The Adventures of Greggery Peccary - Musical Themes

Musical Themes

Unlike many of Zappa's previous lyrical compositions, "Greggery Peccary" relies only minimally on repetition and more or less flows with a somewhat humorous but altogether heavy orchestral arrangement. The story is progressed by means of both lyrics and instrumental passages, e.g., Greggery's drive to work in "his little red Volkswagen" is conveyed by a frenetic musical interlude, after which Greggery delivers the punchline "Boy, it's so hard to find a place to park around here".

The piece is a demonstration of Zappa's mastery of composition much more than of his songwriting, which thus identifies it among the Läther canon. There are a few key "songs", however, within the piece as a whole. A miniature jingle accompanies Greggery's introduction and also returns the piece after a long orchestral interlude, taken from a much earlier instrumental piece, "Some Ballet Music," a piece that had been performed several times by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention but was never officially released on its own in an album until the release of the Beat the Boots box set in 1991. It also includes a piece before the Steno Pool section entitled "Join The March", previously the intro to "Farther O'Blivion." The "Big Swifty's" song during the steno pool sequence is a bizarre yet sophisticated jazz piece utilizing irrational rhythm. Greggery's pondering of the new brown clouds (a melody first heard in 1972 on The Grand Wazoo track "For Calvin And His Next Two Hitch-Hikers" appears twice, the latter time as a finale to the whole piece and, in concept, the Läther album).

Billy the Mountain and Ethel's presence in the story are hinted at early on during Greggery's escape, both by their identities as a mountain and tree with eyeballs on it, but also with a brief instrumental quote of the musical theme which accompanies the line "Billy was a mountain, Ethel was a tree growing off of his shoulder" as Greggery drives within the cave. Another possible reference to "Billy the Mountain" may be in the bizarre and somewhat atonal assembly of the calendar, which oddly resembles the passage of time in the former piece.

A key moment occurs during the love-in, in which Zappa overlays several instrumental "pop music" songs with clever segues, explaining that the young people were listening to several different radios at once, all tuned to entirely different channels (similar to the aleatoric piece "Imaginary Landscape #4" by John Cage).

The song features a variety of musical quotations. When Zappa talks about "slowly aging very hip young people," the music features a quote from Herbie Hancock's "Chameleon". Shortly after, Zappa makes reference to the My Three Sons television theme during the honkey tonk piano section.