Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica

by Courrier, Kevin

  Chapter Six

  Fast ’N Bulbous

  I do not write experimental music. My experimenting is done before I make the music. Afterwards it is the listener who must experiment.

  —Edgard Varèse

  When Trout Mask Replica was released in the US in the early summer of 1969, it was a double LP, not a single CD. It’s significant to point this out for a variety of reasons. With an LP, you always had to approach your turntable with it, take out the record from the jacket, and turn it over to play the other side. You had to do this four times with Trout Mask. It was like an open dare—a summons—just to see if you could sustain your curiosity long enough to find out what lurked on the other side. With the Trout Mask CD, you are left with pretty simple options. For one thing, once you stick the CD in the tray, you never have to touch it until it’s over. Secondly, with your remote, you can abruptly skip tracks, or put it on pause while you shake your head in disbelief at what you’ve just heard. You can quickly turn it off from a safe distance, too, sitting comfortably in your chair. You never ever have to play it again. All things considered, it was far more audacious for Trout Mask Replica to come out in the age of the LP. To risk its contents, you constantly had to handle it.

  Cal Schenkel’s cover art for the record merely doubled the dare. With Vliet in his mammoth hat and fish-face, we find the familiar image of the American artist donning a mask to disclose his most impudent work. But the mask doesn’t work here, as it does metaphorically in the case of Randy Newman, with subversion hidden under the hood. Beefheart uses the mask as a totem of transformation. He doesn’t hide behind it, he becomes the mask. To be a different fish, you first have to become the fish. So Cal Schenkel had to find himself one. “The way it came about [was] I went and found this carp head at some fish market,” Schenkel explained. “We took it back to my studio, which was the same place that I did the Uncle Meat cover … and I took this trout head and hollowed it out—the thing stank like hell—and Don had to hold it up to his face for a couple of hours while we shot.”

  The back cover was less startling, but it didn’t make it any easier to approach the music. Mike Barnes, in his Beefheart biography, perfectly described its impact. With the band surrounding him, Beefheart is in his top hat and shades, pointing a shadeless lamp and “looking like a forlorn Mad Hatter, and lighting the way into the wilderness.” The inside gatefold design had a color negative photo of the group that was cropped incongruently and shaded by psychedelic colors. However, this was no average psychedelic group. As Barnes would remark, “[T]he Magic Band weren’t going to be saddled with any of the beads, bells and incense hokum of the increasingly disparate hippie tribes.” Early editions of the record had a lyric sheet featuring a scattering of some of Victor Hayden’s lithographs. (These are now included in the CD edition.)

  “Frownland” kicks the record off in 7/8 time, until the guitar notes start to fall away aimlessly like raindrops, and French’s drums begin to resemble falling rocks. “My smile is stuck,” Beefheart declares over the avalanche, “I can’t go back to yer frownland.” What begins as a basic rock and roll song is quickly swept away with a steel broom. “The standard role of the two guitars, bass, drums rock line-up is subverted to the point where nothing ever settles or is repeated to any extent,” Mike Barnes writes in Captain Beefheart: The Biography. Beefheart acknowledges his past, where he once built new bridges with blues based material, but the songs featured on Trout Mask demand new ears to listen with. “Beefheart is not concerned to build bridges for his audience or to make it any easier for anyone to come along,” Langdon Winner reminds us in his “Stranded” essay. “Either you’re interested or you’re not.”

  While Beefheart doesn’t patronize listeners with this miniature manifesto (“Take my hand ’n come with me / It’s not too late for you / It’s not too late for me / To find my homeland”), the music arrives with a shocking force that ultimately gives you little choice. “[Beefheart] bellows out a yearning, soulful blues which further warps the already warped structure, pleading, ‘I want my own land,’ realizing that his wish is becoming fulfilled as he sings the words,” Barnes writes. Rock and roll has always been predicated on finding new ways to get the listener onboard, if not up on the dance floor. In “Frownland,” Beefheart decries the conventional rules of rock and roll to open up a territory away from standard notation and the precepts of conventional society. “The vision of Trout Mask Replica is fundamentally that of an American primitivist surrealist,” Langdon Winner explains. “The land he asks us to visit is one we already know very well. It is not, as many of us fans have supposed, outer space or the realm of late 1960’s hippie, psychedelic weirdness for weirdness’ sake.” It is America, a self-made country, built on ideas and ideals, both failed and realized, and Beefheart conceives an elaborate map that defines what those attributes mean to him.

  The next track, “The Dust Blows Forward ’N the Dust Blows Back,” is the first of three a cappella recitations. If “Frownland” points toward a future in a new world, “The Dust Blows Forward” resembles a strange relic unearthed from the distant past. That’s partly due to the poem being recorded on a portable cassette machine at the house. The clicking sound of the pause button, which opens the track, is heard repeatedly between each of the vocal passages replicating the clicking heard on old 78s of the needle running through the grooves. But it can also be heard as a picturesque story out of the early American wilderness tales of James Fenimore Cooper, only told through the eyes of a surrealist. The poem begins with ole Gray “with ’er dovewinged hat” and ole Green “with her sewing machine.” Exchanging puns for perceptions, the narrator quickly abandons the couple and observes the dust going forward and backward in an endless cycle, while the wind blows black and the industrial smokestacks blow up into the sun’s eye. He asks himself if he’s gonna die.

  The escape from Frownland is also an escape into a wilderness free from ecological calamity and hubris. He’s coming back to nature in all its natural folly, where things die only to be born again. In recognition of this, the narrator (who is fishing) is so overwhelmed that he strips off his clothes and feels the breeze blowing through the canyon as well as between his legs. In the end, he’s as entranced as Huck Finn was on the riverboat, listening to “mice toes scamperin’,” while enjoying his coffee from a “krimpt up can.” His girl Bimbo Limbo Spam is happily cradled in his arms as he cheerfully embraces the cycles of the natural world. He’s found the peace that Frownland deprived him. By doing the recording on the cassette, Beefheart also leaves the impression that this wondrous world is part of a frontier life quickly becoming a faded memory. “[Beefheart reminds] us of the American myth of the frontiersman and the explorer,” writes art critic Roberto Ohrt. “Like the frontiersman, he turns his back on civilization, trusts in his knowledge of nature, and seems at first to be a spinner of unintelligible, wild and fantastic tales.” That’s the freedom that Beefheart speaks of all through Trout Mask Replica, what Walt Whitman had implied when he wrote that “words follow character—nativity, independence, individuality.”

  In the next song, “Dachau Blues,” we’re violently thrust back into Frownland, and the air is filled with a different kind of dust and ash. Beefheart’s song about the Holocaust jumps out of the mix with an apocalyptic urgency. In intensity, it matches Charley Patton’s cry of desperation in “High Water Everywhere” (1929), about the Louisiana flood that ravaged his home state in 1927. The blues became a perfectly appropriate musical form to depict the Dachau death camp, which was the first large-scale concentration camp in southern Germany converted from an old gunpowder factory in 1933. But I have some Jewish friends who feel slightly uncomfortable with Beefheart’s abstract rendering of the event. Mike Barnes describes the song quite aptly as “a sonic action painting” and this may be why it causes some unease. Beefheart isn’t performing Kaddish here, he’s pulling us right into the madness and horror, with images of dancing death skeletons in ovens, confronting us eye-t
o-eye with “one mad man” while “six million lose.”

  If “The Dust Blows Forward” describes the natural life cycles, in “Dachau Blues,” he decries the cycle of death brought on by war. He dredges up the horror of World War I with “balls ’n powder ’n blood ’n snow,” then World War II, where it “rained death ’n showers ’n skeletons.” But he’s even more concerned about the “sweet children with doves on their shoulders” inheriting the legacy of World War III. As his bass clarinet shrieks over the depicted carnage of the twentieth century, he tells us of these children begging for the end of this misery:

  Countin’ out the devil

  With two fingers on their hands

  Beggin’ the Lord don’t let the third one land

  On World War Three

  As the bass clarinet ominously fades on its last note, we suddenly hear an unknown voice on audio cassette telling a story. Is it an old recording of someone who liberated the camps? Is he telling us of what he found there? Not at all. He’s talking about rats being beaten out of residences by a bunch of men with sticks, until they finally discovered that their shotguns worked better. “[T]his was some guy that just showed up at the house,” Harkleroad remembered. “[H]e wasn’t a friend of anybody’s.… He came into the house and started telling this story and Don made him stop and repeat it so he could turn on the tape deck.”

  Zappa had taken Don’s own anthropological field recording and juxtaposed it with “Dachau Blues” to create a comparative picture out of two radically different sources. Earlier that year, on Uncle Meat, Zappa had taken a recording of drummer Jimmy Carl Black complaining about the poverty of being in the Mothers of Invention. He followed it with a doowop song called “The Air.” That song had nothing to do with Black’s bellyaching, but when you hear the opening lines of “The Air” (“The air / Escaping from your mouth / The hair escaping from your nose”), you immediately connect the two as part of the same story. “The Air” has the effect of answering Black’s recorded rant—as does the story of the rats in responding to Beefheart’s Holocaust song. It makes a chilling unconscious connection that it was the Nazis who viewed Jews as a form of pestilence.

  The tone shifts dramatically with “Ella Guru,” a goofy love song that suggests the O’Kaysions’ 1968 soul hit “Girl Watcher” on magic mushrooms. “This was a fun tune to play rhythmically, a good upbeat song,” Harkleroad remembered. “You throw stuff up in the air and sometimes it falls nicely into place.” “Ella Guru” was inspired by a female fan who used to turn up at their live shows in eccentric clothes, incorporating sheepskin, tie-dye, and ostrich feathers. The song, like her personality, is as light as the air. There are some lovely verbal puns on her attire (“High yella, high red, high blue, she blew”), plus Jeff Cotton joining into the fray as a leering onlooker possessed of a strangled soprano cartoon voice. The song spawns the infamous sexual in-joke about her being “fast ’n bulbous” (a famous lubricant jelly—credited to Vliet—was also given that designation in Zappa’s Uncle Meat script). Like some of the libidinous slang in many of the songs on Uncle Meat, “fast ’n bulbous” becomes a leitmotif peppered throughout Trout Mask Replica.

  Continuing in the vein of sexual jargon, the next track, “Hair Pie: Bake 1” (“hair pie” being slang for cunnilingus), is an instrumental recording from the house sessions. “Hair Pie: Bake 1” is a freeform improvised sax duet in the back garden between Beefheart and Victor Hayden. “There were remote mics inside on the instruments and outside on a covered patio next to the laundry shed. This is where Don and Victor stood armed with their respective horns,” John French explained. While their sparring resembles some of the wild jazz stylings of Albert Ayler, or perhaps Anthony Braxton, Zappa decided to create an incongruous mix between their duet and the Magic Band simultaneously playing “Hair Pie: Bake 2” in the house. The effect creates a xenochronous composition out of a peculiar matching of quite disparate pieces. It’s something he would experiment with on “The Blimp (mousetrapreplica).” Later in his career, Zappa would perform variations on this method on a variety of his own albums. On Joe’s Garage (1979), for example, he would take guitar solos from various live events and wed them to studio recordings he was doing at the time. In effect, he was paying particular homage to American composer Charles Ives, who many years earlier had laid distinctly different musical pieces on top of one another.

  Just as the track builds in intensity, the band abruptly stops. Two young kids are then heard in the field telling Beefheart that they just came over to hear him play. When they tell him they’re from Reseda, Don replies, “She’s nice,” as if they are describing a friendly neighbour instead of a town. After an uneasy silence, Don asks, “Whaddya think?” “Sounds good,” they answer as if not really sure what constituted “good.” “It’s a bush recording,” Don intones confidently. “We’re out recording with bush,” thus unwittingly linking cunnilingus (“hair pie”) with “bush,” which is slang for pubic hair. In a moment of confusion, Don tells the kids that the composition is called “Neon Meate Dream of a Octafish.” They nod affirmatively as if no title would make sense of what they just experienced. As he lights a cigarette, Don suddenly realizes it is “Hair Pie.”

  John Corbett, in the essay “The Dust Blows Back” included in the comprehensive CD box set Grow Fins: Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band: Rarities [1965–1982], suggests that the “bush” recording (featuring the sounds of some fauna shaking thus making the point) is “reminiscent of Peter Brotzmann and Han Bennink’s Schwarzwaldfahrt, a trip for the two Middle European free improvisers into the Black Forest to make a racket on the trees, in the streams, with the birds, accompanied only by a Stellavox tape recorder.” When we hear Don mention “Neon Meate Dream of a Octafish” to the kids in the field recording, it anticipates a song we don’t actually hear until later on the record. Frank Zappa, on Freak Out!, did something similar when he included a clip from “Help, I’m a Rock” in the middle bridge of the earlier “Who Are the Brain Police?” In both cases, Beefheart and Zappa play with the very concept of linear time on a record. Mike Barnes, in his Beefheart biography, tells us that the two kids who happened on to the field with Beefheart were actually friends of Eric Drew Feldman (who would later join the Magic Band in 1976).

  Once the powerhouse performance of “Moonlight on Vermont” concludes side one, the second side opens with a proclamation: “A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast ’n bulbous. Got me?” In the case of Beefheart and Zappa, the idea of couching sexual innuendo in their songs came out of the blues and R&B records they listened to as kids. Many doo-wop bands like the Clovers were famous for this, as were rockers like Little Richard. Even the sly Fats Domino couldn’t resist insinuating what thrill he found on Blueberry Hill. Out of the gag, “Pachuco Cadaver” quickly jumps in with a rather melodious boogie shuffle. “It was another one that was fun to play because again we’re all playing in a similar time and key—the guitar parts and drums are in sync,” Bill Harkleroad told Billy James. But the tune instantly shifts out of gear once Beefheart steps forward. “When she wears her bolero then she begin t’ dance / All the pachucos start withholdin’ hands,” he sings. The term Pachuco is an LA term for the young adolescent Mexican-Americans in the 40s and 50s who wore stylish Zoot suits, and the song is a surreal love lyric to their lifestyle.

  Although the title “Pachuco Cadaver” suggests something morbid, it’s actually a richly textured love song (“She wears her past like a present,” Beefheart says admiringly with a twinkle in his pun). Beefheart doesn’t so much sing this tune as he does recite it, filling the song with stream-of-consciousness phrases. “Beefheart’s vocals … rely less upon the melody of any given tune than upon the music present in the way people actually talk,” Langdon Winner explains. “Thus, the singing—and it is definitely singing—on ‘Pachuco Cadaver’ takes the form of the rising and falling emphatic tones of an Old West storyteller.” While name-checking Kathleen Winsor’s period novel Forever Amber, which was
once considered controversial for its sexual explicitness, Beefheart incorporates it as a pun for the amber brody knob spinner. This term was slang for the turn knob on the handlebars of 50s Chevys used to pick up girls (these same brody knobs are referred to by Zappa, too, on “The Uncle Meat Variations,” where he dips into the pool of 50s pop culture lore). As the song winds down, Beefheart plays a hearty sax solo over the vamp.

  Speaking of cadavers, the next song, “Bill’s Corpse,” is about one. Bill Harkleroad has always assumed that the song was written for him. But it’s more likely about Beefheart’s dead pet goldfish, Bill, in keeping with the fish motif of the album. According to Mike Barnes, Beefheart had overfed Bill, ultimately leading to his demise. The song uses Bill’s death as a starting point for one of many observations on the comparative life cycles between humans and the world of nature. “The only way they ever all got together,” Beefheart declares, “was not in love but shameful grief.” But these aren’t the thoughts he wants to treasure. Whether he’s singing about love, sex, or death, Beefheart connects everything to mortality and its huge role played in nature’s hierarchy. “Sweet Sweet Bulbs” is a love song to the garden that Beefheart cultivated at the house, connecting his love for its blooming splendour with his own sexual passion for a woman. “She walked back into nature uh queen uncrowned,” he sings. “She had just recognized herself to be an heir t’ the throne.”