Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica

by Courrier, Kevin

  The sensibility at work in Trout Mask can also be tied to early twentieth century Dadaist sound poets like Hugo Ball, who mesmerized—and shocked—audiences in Zurich at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916. “I shall be reading poems that are meant to dispense with conventional language, no less, and have done with it,” Ball wrote in the Dada Manifesto. “I don’t want words that other people have invented … I want my own stuff, my own rhythm, and vowels and consonants too, matching the rhythm and all my own. If this pulsation is seven yards long, I want words that are seven yards long.” Like Ball, Beefheart chose to dispense with conventional language. He hypnotically tore into the syllables and consonants of his lyrics in quest of that pulsation. But unlike Ball, who was burdened by the solemn mysticism of Catholicism, Beefheart takes off—guilt-free—into the vapours by spinning yarns and springing puns. Just listen to a wildly playful song like “My Human Gets Me Blues” (“I knew you were under duress / I knew you were under yer dress”), where he subliminally channels poet Gregory Corso, who similarly got caught up in conceptual wordplay.

  Although Trout Mask Replica is generally considered a landmark avant-garde rock record, it’s essential to note that Beefheart and his group didn’t set out to make an Art Statement—like the Dadaists. Declarations always have a clearly defined purpose, a political intent that fixes them in time. It makes for easy explanations and pigeonholing, too. For example, when Lou Reed made Metal Machine Music (1975), a two-record assault featuring nothing but sonic feedback, he clearly intended to outrage fans and annoy his record company. Trout Mask doesn’t set out to deliberately anger anyone, even if it ultimately does, because Beefheart sincerely wants to entertain us. The record is also not in the adventurous cast of filmmaker Stan Brakhage, who decorated the film frame in Mothlight (1963) by pasting moth’s wings onto film stock and then running it through an optical printer therefore making us aware of cinema’s tactile qualities. Nor is Beefheart’s record in the same world as Andy Warhol, when he extended the epic form of filmmaking in the somnambulistic Empire (1965), where we lay witness to a static shot of the Empire State Building for twenty-four-hours. Beefheart’s effort is the exact opposite of minimalist art, it’s as maximalist as music can get. Yet what ultimately makes Trout Mask a bigger artistic challenge than any of those other departures from convention is that, while it effortlessly tears apart the conventions of songwriting, it attempts it within the commercial world of pop. “I thought Trout Mask Replica was a very commercial album,” Beefheart told Nick Kent of New Musical Express in 1974. “There was a lot of humour on that album that I thought people would pick up on.” The lyrics, in particular, are written with such polymorphous glee and wit (“A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast ’n’ bulbous. Got me?” is but one sample) that the record overturns any avant-garde solemnity. But the rock audience was still generally deaf to it. Defiantly original, Trout Mask Replica is a declaration of the American imagination that speaks in an unknown language, not fully comprehended, yet spoken candidly without fear of recrimination.

  Within the lines of this story, at its very heart, is a bond between two men who were early best friends, artistic collaborators and later adversaries: Frank Zappa and Don Van Vliet. Many critics (including former Magic Band members) have attempted to diminish Zappa’s role on this record. They suggest that he merely “slept at the switch,” or simply pushed the record button. But those claims, specious as they are, seem to come out of a pathological dislike of Zappa and a romantic idealization of Beefheart as the hermit genius. Anyone who cares to truly listen to Trout Mask can feel the abiding spirit of both men on it. Those particularly familiar with Zappa’s music, especially Uncle Meat, will hear the conceptual shape that Zappa, as a producer, gave to the production of the music on Trout Mask Replica. In terms of the creation of it, others elsewhere (particularly John French) have already illuminated the process by which the music was composed. Beefheart had for years (with the help of some critics) taken full credit for the record’s songs, when it was actually created with the full involvement of the group. While many Beefheart fans might already be familiar with that part of the story, this book examines why Beefheart had the need to perpetuate that myth.

  Most great albums do create myths around them and Trout Mask Replica is no different, but the reviews (both hostile and friendly) have usually overvalued and undervalued this great record in a deep need to find a critical language to understand it. Delving into the critical fallout of Trout Mask Replica is part of my own way, as a critic, of illuminating what the work means to me while leaving the judgements to the reader. Finally, the influence of this record goes further and deeper than I could have at first imagined. Besides the many groups who cite Trout Mask as a template for their own musical adventures, the songs on this record have been continually covered by numerous bands, while others have boldly taken their names from the song titles.

  In the end, Trout Mask Replica is a full expression of one American artist’s quest for total freedom. But it is also an expression of the tyranny of freedom. When you find yourself becoming the person you want to be, doing exactly what you want to do, sometimes freedom can’t be sustained. For Beefheart, his earlier records designed an intricate map that tilted him toward Trout Mask, where he acquired the autonomy to remake rock and roll by breaking every rule in the genre. Yet even as the record caught his yearning for a new world, it was delivered with a foreboding force that stripped the ground out from under him. Whether the subsequent records were good or bad, Beefheart really had nowhere to turn after Trout Mask Replica. He could either refine the sound of it (Lick My Decals Off, Baby), define it for commercial consumption (Clear Spot), attempt to repeat it (Bat Chain Puller), or escape it (Bluejeans and Moonbeams). Once you find freedom, you often realize that you can never really keep it. “Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom,” D.H. Lawrence once wrote of Americans. “The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.” Beefheart’s rattling of chains becomes the living drama of Trout Mask Replica. It’s also the subject of this book. Beefheart’s brand of freedom raised the very stakes of personal liberty for the man who envisioned it, the band who created it, and the audience who would soon discover it.

  Chapter Two

  A Different Fish

  No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as it is happily the case with my dear native land.

  —Nathanial Hawthorne, Transformation

  “If you want to be a different fish,” Captain Beefheart once said, “jump out of school.” The image of the fish, deeply rooted in Beefheart’s art, had arrived long before the emergence of Trout Mask Replica in 1969. Yet rather than discovering it by jumping out of school, he first encountered it in one. Ten years before Trout Mask was conceived, Beefheart and his young buddy Frank Zappa stumbled upon a lone Webcor reel-to-reel tape recorder in an empty classroom at Antelope Valley Junior College in Lancaster, California. “[It] just happened to be sitting there waiting to be plundered—maroon, with the green blinking eye,” Zappa recalled. One uneventful afternoon, in that vacant room, Beefheart, Zappa, and his brother Bobby improvised a parody of scatological blues called “Lost in a Whirlpool.” It wasn’t close to being their greatest collaboration, but the song celebrated in irreverent fashion their shared interest in the blues and R&B. You could hear a nascent affection in their performance of the kind usually found in shared juvenile camaraderie. The song came out of the foundation of a friendship, one that’s formed when two outsiders suddenly find themselves killing time in an arid desert community. Looking back on the recording in 1993, Beefheart remarked, “Frank and I had a good time. We were just fooling around.”

  In 1972, though, the good times and the days of fooling around were clearly over. It had been three years since Trout Mask Replica had been released to r
ave reviews from critics like Lester Bangs who, writing in Rolling Stone, championed the record on release by calling it “the most unusual and challenging musical experience you’ll have this year.” BBC DJ John Peel, who helped launch a number of original bands from Half Man Half Biscuit to the Field Mice on his radio show, also contributed to the cheerleading, sending the record charging into the UK Top 50. “If there has been anything in the history of popular music which could be described as a work of art in a way that people who are involved in other areas of art would understand, then Trout Mask is probably that work,” he proclaimed. The more adventurous critics and listeners brought glowing attention to the record, even if radio stations wouldn’t dare touch it. None of that seemed to matter now to Captain Beefheart. He suddenly had a huge axe to grind and he was looking for someone to help him sharpen it.

  He began the year by discussing his career with Roy Carr, a journalist with the British music magazine New Musical Express. “I’ve had my fun,” he said. “Now I’m going to make myself far more accessible to the public.” Just what “accessible” might mean to the man who conceived Trout Mask Replica was never really explained. But it was clear that he didn’t enjoy being perceived as a freak. The blame for that particular moniker was now laid at the door of Trout Mask’s producer, Frank Zappa. “Zappa is an oaf,” Beefheart told Carr. “All he wanted to do was make me into a horrible freak. I am not a freak.” Rejecting the tag of the freak was an odd denial considering that Trout Mask Replica represented the clearest representation of Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band’s most radical work, setting them apart quite dramatically from most contemporary rock groups. Much of his chagrin, too, was directed toward the promotion of the record by Zappa’s Straight Records. Beefheart was distressed about sharing space with such odd company as Wild Man Fischer, the GTO’s, and especially Alice Cooper, who Beefheart thought killed live chickens as part of his stage act.

  Beefheart was desperate to declare himself a true artist and not some circus act. “I am an artist … I paint, I write, I sculpt and I perform my own music,” he pleaded. “The trouble with Frank Zappa is that he is not a good artist or a writer and by surrounding himself with good musicians and exploiting them, he boosts his own image.” Beefheart provided for Carr his ultimate summation of the rancour between them: It’s not worth getting into the bullshit to see what the bull ate. His disappointment was just as harsh when it came to describing his listening audience, whom he saw as “consisting of pickles.” In other words, drug-addled zombies. “It hurts me,” he said, “to see little girls sitting there looking like porcupines.”

  A few months later, he continued the tirade with Caroline Boucher of Disc, when he accused Zappa of “trying to keep the artist in me back.” He went on to say that Zappa stole all his ideas in the early days, even using Beefheart’s concepts for album titles (Lumpy Gravy, Hot Rats) without crediting him. “All this bit about being friends since we were young—I only met the guy about twenty-five times in the whole time I’ve been alive,” he exclaimed. Suddenly the man who wished to be a different fish didn’t want to be proclaimed as so different after all. It no longer mattered that he had finally found himself free to do the music he wished, on a record label and with a producer who offered it to him. It didn’t help having at his disposal an amazingly skilled group of musicians dedicated to playing his music. Now he wasn’t so satisfied with being different. “All the time, I have to explain myself to people,” he told Boucher. “I actually have people trying to get me to explain why I have a right to be on this planet—hundreds of people a day.” That right had suddenly become an ordeal, an albatross continuing to burden and enslave him. Freedom was defining him rather than the other way around. How did this happen—and so quickly—after the artistic success of Trout Mask? Perhaps it was much easier to be a free man when no one knew who you really were, when they didn’t categorize you, or give a fuck about who you really were. To Captain Beefheart, that now seemed like eons ago.

  Those days of yearning to be a free man existed before he met Zappa in 1956. Don Vliet, as he was known then, had attended Lancaster High School, where he possessed a passion for both drawing and sculpting. Earlier he had studied with Portuguese sculptor Augustonia Rodriguez and won a scholarship to study art in Europe. But his parents didn’t approve the trip. For them, the art world was a haven for homosexuals all laying in wait to corrupt their only son. So when they moved to the Mohave Desert, they settled down in the safer white-bread community of Lancaster. They likely figured that, without much of an arts community, their son was safe there. But Don’s folks couldn’t anticipate his embracing of music. In particular, the work of other outsiders like blues giants Howlin’ Wolf, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, and Sonny Boy Williamson. Vliet’s growing fascination for the blues had been nurtured, in part, by the only musician in his family, his grandfather, Amos Warfield. Once a plantation owner in the South, Warfield was a white blues player who performed his songs using a lap guitar that he played with a pocketknife. It was through Amos that Don Vliet quickly acquired a natural fervour for that Delta sound. So when Vliet encountered Frank Zappa, he had found yet another outcast like himself, one who had a similar regard for blues and R&B.

  On the day they met, Don was about to jump out of school, but not necessarily to be a different fish. His father, Glenn, who had a Helms bread truck route to Mohave, just suffered a heart attack and Don had to take over the job. Upon leaving school, Don just happened to give the spindly Zappa a ride home in his ’49 blue powder Oldsmobile 88 Coupe. “[H]e was very fond of wearing khakis and French-toed shoes and dressing in the latest pachuco fashion,” Zappa told British journalist Barry Miles. “It’s a certain style of clothes that you had to wear to look like that type of teenager.” Only it wasn’t the dress of your average teenager—especially from Lancaster. However, Zappa was hardly your average teenager, either. At that time, he was becoming a local legend. He had not only formed the Blackouts, the only racially integrated R&B band in Lancaster, he had already begun experimenting with orchestral composition. Vic Mortensen, who was the drummer in Vliet’s first group, the Omens, grew up in Claremont, California, where he first encountered Zappa. Appropriately enough, it was in the music room at their junior high school. Since Zappa began his musical life as an aspiring percussionist in the Blackouts, Mortensen was on hand to see him gathering all the school’s drum sets and tuning them all to sound like tom-toms.

  The Blackouts may have been a local phenomenon, but they didn’t last, breaking up a year after Zappa met Don. At which point Zappa gave up the drums and started to turn his attention toward the guitar. More importantly, he was becoming seriously interested in becoming a composer. Besides his love of R&B, he had fallen in love with the avant-garde classical composer Edgard Varèse, who was challenging the very principles of western music, along with other serialist twelve-tone composers like Anton Webern and the neoclassicist Igor Stravinsky. When Vliet and Zappa encountered each other, Zappa was studying musical harmony while Vliet was still working on his art major. In short order, Don and Frank became fast friends over music and food. They’d gorge on Don’s growing collection of rhythm and blues records, while also helping themselves to partially stale pineapple buns from Don’s father’s truck. “We’d start off at my house, and then we’d get something to eat and ride around in his old Oldsmobile looking for pussy—in Lancaster!” Zappa mused. When they couldn’t get any local hot action, they’d be back at Don’s place eating buns and listening to records until 5AM. “It was the only thing that seemed to matter at the time,” Zappa recalled wistfully. Music mattered quite a bit, to the point of zealous competitiveness. Often they would quiz each other on the records they listened to, testing each other’s knowledge of an artist’s work, the number of songs released, their B-sides, even the serial number on the single itself. It was at the height of this musical muscle-flexing that they happened on that magical Webcor reel-to-reel.

  Zappa had been learning to play the g
uitar thanks to his brother Bobby’s assistance. He was patterning his technique of playing on the sharp picking style of R&B artist Johnny “Guitar” Watson while adapting the aggressive tone of “Guitar” Slim. Don Vliet, on the other hand, was somewhat less assertive when it came to music. According to Beefheart biographer Mike Barnes, “[Vliet] would sing for his own amusement and obviously possessed talent, but he had to be cajoled or tricked into having his voice recorded.” Barnes explained that Vliet would often become self-conscious and embarrassed when he performed, thus destroying his sense of timing. He would cover his awkwardness by becoming angry. When they gathered to record “Lost in a Whirlpool,” Don had to be tricked into improvising the lyrics. “Without being kicked in the butt, he would never have started singing,” Zappa explained.

  For most of his career, Zappa’s musical satire was largely based on his interest in documenting the unusual fixations of those normally not commemorated in pop songs—or for that matter, in classical music, too. For example, before his death, while working with the Ensemble Modern, he provided story material from PFIQ magazine—a magazine devoted to genital piercing—in order to create an orchestral composition. In “Lost in a Whirlpool,” it was the peculiar story of a man being flushed down the toilet by his girlfriend where—to his horror—he encounters an eyeless brown fish. “There are few areas of basic human activity that have not been dealt with in rock ’n’ roll, but a song about being pursued by a giant stool stands in a field of one,” wrote Mike Barnes. But the idea of building a blues song around such questionable material was in keeping with a tradition much bigger than a field of one.