The Adventures of Greggery Peccary
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"The Adventures of Greggery Peccary" is a song by Frank Zappa, originally released on the album Studio Tan in 1978 and later recompiled into the posthumously released Läther album for which it was originally recorded. The song is an epic that extended 20 minutes and 33 seconds in length when first released and later 21 minutes on Läther, mocking the rock opera style and reprising the extended story format used in "Billy the Mountain" and, to some extent, the lengthy adventures outlined in the "Don't Eat the Yellow Snow" Suite.
The piece required a large number of personnel to record, as Zappa was delving heavily into orchestral arrangement at the time that he began the Läther sessions, and despite the context of Studio Tan being a rock and roll album, the long interludes of avante-garde classical arrangement that are prevalent in the track made for a much more sophisticated sound than "Billy the Mountain". Nonetheless, Zappa's use of absurdist humor and political commentary remains prevalent in this piece.
[edit] Story
Greggery Peccary is a small peccary, whose name is obviously a pun off of Gregory Peck, and not so obviously a reference to Pope Gregory XIII, creator of the modern calendar. Greggery lives among the peccary population, which ranges from Texas to Paraguay and sometimes as far west as Catalina. Peccaries are notable for having a white collar pattern on their fur, but Greggary is part of a "bold new breed" of peccary that also has a wide tie below his collar, distinguishing it as a particularly exceptional swine.
Greggery owns a red Volkswagen and works in the part of the town where the government buildings are kept at a corporation known as "Big Swifty and Associates, Trend-mongers". As the name suggests, their line of work involves conceiving and promoting the many trends and fads within the world using whatever means science has to offer.
Greggery is popular among the air-headed lady stenographers at his company, who are impressed by Greggery and taken by his suave and particular cunning as an employee. Together they sing a song advertising the company's many time-wasting products, thus inspiring Greggery to return to his "ultra-avant, laminated, simulated, replica-mahogany desk" so that he may conceive a new trend, some "THING" to identify with. Guided by heavenly voices, he invents the calendar.
The calendar, upon release, immediately causes chaos, as people suddenly can keep track of time and plan ahead, thus making life aggrivatingly mechanical, and also allowing people to discover how old they were. A group of hunchmen, just a few of the "very hip young people" of the world, attack Greggery on the way home from his office one night, enraged at the prospect of birthdays and being aware of their own aging. Greggery is chased by them in his car, and narrowly escapes into a cave in a conveniently placed and nearby mountain.
The hunchmen (and hunchwomen) decide to abandon the chase for a "love-in" and a party ensues among them. Greggery is safe from them, but suddenly discovers that he has parked within no ordinary cave, but the mouth of Billy the Mountain. Billy hacks up boulders and creates brown clouds as he laughs, suddenly procuring Greggery's interest.
Greggery, unaware that he was parked within Billy the Mountain or that Billy had coughed up the clouds, ponders "who is making those new brown clouds", and makes a phone call to find a "philostopher" for an explanation of the presence of the brown clouds. He is sent to a man named Quentin Robert DeNameland, supposedly "the greatest living philostopher known to mankind", who hosts a group assembly. DeNameland's authenticity as a philostopher is questionable, as he merely proclaims that "time is of affliction" and that "the eons are closing" before soliciting for payment for attendance to his assembly.
The adventure closes with Greggery still pondering the presence of the brown clouds, given DeNameland's lack of answers.
[edit] 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. Many segments of lyrics are interrupted at great length with musical interludes, and 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 released on its own in an album until the release of the Beat the Boots box set in 1991. The "Big Swifty's" song during the steno pool sequence is a bizarre yet sophisticated jazz piece which stands on its own. Greggery's pondering of the new brown clouds 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 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.
