Dangerous Kitchen is over 500 exhaustively researched pages long. That’s a bit daunting if you’re not already a confirmed Zappa fan. Author Kevin Courrier, a big fan himself, is less concerned with narrative thrust than with detailing the miracles Saint Frank hath wrought. He lovingly parses song after song after song, wringing the references and implications out of every note.

But then, this is where the “world” mentioned in the subtitle comes from. Frank Zappa created his own bizarre American musical idiom, mixing neoclassical dissonances with fifties R&B rhythms and sampling as readily from obscure Paul Varese works as from cultural touchstones like “Louie Louie.” Courrier follows each of these threads back towards its origin, layering them with groupies, riots and a full roster of freaks.

A life like Zappa’s doesn’t need much embellishment anyway. His name became a byword for bizarre with songs like “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow.” He went head-to-head with Tipper Gore and her obscenity-obsessed ilk in front of Congress in the eighties. He was alternately regarded as a groundbreaking “serious” modern composer and a filthy-minded musical absurdist, and was often a pariah in both camps. He became an underground hero in Communist Eastern Europe and an unofficial ambassador of sorts after the fall of Communism and before his death from cancer in 1993.

And although Courrier’s painstaking dissection of Zappa’s work can wear you out, it provides a convincing portrait of artistic drive. Through the pages and pages of minutiae—what was done to which songs, where and when and with whom—you can see an amazing single-mindedness at work. Zappa, a self-professed “full-time obsessive overdub maniac” from way back, spent an increasing amount of time over the years remixing and remastering and rereleasing older songs. Technological advances and an ever-growing pool of musical talent at his disposal meant potentially unlimited fiddling to create the desired result. He squabbled with record labels and bullied his musicians, and generally rolled over anyone who interfered with the “conceptual continuity” of his “output macrostructure.”

He would have hated seeing a book like Courrier’s condensed to make easier reading for cretins like me.

Alas, we aren’t all Frank Zappa. But I suppose I am better off than if I’d got the collection of lewd anecdotes I was really after.