Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica

by Courrier, Kevin

  Another new song they recorded, which would conclude Trout Mask Replica, was “Veteran’s Day Poppy,” an antiwar song told from the point of view of a father who has just lost his son in battle. Lamenting the significance of the poppy, in the face of the familial loss, Beefheart exclaims, “It can never grow another son / Like the one who warmed me my days.” While lyrically the track is—for Beefheart—fairly straightforward, the title is a playful double-entendre (Poppy is also Papa). “Suffice to say that one of Don’s favorite words was ‘juxtaposition,’” Harkleroad explained. Yet even if the lyric is simple, “Veteran’s Day Poppy” is musically dense, with an intricate coda at the end. “That section at the end was obviously tacked on later,” Harkleroad told Billy James in Lunar Notes. “Zappa showed me this major 7th chord—actually it comes out as a minor 9th—but I didn’t know about relative major-minor stuff then. If you listen to the end section it’s kind of Zappa-like.” Mike Barnes also rightly asserts that the slide guitar in the opening is lifted from the popular 40s song, “Rancho Grande.”

  The only track they rerecorded from Strictly Personal was “Kandy Korn,” but it never got completed. Before the sessions completed, Gary Marker started to sense a portentous dynamic emerging in the studio, which bore significance further down the road. There was a growing competitive tension developing between Zappa and Beefheart. “The real operative current in the studio that night was the competition between Zappa and Don,” Marker told Mike Barnes. “If there’s any tension in that stuff, it’s there.” Often it was instigated by Zappa, too, who would taunt Beefheart to do bird whistles until he would ultimately relent. The tension didn’t escalate, however, since the recordings were pretty close to completion. During the early winter of 1969, Zappa prepared to head out on the road for what would turn out to be his final tour with that current edition of the Mothers. Beefheart, meanwhile, took the Magic Band back to their house and mapped out the new music for his upcoming record.

  The first task, though, was to find a permanent bass player, since Gary Marker made it clear that his inclusion was only temporary. Mark Boston had once played bass in one of Harkleroad’s blues cover groups, so he was invited to join up. “When I joined, I thought I was gonna be playing blues,” Boston explained to Mojo magazine in 2005. His assumption wasn’t misplaced, because he had last seen the Magic Band back at the Teenage Fair, when they were still playing the blues. Despite concerns that he might not fit in, Boston ultimately won over the group. One new member who didn’t immediately win over everyone (except Beefheart) was Victor Hayden. Although Beefheart added Hayden on bass clarinet, the problem was, he couldn’t actually play it. “He was totally untrained, completely,” French told Bryon Coley of Spin. “He hadn’t even played a horn before. It was just basically squawking around a bit.” Harkleroad was even less charitable. “I’m not sure I would say that he played it, so much as pushed air through it,” Harkleroad added.

  Besides being Beefheart’s cousin, what likely interested Vliet most about including Hayden in the group was the atypical aspect of having someone who could only “push air” and “squawk” through a bass clarinet. Out of the failure to realize Brown Wrapper, plus the mess that became Strictly Personal, Beefheart envisioned a music with a purity of sound, not harmony and melody. He knew he would need the most unorthodox (and dedicated) band to accomplish it. The first step in this new direction was to rename the members (as Zappa had once renamed him). Mark Boston became Rockette Morton, Jeff Cotton was christened Antennae Jimmy Semens, Victor Hayden was the Mascara Snake, John French inherited the obvious moniker Drumbo, and Bill Harkleroad became Zoot Horn Rollo. Harkleroad wasn’t so sure he liked the name at first, but eventually grew to accept it. “I guess the name fit in with this strange music we were playing and in time I felt very comfortable with it, and still do,” Harkleroad explained.

  As for the “strange music,” which would ultimately comprise Trout Mask Replica, the inspiration for it was partly due to the jazz records that Gary Marker had been playing Beefheart over the past couple of years. Among the stacks of Archie Shepp, John Coltrane, and Charles Lloyd albums, there was one record that particularly stood out. It was a rare disc by author Lawrence Lipton called Jazz Canto. Lipton was a writer with a varied career, who early in the 40s wrote mysteries, novels, and poetry. In the late 50s, when he was in his sixties, he became linked to the Beat writers such as Jack Keroauc and Allen Ginsberg in the poetry renaissance in San Francisco. Later that year, Lipton began experimenting with the latent musical rhythms within verse by combining poetry with jazz music. While working with Shelly Manne, Jimmie Giuffre, and Buddy Colette, he perfected an integration of the two forms. When Benny Carter and Jack Hampton heard Lipton discussing his fusion of poetry and jazz on CBS Radio, they called on him to produce a whole series of poetry and jazz concerts. This not only led to the First West Coast Poetry and Jazz Festival in December 1957, it resulted the following year in a concept record for World Pacific Records called Jazz Canto. The album drew upon the musical talents of Shorty Rogers, Paul Horn, and Barney Kessel to shape their music around the recitations of poets like Kenneth Rexroth, Stuart Z. Perkoff, and many other West Coast bohemians. The record provided a portal by which Beefheart could combine poetic timbre with the musical arrangements from his group.

  Gary Marker had also partly provided the idea for the musical structure of Trout Mask. One day, while learning how to edit, Marker was told to take out a number of reference tapes and put together a series of four-bar and eight-bar segments in a random order, then match them up so that the metre would be accurate. While Marker was playing back his seemlessly edited opus of disjointed parts, Beefheart happened to enter the studio and immediately wanted to know what he was doing. Once Marker explained the process to him, Don decided that he wanted to create a music that was, as Marker recalled, “like punching buttons on a radio and getting random stuff that hangs together.” To achieve this conceptual strategy for Trout Mask Replica, Beefheart turned to the one person he could: John French. “Alex [Snouffer] directed the original band, until Don kept asserting himself to the point where Alex became disgusted and gave up,” French explained to Bryon Coley of Spin. “It took somebody to arrange what Don was doing; not creating music necessarily—although I created a lot of my own drum parts—but just making sure that everybody knows what everything is, so that the tunes don’t go on for twenty minutes.”

  The popular myth, devised by Beefheart, then embellished by the rock press, was that he composed all the songs on Trout Mask Replica at a piano in a remarkable eight-day span. Not only is the claim patently false, it helped propagate a cult of personality around Beefheart. It was reminiscent of the declarations made by many auteur film critics that Orson Welles was the sole genius behind Citizen Kane, as if Herman J. Mankiewicz’s screenplay were merely an adjunct to the picture. Yet the Trout Mask myth served another purpose. It enabled Beefheart to claim an artistic control thus far denied him, and it pitted him as the resident genius next to his friend/rival Frank Zappa. Since most rock critics despised Zappa, especially for his snide put-downs of the counterculture scene, it proved easier to exalt the more romantic view of Beefheart as the misunderstood master. It’s a spurious perspective still held today—although the Magic Band has finally been recognized for the importance of their contributions.

  One significant truth of Beefheart’s assertion, though, was that he began composing the music for Trout Mask on the piano. One day, he brought one into the house, even though (in the spirit of Victor Hayden) he couldn’t play it. As Mike Barnes pointed out in his Beefheart biography, Vliet approached the piano in an intuitive manner, “unencumbered by technique as he possessed none.” Barnes described the process, quoting future Magic Band guitarist Gary Lucas, by suggesting that Beefheart was “throwing a pack of cards in the air, photographing them as they fell and then getting the … musicians to reproduce the frozen moment.” John French agreed with the intuitive approach Beefheart applied. “Don could ne
ither read nor write music notation as he had no formal music education,” he explained. “Yet with this handicap, he still managed to communicate several albums worth of material through whistling, singing, and playing parts on guitars, drums, harmonicas, pianos, and any other instrument within reach. Had he been able to write music in the conventional manner, there is no telling what this man might have accomplished musically.”

  Even so, Beefheart accomplished more than anyone could have bargained for—and French knew it. This is one reason why he used a tape recorder to get Beefheart’s spontaneous musical lines down for notation. “I had been tape recording Don’s piano parts,” French remembered. “He would go on for hours, just hours, to get one little thing on there and we finally ran out of tape. He was like, ‘John, record this! Get this, man! Get this! Come on!’ He’d be sitting at the piano, trapped in his own creativity, because he couldn’t get up. If he moved his hands he’d forget what he was doing.” Harkleroad had vivid recollections of watching the two men in process. “There were days and days when [Beefheart] and John French were pounding out parts. I don’t mean to diminish [Beefheart]’s creativity or his view of the big picture, but he would play something and couldn’t repeat it ten minutes later.… John would try to make him do that so he could write it. [Beefheart] was chiselling away at rhythmic shapes and sounds, and it wasn’t done in any concise way where he had a direct vision of what he was going to come up with, other than the parts that the band was going to put together.” Soon the process broke down when French accidently erased a tape they’d made. “I’d be looking for tapes through these old reel-to-reel tapes,” French said. “I’d drop one on the floor and it would roll away and unspool.… I couldn’t find any tape, so one day I just took the fuse out of the tape recorder and said it was broken. ‘Won’t work anymore.’”

  French quickly decided to bring some manuscript paper to their sessions and began writing drum patterns to Beefheart’s whistled, or vocalized, musical phrases. He would write the notation and play it back to him. “I had a spiral-bound music manuscript book and one day I attempted to transcribe something as Don played,” French remembered. “Pitches were a little rough at first, but I knew rhythms well. After writing a couple of passages, I unconsciously laid the book down and walked out of the room. Don approached me later, downstairs, and, displaying the transcription, asked, ‘Can you play this back?’ I said, ‘I’ll give it a try!’ After a moderately successful replay, this became the method by which much of Trout Mask Replica was written.” For hours, they would sit there working out their strategy, coming up with the notations for “Dali’s Car,” an instrumental that would later appear on Trout Mask. “He did not think in long passages,” French explained. “Most of his passages were fairly short, just a bunch of riffs put together. And he couldn’t play from one to the other. The music works, but to me it’s rhythmically random. And it wasn’t done because Don was thinking, intentionally, ‘Oh, here I’ll go into 3/4.’ He never thought about key signatures. He never thought about time signatures. You could say, ‘Don, where’s middle C?’ And he wouldn’t know. He had no idea about that. That doesn’t stop someone from being a creative person, but it definitely stops them from being able to communicate what it is they want to do.” The job of communicating this new music to the rest of the group fell to French.

  “John would show us the parts,” Harkleroad recalled. “[H]e had a tremendous amount of control over who played what. Don didn’t know what we were playing. As he heard us rehearsing the songs—and he rarely was at rehearsals—he would become familiar with the parts we were working out, and he might say, ‘That’s great,’ or ‘You need to fix that.’ But the way we’d play in different time signatures and make it work together—how we would come together after twelve beats and then move on to the next section—wasn’t determined by Don.” If the musical end was pretty much the combined effort of the Magic Band, the lyrics were all Beefheart. “The lyric was onto itself and the music was unto itself, and they were crammed together, sometimes magically and other times not so well,” Harkleroad explained. “There was never any rehearsing of the lyrics, so they were very separate.” For the band, Beefheart was using these chunks of musical sound much the way a sculptor shapes clay. “He adopted more of the mentality of a sculptor,” Harkleroad explained. “His idea was to use sound, bodies, and people as tools. It was increasingly clear that our job as his band was to turn it into sounds that were repeatable.”

  For much of the late autumn of 1968, into the early winter of 1969, the group rehearsed the music endlessly until Zappa returned from his tour to begin producing the record. However, as nourished as they were by playing this new music, they were literally starving. “We were all totally broke,” French explained. “There was no money. Basically Don’s mother was supporting the band and [Harkleroad’s] mother would send down cheques to pay the rent and buy food. I remember once going for a month and all we had to eat every day was one little ration of a four-ounce cup of soya beans.” The group was in fact so poor they even resorted to stealing food. One time, they actually got caught. Before heading out on the tour, Zappa bailed them out of jail. “I remember waking up in the middle of the night,” French remembered. “I could hear everybody sleeping, so I crawled into the kitchen on my hands and knees, very very quietly. I took a piece of bread … I lay with my head under my blanket, munching on this bread, like it was a feast.… I actually remember one time drinking pancake syrup. I was so hungry I just poured it in a glass and drank it. I had to have something in my stomach.”

  Beefheart drove the musicians hard, making them play twelve to fourteen hours a day. He was “conditioning” the band by keeping them talking for up to thirty-six hours straight. “When I first joined the group, Don was going to the library looking up books on how to control people, and literally how to brainwash these young kids,” Harkleroad recalled. “We’re talking sleep deprivation, food deprivation.” Working so close to Beefheart, French saw how Don would use the same underhanded techniques to gain control that he used to get Doug Moon out of the group. “We’d have these, what I used to call, ‘brainwashing sessions,’ where he’d decide someone in the band was Public Enemy #1. He’d centre in on them for two or three days, feed them coffee and not let them sleep until their sense of deprivation was such that they’d say, ‘I’ll do anything you say!’ Then they’d fall apart and cry or something … it was very emotionally disturbing to all of us and it took us a long time to get past that.” The band never saw anyone outside the house—in fact, they rarely left the residence. Just prior to recording Trout Mask, French, Jeff Cotton, and Mark Boston tried to escape in the middle of the night. Boston even had his clothes hidden across the road in a field. Often Vliet would make emotional appeals for them to stay.

  Beefheart once said that paranoia was a good propeller. He used it here to instill fear in the group, grinding the band into his own personal sounding board and, eventually, earning their loyalty. Sometimes he would do spontaneous readings of his lyrics looking specifically for some response. At the end of “Old Fart at Play,” for example, you can hear an excerpt from one of those sessions where Jeff Cotton (Antennae Jimmy Semens) is heard saying, “Oh man, that’s so heavy!” He would play cultural impresario, introducing them to the works of various contemporary artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Willem De Kooning, sometimes talking endlessly about Monet, or regaling them about the passion he felt for the work of Modigliani. Despite the cultlike atmosphere, with a tyrant now in charge, the music the group played was itself strangely liberating. “Those tunes became magical to my ears—they felt like a part of me,” Harkleroad wrote in Lunar Notes. “It was all so new and I felt I was participating in something that defied description.” By the time Zappa returned to Los Angeles in the spring, the group was ready to begin defying reality.

  Chapter Five

  Music from the Other Side

  of the Fence

  You can physically drown in paint, you can mental
ly drown in music.

  —Don Van Vliet

  The quest for pure freedom that Trout Mask Replica sought came out of nowhere in the world of rock and roll. The ground it travelled, however, had already been tilled in the other arts. For example, its roots lay in abstract expressionism, where painters applied their paint gesturally and nongeometrically to the canvas with speed and force, to convey depth of emotion through sensation. The pure spontaneity in the work of Franz Kline, Hans Hoffman, Jean Dubuffet, Willem de Kooning, and especially Jackson Pollock, cut through the limits of realism by suggesting that the expressive method of painting was just as valuable as the painting itself. As a movement, originating in the 40s, it would soon become fiercely popular in the visual arts world of the 50s.

  At the turn of the twentieth century, a number of classical composers were growing weary of tonality and wishing to dispense with the adherence to a single key as the one accepted foundation for musical composition. In response, Arnold Schoenberg developed a twelve-tone system in which all twelve notes in the chromatic scale were performed before the initial note was played again. Anton Webern offered his own interpretation of twelve-tone serialism by using it to create an abstract sparseness in his pieces. Igor Stravinsky became inspired to take music back to a pre-romantic era. From there, he could explore form rather than content, ultimately leading him into neoclassicism and interpreting the music of the past. Composer Edgard Varèse wished to clear the decks altogether by reinventing western music at its core. He explored it as a scientific construct of sounds, creating a whole new world of music yet unheard.

  As for American jazz music, many of its practitioners already considered it free, built on improvisation, soloing, and liberated voices calling out to one another. But by the 50s, there were some who claimed it wasn’t free enough. “Free jazz” became a radical deviation from the form that challenged the conventional chord progressions and time signatures at its foundation. It erupted out of the untimely death of Charlie Parker, who opened the door for innovators to rethink the legacy they inherited. Pianist Cecil Taylor, for instance, decided to bring the ideas of Schoenberg and Webern into the land of Bud Powell and Horace Silver. In 1957, he appeared at the Newport Jazz Festival with an abstract atonal sound that, as he put it, “imitate[s] on the piano the leaps in space a dancer makes.” Those leaps began in a lonely loft where by night, after returning from his dull day job delivering sandwiches, he would hold “imaginary concerts” of his music, envisioning an audience that could one day hear and appreciate it.