It's called 'sing or get off the pot’.”[7] Zappa intended the album to be divided into two operatic suites with all the songs continually linked, which at the time of recording predated the release of The Who’s "A Quick One While He’s Away" and The Beatles’ Sgt.

It opens with an announcement of the President of the United States, who is ill and needs chicken soup, before going on to critique the “plastic” hippies who hung out at clubs like Pandora's Box, the epicenter of the Sunset Strip Riots happening at the time of the album’s recording.

The Duke of Prunes The primary subject of the suite, food, appears on this mock-AOR love ballad with comedic lyrics improvised by Ray Collins.

Originally based on a Zappa composition titled “And Very True”, the subject involves Ray, as the Duke of Prunes, attempting to pick up a woman at the supermarket by using food references that are meant as euphemisms for sex.

[8] Invocation and Ritual Dance of the Young Pumpkin This seven-minute instrumental opens with a quote from Holst’s The Planets before morphing into a wild, proto-jazz fusion group jam in which Zappa displays his improvisational guitar skills for the first time on record.

America Drinks The second suite opens with this send-up of a lounge ballad, sung deliberately off-tempo as if the singer is very drunk, to illustrate the empty phoniness of American culture.

The lyrical content skewers high school social cliques, as a self-absorbed jock finds he’s losing status with the pom-pom girls.

[8] Uncle Bernie’s Farm This relatively straightforward, fast-paced rocker critiques the makers of violent children’s toys and compares them to the child’s equally plastic parents.

It closes with several overlapping voices attempting to sell the listener toy bombs, rockets, intestines, brass knuckles, and other grotesque products.

Here we learn more about her desire to be "in" as she drops acid, stays out all night on Sunset Strip, steals her boyfriend’s stash of drugs and attends a protest march in Berkeley.

[8] Zappa admitted that the rocker was one of the most difficult songs for The Mothers to learn to play due to its dizzying change of time signatures, moving between 4/4, 8/8, 9/8, 4/8, 5/8, 6/8 and back to 4/4.

AllMusic calls it a “fabulously inventive record, bursting at the seams with ideas”[11] while The New Rolling Stone Album Guide awarded four-and-a-half stars.