Produced simultaneously with We're Only in It for the Money, Zappa saw Lumpy Gravy as the second part of a conceptual continuity that later included his final album, Civilization Phaze III.

[7] Capitol released the original all-orchestral Lumpy Gravy album on August 7, 1967, only on the 4-track cartridge format, apparently in limited numbers.

[8] During the litigation, Zappa expanded and significantly edited the album, adding spoken word and musique concrète interludes, as well as some pieces of music from his pre-Mothers archives.

Most of the dialogue on the reedited Lumpy Gravy, recorded simultaneously with We're Only in It for the Money,[10] was spoken by a small group which included Motorhead Sherwood, Roy Estrada, Spider Barbour, All-Night John (the manager of the studio) and Louis Cuneo, who was noted for his laugh, which sounded like a "psychotic turkey".

[11] The revised album proved to be very difficult to make, as the orchestral master tapes recovered from Capitol featured many poor splices.

[18] Barry Miles, writing in International Times, described the album as fusing John Cage's Fontana Mix (1958) and John Carisi's "Moon Taj" (1962) with Zappa's distinctive style of "lyricism and cynicism", and praised Zappa's editing of the "loaded" conversation snippets, deeming them "masterpieces of editing".

[19] In a mixed review, Jim Miller of Rolling Stone called it Zappa's "most curious" album to date, finding it to represent the extreme of his "fragmented musical approach", but believed it to be overall "rather inert" and criticised the spoken sections for seeming forced.

"[20] Retrospectively, AllMusic writer François Couture wrote, "The starting point of Zappa's 'serious music,' Lumpy Gravy suffers from a lack of coherence, but it remains historically important and contains many conceptual continuity clues for the fan.

"[13] David Cavanagh of Uncut wrote that the "collage-style concept album" features "some of his most avant-garde music as well as some of his most bizarre encounters with his fellow Mothers.

"[21] Ian Stonehouse of The Rough Guide to Rock wrote that the album shows Zappa at his "most original", noting its cut-up blend of musique concrète, R&B, jazz and "mumblings from inside a grand piano", and deemed it a "masterpiece that anticipated sampling technology".

[24] In 1984, the second version of Lumpy Gravy was remixed by Zappa, with new overdubs by bassist Arthur Barrow and drummer Chad Wackerman.