FIRST: What is gravy? Generally, it’s a sauce for meat made from it’s own juices with flavors and thickeners added to taste…  
Lumpy Gravy is the result of mis-mixture, or perhaps the abundance of flour, or the addition of cool water instead of warm water—
Typically, Lumpy Gravy is not a desired result, though some do crave it for nostalgia “Just like Mom’s!” or for the heterogeneous ‘pearls of flavor’…

SECOND: Zappa was initially commissioned to compose/conduct a work for Capitol Records, and as such Lumpy Gravy was actually recorded, printed, and briefly released ready early in 1967…

Shortly after MGM/Verve, the label for the Mothers of Invention, filled suit prohibiting its release on Capitol.  Zappa then re-edited the material for its subsequent official release in May 1968…

Though one can here many orchestral similarities, the original material has been re-cut and reordered, and there is now a vocal element, that is spoken bits of dialogue. Though basically random snippets of friends, family and hangers-on talking into a well-reverberating piano, the listener grows used to such voices and types of dialogue, perhaps creating a narrative where none was intended…
(BTW: Lumpy Gravy there is actually a third version, this one is also pre-1968, similar, yet different, with much more improvisation and generally jazziness:
)

THIRD: ANALYSIS, part 1: James Borders in his article “Form and the Concept Album: Aspects of Modernism in Frank Zappa’s Early Releases (Perspectives of New Music Vol.39nO.1 (Winter, 2011), pp. 118-160) analyzes the first side of Lumpy Gravy as a Rondo form, largely due to the recurrences of “Oh, No” throughout the album…

According to Borders this tune returns twice, though it has been sped up, retrograde, etc. (Ex.3, pp. 130-133).  Intermixed with this tune are tidbits of what Borders calls ‘Varesiana,’ ‘Weberniana’ and ‘Stravinksiana’ in hommage to Zappa’s three favorite classical composers, Edgard Varese, Anton Webern and Igor Stravinsky. There are also found samples of non-Zappa pre-recorded music and eletronic treaments of various sorts

FOURTH: ANALYSIS, part 1: Borders’s rondo-form analysis is tantalizing, especially given similar structures found in Charles Ives’ “General William Booth Enters unto Heaven.”  A drawback to this might make us think Zappa was using classical forms as such, but I  instead encouraging folks to think collage or montage, more like film or a plastic art OR remind folks the Rondo form was initially a popular vocal form before it was a serious classical form…

As a MAM—dude 4eva, I hear many influences beyond, the three mentioned above—Varese of course being the most important, as he was the premier sonic collage collagist par excellence…. For (some of) those influences, see the ‘map’ below, and no more need be said…
…except of course to note that however ‘serious’ we perceive Zappa to be, he was always at least equal measure ‘silly’…
…and Lumpy Gravy is perhaps the best example of… that…

© 2013 Peter J. Evans, theorist