Ornette Coleman, a Texas-born saxophone player who eventually sojourned to LA, took his own leaps into space with his quartet by playing jazz music that abandoned form altogether. When he appeared at the Five Spot nightclub in New York in the early winter of 1959, he inspired a small riot resembling the larger one Stravinsky had instigated in 1913 with Le Sacre du Printemps. “It was like I was E.T. or something, just dropped in from the moon,” Coleman remembered. He achieved extraterrestrial status by abandoning harmony. Coleman sought rhythm the way abstract expressionist painters went after sensation through dazzling speed. Melody was experienced through a musical maze, an acceleration of tempo, demanding that the audience follow along as he abandoned jazz’s adherence to strict time. Naturally, Coleman’s music became a favorite of painter Jackson Pollock, who provided a canvas of exploding color for the cover of the self-explanatory Free Jazz (1960).
While all these tributaries fed into the river that baptised Don Van Vliet, one significant stream was the work of John Coltrane. While stylistically Beefheart is closer to the work of Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, and the abstract expressionists, he cuts through the blues with the same sharp precision that Coltrane cut through jazz. This is by no means comparing the primitive talent of Beefheart with the pure genius of Coltrane, but both men were pioneers of a similar cause. For twenty years, between 1947 and 1967, Coltrane played saxophone engrossed with a desire to reach a place yet unheard, unfelt, and spiritually solvent. Beginning his career with a desire to be “consumed” by the spirit of Charlie Parker, in actuality, he was consumed in the early years by drugs and alcohol. One day, he had a spiritual awakening through vegetarianism and eastern religion, which lead him on a quest “to make others happy through music.”
His career had begun with Dizzy Gillespie’s band in the late 40s, until Coltrane hooked up with trumpeter Miles Davis in the mid-50s, when he began to hone a virtuosity in improvisation. They were an audacious contrast in styles. Where Davis was a master of spareness, Coltrane could never seem to cram enough notes into a bar of music. His heroin problem got him kicked out of Davis’s group, but then he began a short term with pianist Thelonious Monk before kicking his habit permanently. Coltrane had found a mentor in Monk. Monk taught him methods of creating complex harmonic structures within his sax solos, which in time would be long, difficult excursions into abstract blues. Coltrane could take a conventional pop song, like Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “My Favorite Things” in 1960, and enlarge the melody on soprano saxophone by building an extended solo overtop the basic chords of the theme. Within a year, though, in a series of concerts at the Village Vanguard, Coltrane used melody as merely a starting place for epic solos that built in intensity like a chainsaw cutting through a tornado. Sometimes they would last close to an hour. “Chasin’ the Trane,” for example, featured over eighty choruses that were built upon a twelve-bar blues. That intensity would reach a spiritual epiphany in 1964 with the luxuriant devotional suite A Love Supreme. Like Blind Willie Johnson years earlier, Coltrane was possessed by a higher power and a purpose that was expressed through a fervent desire to remake himself through his art. “My music is the spiritual expression of what I am—my faith, my knowledge, my being,” Coltrane remarked.
Where many would take the path of sanctimony, Coltrane sought out dissonance rather than harmony. It reached its zenith a year later in Seattle in 1965. That year, he was recording a phenomenal amount of music, each piece becoming more abstract than the last. One night, he had a dream in which he and the band had played a show without reference to chords or chordal sequences. In his dream, he discovered that he was seeking, in the words of jazz critic Keith Raether in Earshot Jazz, “dialogues of tonal and atonal sections similar to the parallel octave passages found in African vocal music.” The sessions Coltrane recorded after his dream were the kind that could cause others to have nightmares. “We did two takes and both had that kind of thing in them that makes people scream,” saxophonist Marion Brown explained. During the concert in Seattle, Coltrane decided to take his group, which also included Pharoah Sanders on sax, Elvin Jones on drums, and Jimmy Garrison on bass, through the most atonal abstractions he’d ever played. The purpose? “I don’t think I’ll know what’s missing from my playing until I find it,” Coltrane told a journalist from Melody Maker before the show. One of the tracks, “Evolution,” was a thirty-six-minute excursion into an extravagant sheet of combative chords that filled close to two sides of an LP. The Harold Arlen standard “Out of This World” became literally that. It was so dense in atonality that the recording engineer, Jan Kurtis, who knew Coltrane’s original recording of the song, didn’t recognize it until well into the piece. In what became an understatement of perception, Kurtis told Keith Raether: “Coltrane seemed to be thinking about a lot of things. There must have been an enormous amount of music going on inside him.”
The enormity of that music was overwhelming for most people to consume. When a friend of mine, who loves Coltrane, bought a used CD of John Coltrane: Live in Seattle (on my recommendation), he phoned me shortly after hearing only a portion of it. “I’m taking this back,” he cried. Somewhat puzzled, I asked him why. He replied pejoratively, “This is.… Beefheart!” He had heard in Coltrane what he once perceived briefly in Trout Mask. At that moment, I suddenly recalled playing him about twenty-five seconds of the record (before he begged me to turn it off). By Seattle, Coltrane had dispensed of conventional melodies in his own search for what Blind Willie Johnson had been looking for in his gospel blues: the soul of a man. For both men, the soul of a man was not a harmonious place. So the octane Coltrane provided was pure force, a streaming of notes too primal to contain, a musical speaking in tongues, so to speak. For my friend, of course, it was much less than that. It was tongues that were garbled, pure noise, no more than an unlistenable cacophony. Music from the other side of the fence. When Beefheart released Trout Mask Replica, it was spawned from the same type of spiritual hermitage that took Coltrane to Seattle four years earlier.
Although Trout Mask Replica has its antecedents in all these varied sources, it has none in the world of rock. That is partly due to the fact that—unlike the visual arts, classical music, and jazz—rock is a populist music. Classical music and jazz, arguably, have a comparatively minority audience. “Pop music provides immediate emotional gratifications that the subtler and deeper and more lasting pleasures of jazz can’t prevail against,” film critic Pauline Kael once wrote in her ambivalent praise of Lady Sings the Blues, the movie biography of singer Billie Holiday. “Pop drives jazz back underground,” she explained. It’s in that underground, though, where a laboratory of experimentation can flourish. Since the huge dollars and the mass audience don’t drive that world, lone dreamers (like Cecil Taylor) could endlessly perform their imaginary concerts. That underground made these distinct kinds of propulsive forces possible, in a way that they never could in rock and roll. The stage that Elvis Presley and the Beatles built, as big and as bold as it was, couldn’t break totally free from the huge business that ultimately needed to make money from its art. This is why the emergence of Trout Mask Replica seemed so abhorrent when it hit the record stores in 1969. Who the fuck would want to listen to this? It’s Beefheart!
* * *
By the late winter of 1969, when Beefheart and the group were ready to begin recording their album, Frank Zappa already had an idea of how he wanted to produce it. During the road tour with the Mothers, he had been recording their live gigs with an ingeniously inexpensive unit. Sound engineer Dick Kunc had a Shure eight-channel mixer mounted in a portable briefcase. At all performances, Kunc would simply sit in a corner and adjust levels through his headphones, whereby he could monitor the band through the briefcase mixer that was feeding a portable state-of-the-art Uher reel-to-reel recorder. “It was a tough little machine and it made spectacular recordings,” Kunc said. “Sometimes I used just the single stereo microphone that came with it; other times I set up four separate mics or so and fed t
hem to the Uher.” Since the road tapes turned out so well, Zappa figured it might also work for recording Trout Mask. “I thought it would be great to go to Don’s house with this portable rig and put the drums in the bedroom, the bass clarinet in the kitchen, and the vocals in the bathroom, complete isolation just like in a studio—except that the band members probably would feel more at home, since they were at home,” he wrote in The Real Frank Zappa Book. Zappa approached the album as an anthropological field recording—just as he had done with An Evening with Wild Man Fischer. He treated the band’s home as their own organic recording studio. “I think it’s a valid way to approach what we were doing, because who lives in a house for nine months, playing twelve, fourteen hours a day these same tunes?” explained Bill Harkleroad to Alex Duke and Rob DeNunzio of the internet site the Captain Beefheart Radar Station.
Once they got rolling, the sessions began very casually, as if Zappa and Beefheart were once again revisiting that old Webcor in the abandoned classroom. In the beginning, Zappa set up the band (minus Don) and had them play all the songs they had been tirelessly working on. Meanwhile he was instigating a number of theatrical pieces, as well, to include on the record. Most of them involved Mark Boston (including a Rockette Morton routine that precedes “Fallin’ Ditch”). But John French wanted none of it. “Frank would occasionally approach me and suggest some zany verbal role which he had undoubtedly spontaneously conceived in a moment of ‘inspiration,’” French recalled. “I for the most part ignored him, feeling that this was Don’s ‘show’ and I would be firmly vilified later for allowing myself to be manipulated by Frank at any level.”
On the surviving tapes of the house sessions, the mood was pretty upbeat and the only tension was in the anticipation of just what might happen. The first day begins with engineer Dick Kunc trying out the Uher. Once he discovers that everything seems to be working, Bill Harkleroad and Mark Boston begin rigorously practicing the opening notes of the song “Hobo Chang Ba.” Kunc then becomes aware of how quickly he will have to ride the levels. There are obvious surprises built into this music. “That’s really loud,” he says astonishingly while monitoring the playback on his headphones. “You can hear that in there?” Harkleroad asks surprised because his amp isn’t even turned on. Don jumps in quickly to warn Kunc that these guitarists just might break the speakers. Kunc then becomes apprehensive, perhaps wondering what speakers he is referring to. “Are we waiting for something?” Kunc asks quietly, not sure now what to expect. “Us,” is the answer from Boston, “if it’s alright to get a microphone.” “Can we play now?” asks Harkleroad impatiently. Kunc is now feeling the kind of confidence he recently gained from the Mothers’ tour. He replies, “Yeah. If you want to. Sure.” “Alright,” Don says eagerly awaiting the results. “What would you like to play?” Kunc asks. Don answers, “‘Dachau.’” The amps are turned up as Kunc gets the levels down and the cacophony begins with the first instrumental phrases of the apocalyptic number “Dachau Blues.”
After the band struggles through a few moments of “Dachau Blues,” they settle into the instrumental “Hair Pie: Bake 2.” “Magnificent!” Zappa yells approvingly as the song ends. He sounds assured that this field recording is up to his expectations. Meanwhile French describes to someone the acoustic effect of the corrugated cardboard he has placed on his drum set. Apparently, the neighbour next door was complaining about the noise coming from the group and French tried to soften the sound of his set. “We had this neurotic neighbour who couldn’t stand any noise,” French remembered. “Every time we started to practice she called the police. We had several visits from the police before I finally put cardboard on my drums.” This charitable act ultimately evolved into an artistic strategy by the time they started the final recording sessions—an idea that Zappa wasn’t too crazy about. “Usually, when you record a drum set, the cymbals provide part of the ‘air’ at the top end of the mix,” he wrote in The Real Frank Zappa Book. “Without a certain amount of this frequency information, mixes tend to sound claustrophobic.” Nevertheless, it provided for the percussion its own distinctive quality. Rather than simply keeping the beat, the drums were now as discrete as the other instrumentalists. Once they wrap the first day’s recording, Don says, “Jesus!” in response to the wonderful noise he has just heard. Everyone appears to be happy. It sounds like a musical Garden of Eden.
Within days of that recording, Beefheart was taxing the patience of the Garden’s residents. It began with the demands he was making on the executives at Bizarre/Straight. While doing these house sessions, he had asked for a tree surgeon to be in residence. Apparently, Beefheart thought the trees around the house might become frightened of all the noise and fall over. “What I remember most of all is a pair of male and female eucalyptus trees,” Beefheart explained. “We’d play music to them, and they were really thriving, although they hadn’t been when we got there. But it started raining terribly and I was really worried about them. I suddenly decided, ‘God, I’ve got to get something done about this.’ So I went out and got eight tree surgeons and we saved those trees.” Straight refused Beefheart’s request outright, but they still received a bill for $250.
Next, despite everyone’s satisfaction with the recordings, Beefheart accused Zappa of being cheap and demanded to bring the band into a studio. “I recall Don had brought Frank into the living room on approximately the third day of recording,” French explained. “‘Look at them, Frank!’ he said. ‘They’re trapped! They can’t transcend their environment!’” The group hardly felt trapped. According to French, they were doing just fine in their home environment. But Beefheart demanded to see studio time, which pretty much jettisoned the idea of the album becoming an anthropological field recording. Quickly, they moved the proceedings to Whitney Studios in Glendale, a studio that Dick Kunc had discovered that was owned by the Mormon church. “They had a monstrous pipe organ with rooms full of pipes and remote instruments,” Kunc told Mike Barnes. “The group was certainly well rehearsed … and was ready for anything.” This became an important factor, since Zappa initially wanted the basic tracks recorded in the house, while saving the studio for Don’s vocals. Now he had to provide about six hours of studio time to do twenty tracks, plus the vocals.
Besides the arduous task of accomplishing that feat, Beefheart was creating more headaches for Zappa. “Ordinarily, a singer goes in the studio, puts earphones on, listens to the track, tries to sing in time with it and away you go,” Zappa explained. “[But] Don couldn’t tolerate the headphones. He wanted to stand in the studio and sing as loud as he could—singing along with the audio leakage coming through the three panes of glass which comprised the control-room window. The chances of him staying in sync was nil—but that’s how the vocals were done.” Beefheart couldn’t fathom what Zappa was so upset about. “I was playing—just like the whales,” he told Zig Zag. “I don’t think there is such a thing as synchronization … that’s what they do before a commando raid, isn’t it?”
Given what he was faced with, Zappa probably would have preferred a commando raid. He just dug into the trenches and quickly ran the group through the songs. But even after all the complications, he was astonished that they could play this music—note for note—exactly the way they did back in the house. “When Beefheart recorded the Trout Mask Replica album, Zappa told me that he was totally amazed at the band because they went into the studio and recorded the entire album … in one take—pretty much without stopping,” Don Preston recalled. “But the thing was, Zappa wasn’t so satisfied with that.… Frank said he needed to have the band do a second take just in case he needed to switch things around a bit. So he asked them to do it again, and once again they did the entire album in one take! Zappa was completely amazed because the second takes were virtually identical to the first.” During the sessions, Zappa didn’t take many suggestions from Kunc for fear that Beefheart would find something else to complain about. In five or six hours, the recording was done, which led many to believe
that Zappa just nodded off at the control board. “Dick Kunc was engineering, so he would go, ‘Okay,’ and we would go … and twenty-one tunes later, we were done,” Harkleroad said. “Frank was just sitting there. He didn’t really produce the album. There was no musical input, nothing.”
Since musical input had only inspired paranoia, Zappa preferred to do his real production work once he got the tapes in his possession. “You couldn’t explain, from a technical standpoint, anything to Don,” Zappa told Nigel Leigh of the BBC. “You couldn’t tell him why things ought to be such and such a way. And it seemed to me that if he was going to create a unique object, the easiest thing for me to do was keep my mouth shut as much as possible.” As a rationalist, Zappa was trying to build a foundation for Beefheart’s art, while Beefheart, the irrational artist, railed against the perceived limitations Zappa was imposing on him. “I think that if he had been produced by any professional famous producer, there could have been a number of suicides involved,” Zappa would later remark. On Easter Sunday 1969, though, Zappa called up Vliet and told him that the album was done. Beefheart had all the guys in the band get dressed up, “as if they were going to Easter church,” Zappa recalled. They came over to Zappa’s studio early that morning and sat in his living room and listened to it. Apparently, they loved it. Considering all the adversity stirred up in making it, the record’s defiant originality cut through the foibles. Within a few months, when a few brave people put the record on their turntable, they would discover just how defiantly original it really was.
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