YMMV / Joe's Garage

• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The final track, "A Little Green Rosetta", is completely random and sits in severe contrast with the arresting Tear Jerker of a penultimate song, "Watermelon in Easter Hay". Even with its context of "this is the dangerous consequence of making music (ie. going entirely insane)", it's still pretty jarring.
• Broken Base: This Rock Opera is a Broken Base among fans. Some people adore it, others feel there is a lot of Album Filler and Padding. The plot often goes nowhere and focuses to much on bawdy comedy that doesn't drive the story forward. The long guitar solos on CD 2 have also divided audiences. Some like them, others claim they it's just noodling for the sake of noodling. Zappa's interludes as the Central Scrutinizer also irk some listeners, because when you play the tracks it's always the first thing you have to endure before you get to the music. In the otherwise beautiful "Watermelon in Easter Hay" Zappa's jabbering takes up more than a minute and he even talks over the guitar intro! And then there is the final track, "A Little Green Rosetta", which has nothing to do with the rest of the plot and just seems to be there to go out on a less depressive note.
• Fridge Brilliance:
  • The album has a Downer Ending, with Joe giving up on his individuality...but only until you remember exactly who is doing the narrating. At this point, it becomes obvious that, since this is supposedly government propaganda, the album had to end this way.
  • The song "Why Does It Hurt When I Pee" is an over the top Progressive Rock parody about a guy lamenting an STD. As goofy as this is, it's revealed in the next song he had fallen in love with her(or at least thought he was in love), and there are few things as heart-breaking as contracting an STD from someone you love and trust. So, he's not melodramatic over the disease, but getting it from someone he thinks he loves.
  • Probably the most heavily criticized aspect of the album is how much the pacing slows down in the last third, but, if you think about it, it fits the tone of the story. If you're in a bad place in your life, and you look at the events that led you to that place, everything seems very fast, one catastrophe happening after the other. Then, if you look at your life since everything went to hell, it seems the opposite, slow and unchanging, as you're stuck in one place, and can't get out, and all there is for you to do is live in your head, and reflect on your life.
• Funny Moments: Many, many examples throughout the album.
• Heartwarming Moments: The title track can come across like this, as it concerns Joe starting up a band with his friends and just having fun playing music, with only a hint of the corruption to follow in the rest of the album.
  • Another is Joe's mysterious vision of Mary at the end of "Packard Goose", when she delivers some of the most oracular and haunting lines Zappa would ever write:
  Mary: Hi! It's me...the girl from the bus...
  Remember? The last tour?
  Well...
  Information is not knowledge
  Knowledge is not wisdom
  Wisdom is not truth
  Truth is not beauty
  Beauty is not love
  Love is not music
  Music is THE BEST...
• Tear Jerker: "Watermelon in Easter Hay", a beautiful, tragic guitar solo which occurs near the end of the album as Joe prepares to completely leave music behind and enter a normal life.