So I'm halfway through Kelly Fisher Lowe's book (see below for my initial reactions), and it only gets more disappointing. What is really a terrible shame is that Lowe did not do his homework in trying to decipher more of Frank's lyrics, despite the fact the lyrical content is (by default) what Lowe, as a non-musician, focuses primarily on.
It astounds me that Lowe describes the lyrics to "Pygmy Twylyte" as "absurdist" and "inscrutable" when, in fact, the slightest effort to comprehend the lyrics to this song reveals that they do in fact, make perfect sense. The "green hocker croakin' in the pygmy twylyte" is just another hapless victim of drug abuse. In this case the protagonist is particularly pathetic because he seems to be a user of both uppers and downers. "Crankin' and a-cokin" indicates that the guy is presumably snorting cocaine and/or using amphetamines, aka "crank." "Out of his deep on a four-day run/hurtin' for sleep in the Quaalude moonlight" tells you how he got to this point: he was obviously on an amphetamine kick (people who do uppers will often stay awake for days at a time) and is now "hurtin' for sleep," turning to Quaaludes (a ubiquitous drug of the 70's and a powerful sedative) in order to get some relief. However, the combination of all those drugs in his system has made him sick and he's sitting there, looking all green and sickly and shaking and scared, totally pathetic and vulnerable, a complete slave to the drugs, and just scared out of his mind, afraid that he's gonna die. He has a "crystal eye" and a "crystal kidney" -- a reference to methamphetamine which is a crystalized form of the drug. Anxiety, sleeplessness, poor skin condition and kidney damage are all problems resulting from amphetamine abuse.
The term "pygmy twylyte" is, I think, connected to the song "City of Tiny Lites," another song concerned with drug abuse. The city of tiny lites is visible after the use of downers and wine; similarly, the green hocker (incidentally, he's probably a hocker because he's been driven to sell most of his possessions to pay for his drug habit) is "smokin' in the pygmy twylyte" after doing some Quaaludes in order to end his four-day amphetamine bender. I would conjecture that Frank may have heard a story about someone on 'ludes or some other sedative who, in the trance-like state induced by the drug, imagined seeing a tiny little city, maybe in a puddle or some other reflective surface, lit up by a streetlight. This would conform with Frank's usual tendency of commemorating "true stories" or events in song form.
It is also, of course, consistent with FZ's strong anti-drug stance. For Frank, anyone who allows him or herself to become suspectible to delusions of the kind described in those songs is worthy of ridicule. The proclivity of Americans to being taken in by illusions, whether drug-induced or otherwise, was a socio-cultural trait of which Zappa strongly disapproved. To him, drugs were an escape and could only be destructive, whether indirectly, by making the user unable to face the reality of his situation or by directly wreaking havoc on his body. Zappa hated deceit and felt a lot of America's problems were caused by its people being unwilling or unable to face up to the truth, no matter how ugly.
To me, if you can't get any of this out of the song's lyrics and are willing to dismiss them as "absurd," you have no business writing a book that purports to concern itself with an analysis of Zappa's lyrics. Anyway, that's why I think Kelly Lowe's book sucks.
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