"Billy the Mountain" is a Frank Zappa piece first made available on the album Just Another Band from L.A. in 1972.
The original recording, which took more than a half-hour to perform, was from a live tour performance on August 7, 1971, in Los Angeles, performed by Zappa with his band the Mothers and prominently featured the musical duo Flo & Eddie.
An alternate version of the song was featured on the 1992 album Playground Psychotics,[2] and a third version of the song was posthumously released in 2011 by the Zappa Family Trust on the album Carnegie Hall.
The song is an intricate and absurd story in a parody of the song/story style of works such as "Peter and the Wolf" about a talking mountain named Billy and his "lovely wife" Ethel, "a tree growing off of his shoulder."
The lyrics are a satirical myriad of monoculture imagery, the city of Los Angeles, the demise of urban America, and overall absurd juxtapositions of situations.