Abandoning his middle period flirtations with jazz improvisation and contemporary orchestration, [on Joe's Garage (Act I and Acts II & III)] Zappa has reverted to the conceptual doo-wop format he last employed on the Mothers' Kafkaesque exercise in cosmic paranoia We're Only In It For The Money. Joe's Garage is similarly premised on the imminent prohibition of music … as it traces the journey of protagonist/guitarist Joe through the travails of the robot age…. [The] greater portion of this extravaganza is of no more substance than hamburger helper…. [Frank's] purulent invective oftener-than-not degenerates into the most putrid scatological doggerel, lacking, however, the power to shock that his comparatively tame satire originally had. Between occasional thrusts of barbed humor and even rarer bursts of creative music, Zappa bogs down in a bilious quagmire of obscenity, misogyny and self-pity, raging with equal incomprehension over the demise of psychedelia and the recent...