barry, Duodenum, Oh No, Bit of Nostalgia, It's from Kansas, Bored Out 90 Over, Almost Chinese, Switching Girls, Oh No Again, At the Gas Station, Another Pickup, I Don't Know If I Can Go Through This Again
1968 version, part two
Very Distraughtening, White Ugliness, Amen, Just One More Time, A Vicious Circle, King Kong, Drums Are Too Noisy, Kangaroos, Envelops the Bath Tub, Take Your Clothes Off