Frank Zappa's satirical rock opera, Joe's Garage [Act I and Acts II and III] is ambitious and mad, brilliant, peculiar and incoherent…. As a music maker and recording artist, Zappa has always cultivated two warring images—the serious composer with a social satirist's sense of irony versus the smutty crowd pleaser with a puerile sense of humor….

Joe's Garage ties the dual extremes of Frank Zappa's sensibility closer together than ever. An attack on authoritarianism in which fascist governments, self-help pseudoreligions and the music industry are inextricably linked, the opera simultaneously tells the tale of a boy and girl….

As a stage musical, Joe's Garage is unproducible. As a satire, it's terribly obvious and conceptually fuzzy…. And as an aural experience, this work is too often unlistenable. After three clever and catchy cuts on side one—the title tune, "Catholic Girls" and "Crew Slut"—the music goes downhill...