Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica

by Courrier, Kevin

  “She’s Too Much for My Mirror” is a sparklingly funny little number about romantic ambivalence:

  She’s too much for my mirror

  She almost makes me lose it

  The way she abuse it

  Make me never want to use it

  It opens casually with an intro by engineer Dick Kunc that once more makes us conscious of the act of listening to a record in production, in short, making us participants in the process. “Here you would have a famous version of ‘She’s Too Much for My Mirror.’ Note the clever slate,” Kunc says cheerfully, while marking the take with his clapper. “‘She’s Too Much for My, or Anybody’s, Mirror’, number two. Told ya.” On his own records, Zappa would often thrust Kunc into the mix, once again to provide texture, or maybe to render contrast between the previous song and the one to follow. He did this to great effect, for example, at the beginning of “Idiot Bastard Son” on We’re Only in It for the Money. “This will be a little vocal TH-Heaven right here on Earth,” Kunc called out mockingly in a killer parody of an AM radio jock setting up a song.

  “She’s Too Much for My Mirror” is a runaway track that almost runs away with itself. Since Beefheart didn’t attend rehearsals, it was often miraculous that he could fit his lyrics into any of the music created by the band. In this instance, it almost didn’t happen. “Don sounds uptight when he’s singing it,” Harkleroad recalled. “This is something that could have been fixed if he had actually sung at rehearsals.” Beefheart can be heard at the conclusion saying, “Shit, I don’t know how I’m gonna get that in there.” Apparently, he still had a page of lyrics that never found their way into the song’s quick tempo.

  If there was one song rehearsed relentlessly in the house sessions, with guitar lines continuously being sung and discussed, it was “Hobo Chang Ba.” Essentially, it’s a folk song about Chinese immigrants coming to America and building the railroads, and one (Chang Ba) who becomes a hobo. Beefheart sings in a low monotonous drawl that mirrors the dreariness suffered by Chang Ba:

  The rails I ride ’r rustin

  The new sunrise I’m trustin’

  Strawwood claw rattlin’ m’ jaw

  For Bizarre/Straight Records, however, “Hobo Chang Ba” inspired a whole different kind of dreariness. Herb Cohen noticed that Beefheart had ordered twenty sets of sleigh bells for the recording session. He pointed out to Beefheart that even if Frank Zappa and the engineer were added to the bell-ringers, they would only need fourteen sleigh bells with one in each hand of the performers. “What are you going to do with the other six?,” Cohen asked. “We’ll overdub them,” Beefheart replied calmly.

  If Trout Mask Replica overall is an attempt to make the disparate parts of a group work together musically, “The Blimp (mousetrapreplica)” goes one step further by adding another group to the mix: the Mothers of Invention. Zappa was working in the Whitney studio mixing a freeform jazz parody from the Mothers’ last tour fittingly called “Charles Ives,” a tune that had been played quite frequently on the tour. Sometimes it was part of another song, “Didja Get Any Onya?” an atonal horn workout that also featured comic burlesque, operatic falsettos, and a brief trumpet quote from Ives’s The Unanswered Question. Midway through the mixing session, Zappa received a phone call in the studio from Beefheart, who was excited about some new lyrics. Beefheart had Jeff Cotton recite them over the phone, to the accompaniment of Beefheart’s soprano sax, and Zappa decided to record it. He superimposed the recording (in the style of Charles Ives) over the Mothers’ song he was working on. “You can tell it’s not us—just listen to the studio quality of the recording of those parts compared to the things we did,” Harkleroad pointed out. “Maybe we didn’t have that studio polish, but then again we weren’t about studio polish, cardboard drums and tortured guitars were more us.” It was a key observation because the final results are fascinating for what they reveal.

  Hard at work, Zappa begins the track by asking Cotton, over the phone, if he’s ready. Once Zappa tells him to begin, Cotton delivers a frenzied account of sexual terror:

  The drazy hoops the drazy hoops

  They’re camp they’re camp

  Tit tits the blimp the blimp

  The frantic words juxtapose perfectly with the Mothers’ smoothly crafted abstract jazz performance. The wedding of these two contrasting pieces also paints a fascinating portrait of Beefheart and Zappa’s dissimilar styles. On the one hand, you can hear in “The Blimp (mousetrapreplica),” Zappa’s conscious desire to prove that one size fits all. For him, this is a calculated strategy, one he’s been consciously designing and mapping out through his entire musical career. On the other hand, Beefheart’s strategy is more intuitive, playfully haphazard, part of what writer Neil Slaven calls “a living environment.” Steve Peacock explores these differences with keen insight in Sounds magazine:

  Zappa is a fine technician, a craftsman with a wealth of expert knowledge on which he draws to construct intricate … (though bizarre) set pieces of music. He blends absurdity, outrage with an extensive, wide-ranging set of musical reference points. Listening to Zappa’s music is a thoroughly enjoyable experience and though there is an emotive quality, the overriding effect is intellectual.… Frank Zappa constructs and controls his music, it is for the most part conscious creation; Captain Beefheart opens up and lets it flow. Frank Zappa is shrewd, Beefheart is a visionary.

  The two incongruent musical pieces illustrate perfectly the shrewdly organized chaos of the Mothers versus the spontaneous hyperbole at the core of Beefheart’s visionary art. “The Blimp (moustrapreplica)” is a marvellous blending of two disperate sensibilities, as (in a completely different musical sense) “We Can Work it Out” was for Lennon and McCartney. Both songs, in their own very distinct ways, succeed in transforming incongruency into a new style of harmony.

  “Steal Softly Thru Snow” may be the most romantically sublime track on the album. “Grain grows rainbows up straw hill,” Beefheart sings wistfully. “Breaks my heart to see the highway ’cross the hills / Man lived a million years ’n still kills.” As romantic as the sentiment is, the song’s construction is a killer. “The drum parts on [‘Steal Softly’ and ‘Hair Pie’] were figured out partially during rehearsal and partially by me writing it out later,” French explained. “I wrote a lot of my own drum parts for the album. And what I did was take the music and take the main rhythmic thrust of each instrument and try and combine it into one part.” Apparently, French had to combine some awkward musical phrases. “Some people were playing [in] five, some people were playing [in seven], some were playing [in] three, some in four,” French said. “Now I knew that I wasn’t going to play in three different time signatures at the same time on all these songs, but what I wanted to do was grab the essence of what the part was and make a part that would suggest tying them together—even though it was going to be a counter rhythm, just like everything else.” Naturally, it was agony for the group to learn. “I remember torturing myself to play the thing,” Harkleroad explained remembering the torture. Yet he still considered it his favorite song on the record. “This is the tune that has the most to offer. The unison rhythm things and John French’s playing on it is ripping!” Harkleroad enthused.

  In “Old Fart at Play,” the trout mask is finally unveiled. The verse, an excerpt from an unfinished novel, is Beefheart’s final transformation into a different fish. “As [the old fart] looks on, a metamorphosis begins to take place in him,” Langdon Winner explains. “The mask grows more and more fishlike. The boundaries between man, artifact, and natural creature quickly vanish.” This transformation into a state of natural being erodes boundaries and openly gives into change. The song explicitly states the quest of the album: it’s about breathing in the freedom of your true nature, to discover yourself “breathin’ freely,” as the Old Fart puts it. The Beefheart trout mask is a disguise that reveals, rather than hides. “His excited eyes from within the dark interior glazed, watered in appreciation of his thoughtful preparat
ion,” he recites at the end. He has finally jumped out of school, to a place where freedom is experienced rather than consciously defined. Although “Veteran’s Day Poppy” literally concludes Trout Mask Replica, it’s “Old Fart at Play” that provides the more natural conclusion.

  Beefheart’s desire to be different on Trout Mask Replica wasn’t designed to oppose anybody, or anything. “Van Vliet’s version of freedom is the mastery of a man who cannot make anyone else’s music,” Greil Marcus writes in Ranters & Crowd Pleasers: Pop in Punk Music, 1977–92. “As he has proved in the past, a man who can’t make anyone else’s music is not the same as a man who won’t.” But Beefheart came to see that freedom can impose its own limitations. In the years following the release of Trout Mask Replica, many would come to both scorn and love this record, while others would be ready to jump into the pond Beefheart created for them. Beefheart, though, in short time would begin to feel like a fish out of water.

  Epilogue

  Everybody Drinks

  from the Same Pond

  Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches.

  —Gertrude Stein

  To understand the shock and disbelief surrounding the release of Trout Mask Replica, in the early summer of 1969, you first had to consider the music already on the airwaves, or perhaps about to arrive there. The previous year, politically and culturally, had been relentlessly convulsive. America was still reeling in shock from a succession of horrors. Martin Luther King was shot dead and cities were in flames. Robert Kennedy, the great hope of the Democratic Party, was murdered like his brother five years earlier. Richard Nixon would inherit the crown of the Presidency, bringing with him a dark cloud that began to cover the country. The Soviet army put the boot to Czechoslovakia’s “socialism with a human face” during the short-lived Prague Spring. The war in Vietnam was continuously escalating. After the violence at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, radical politics was beginning to turn criminally psychopathic with the Weather Underground, while counterculture living was becoming cultish. Charles Manson and his murderous hippie family were merely a year away—acting out their horrors a mere month after the release of Trout Mask.

  In the aftermath of 1968, you could feel the culture starting to splinter into factions. You could also hear it in the music—still vital, but seeking shelter from the storm. The aching harmonies of country rock were just being fully realized when Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman of the Byrds formed the Flying Burrito Brothers with their first record, The Gilded Palace of Sin. Another Byrd, David Crosby, plus former Buffalo Springfield singer/songwriter Steven Stills and exHollie Graham Nash, brought their own gentle angst to the creation of Crosby, Stills & Nash. British chanteuse Dusty Springfield turned up in Memphis to prove that she was perhaps the best white soul singer of her time. Elvis Presley rediscovered his own soul making a confidently crafted studio record, From Elvis in Memphis, shortly after a surprisingly successful television special. The Beatles, meanwhile, were about to acrimoniously depart the stage they erected with the late summer release of Abbey Road. After being upstaged by Jimi Hendrix at Monterey, the Who decided to throw down the gauntlet and create the first epic rock opera about a blind, sagelike pinball wizard named Tommy. A ten-year-old singer from Gary, Indiana, named Michael Jackson was on a mission to change black R&B along with his brothers, the Jackson 5. Led Zeppelin was born out of the ashes of the Yardbirds to unleash what came to be known as heavy metal.

  Into this eclectic gumbo of pop metamorphosis, with the birth of Woodstock Nation in the wings and its violent death a mere few months later at Altamont, Trout Mask Replica appeared on the scene totally oblivious to the musical, political, and cultural environment surrounding it. The other performers that summer, who were making their shift toward either stardom or oblivion, made their moves with one eye on the pop audience they carried on their backs. Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band made no concessions to anyone. They came out of a hermitage, not a popular culture. They emerged from a house, and they did it with music that nobody expected to hear. For those who did hear it, the record would polarize an already polarized culture. It repelled some just as violently as it attracted listeners. “When I first heard Trout Mask Replica, I about puked,” Rolling Stone critic Ed Ward put it, not so delicately. “What is this shit, I thought. People I met talked about it in glowing terms—not just anybody, mind you, but people I genuinely respected when it came to their music tastes.” One of those people he respected was an ambitious and talented writer named Lester Bangs. Bangs wrote about Trout Mask Replica as if the Messiah had just arrived to heal a broken nation. “Captain Beefheart, the only true dadaist in rock, has been victimized repeatedly by public incomprehension and critical authoritarianism,” Bangs told Rolling Stone readers. “[His] music [derives] as much from the new free jazz and African chant rhythms as from Delta blues, the songs tended to be rattly and wayward, clattering along on weirdly jabbering high-pitched guitars and sprung rhythms.”

  Eliot Wald, writing a few years later in Oui, knew what Bangs had heard in Trout Mask, but he also understood what offended listeners as well. “[Lester Bangs] described [Trout Mask] as the most astounding and important work of art ever to appear on a phonograph record,” he began. “However, it was not to everyone’s taste.… Rhythms are totally unpredictable; what starts out as a blues boogie may end up sounding like a surrealist waltz. Everybody seems to be playing whatever came to mind, including Beefheart, whose sax, musette and simran horn solos (played through tubes that allow him to play two instruments at the same time) swoop and dive, mirroring his incredible four-octave voice. Lyrically, it’s absurdist poetry.… Trout Mask Replica was not an overnight sensation.” Not only was it not an overnight sensation, it took (for some people) many nights of listening to fully comprehend its strange power. “The first time I heard Trout Mask, when I was fifteen years old, I thought it was the worst thing I’d ever heard,” remembered Matt Groening, the creator of The Simpsons, and long-time fan and friend of Frank Zappa. “I said to myself, ‘They’re not even trying!’ It was just a sloppy cacophony. Then I listened to it a couple more times because I couldn’t believe Frank Zappa could do this to me—and because a double album cost a lot of money. About the third time, I realized they were doing it on purpose: they meant it to sound exactly this way. About the sixth or seventh time, it clicked in and I thought it was the greatest album I ever heard.”

  The greatest album ever heard? In 1987, Rolling Stone did list it as number 33 in their Top 100 Best Rock Albums issue, describing it as “rock’s most visionary album.” Critic Paul Gambaccini later gathered other scribes who listed the record at number 81 in a Top 100 list of the best rock and roll albums of all time. The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Rock describes Trout Mask as “one of the most advanced overall concepts in rock music.” Record Collector describes Beefheart’s epic opus as “a major musical achievement,” while the Trouser Press Record Guide calls it a “masterpiece.” As recent as March 2005, Mojo magazine declared Trout Mask the “ultimate Out There! album.” It was a “triumph of genius” (beating out such competition as Sun Ra’s 1973 Space Is the Place, on which his Astro Intergalactic Infinity Arkestra attempted to musically define the history of the universe) according to the popular British music magazine and “matched by a collective work ethic that threatened the health of everyone involved.” British music critic Ben Watson couldn’t compare Trout Mask to any other recording. “Trout Mask is the only record ever made for which no other music is suitable ‘preparation,’” he wrote.

  As visionary as Trout Mask is, its influence in the years to follow was not as straightforward as other significant pop artists. As critic Steve Huey remarked, “[T]he influence of Trout Mask Replica was felt more in spirit than in direct copy-catting, as a catalyst rather than a literal musical starting point.” That spirit, which stretched itself down many winding pathways, proved Beefheart right when he pronounced one day that everyone drinks from the same pond. One such drinker from
that pond was John Graham Mellor, a middle-class grave digger, who would later be reborn as Joe Strummer. Years before he dreamed of making a dent in the rock conglomerate with the Clash, Strummer told critic Greil Marcus, “When I was sixteen, [Trout Mask Replica] was the only record I listened to—for a year.” Marcus actually heard Trout Mask stewing under the surface of the Clash’s 1977 debut. “The Clash have taken Beefheart’s aesthetic of scorched vocals, guitar discords, melody reversals, and rhythmic conflict and made the whole seem anything but avant-garde: in their hands that aesthetic speaks with clarity and immediacy, a demand you have to accept or refuse,” he wrote in New West in 1978. That either/or ultimatum, which became the standard provocation offered by punk in the late 70s, wasn’t exactly the stand that Trout Mask took when it appeared in 1969. Beefheart held a more an ambiguous position than punk itself offered. Trout Mask Replica was an inhabitor of the pond, possessing those who wished to be different fish.

  Another artist transformed was Mark Mothersbaugh, the founder of the synth-punk band Devo. Formed in Akron, Ohio, in 1972, by two Kent State art students, Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale came upon the notion of a “devolving” American society out of the ashes of the fatal shootings of four students at Kent State by the National Guard. In their mind, mankind was regressing, becoming rigid in its thinking and more authoritarian in attitude. Devo mirrored that world in their music with robotic rhythms and nerdish demeanour. “Beefheart was a major influence on Devo as far as direction goes,” Mothersbaugh explained in 1978. “Trout Mask Replica … there’s so many people that were affected by that album that he probably doesn’t even know about, a silent movement of people.” That movement of people seemed silent only because the record, nurtured in isolation, inspired a quiet need to be unique. So its spirit became shared subliminally among a scattering of diverse voices in a wilderness.