- Trout Mask Replica is Captain Beefheart's masterpiece, a fascinating, stunningly imaginative work that still sounds like little else in the rock & roll canon. Given total creative control by producer and friend Frank Zappa, Beefheart and his Magic Band rehearsed the material for this 28-song double album for over a year, wedding minimalistic R&B, blues, and garage rock to free jazz and avant.
- Album 1969 28 Songs.
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Captain Beefheart Trout Mask Replica House
Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band
Trout Mask Replica
by Mike Barnes
(February 1999)
This is an excerpt from Captain Beefheart,the first full-length biography of this legendary musical figure. It is now available from Quartet Books (quartetbooks@easynet.co.uk)
Out Recording a Bush
“Trout Mask Replica”- Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band (1969) Added to the National Registry: 2010 Essay by Josh Shepperd (guest post). Captani Beehf ear at nd His Magic Band. Depending on who you talk to Captain Beefheart’s third, released album, which entered the.
'If there has been anything in the history of popularmusic which could be described as a work of art in a way that people whoare involved in other areas of art would understand, then Trout MaskReplica is probably that work.' - John Peel (interview with author1995)
'Trout Mask Replica shattered my skull, realignedmy synapses, made me nervous, made me laugh, made me jump and jag withjoy. It wasn't just the fusion I'd been waiting for: it was a whole newuniverse, a completely realized and previously unimaginable landscape ofguitars splintering and spronging and slanging and even actually swingingin every direction, as far as the mind could see...while this beast voicestraight out of one of Michael McClure's Ghost Tantras growled out a catarrhspew of images at once careeningly abstract and as basic and bawdy as thelast 200 years of American Folklore...I stayed under the headphones andplayed Trout Mask straight through five times in a row that night.The next step of course was to turn the rest of the world on to this amazingthing I'd found, which perhaps came closer to a living, pulsating, slitheringorganism than any other record I'd ever heard.' - Lester Bangs, NewMusical Express, 1 April 1978
The fusion Bangs had been waiting for was a new musicwhich used the earthbound drive of primal rock as a platform from whichto launch the untrammelled 'atonality and primal shrieks' employed by blackfree-jazz players like Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Albert Ayler.He got so much more than he was expecting when Trout Mask droppedinto his head- the experience was epiphanic. He was still writing aboutthe search for other examples of this fusion the following year, referringthen to The Stooges' Fun House, with its clash of ultra-hard-nosedgarage-rock cut with Iggy Pop's more sophisticated taste for Coltrane andhis ilk. Superb though that album is, the comparisons were far more tenuous,but then fusioneers that could meet Bangs' criteria were thin on the ground,Detroit group MC5's mixing of astral jazz into their malevolent rock'n'rollmade them another candidate, but Bangs remained unconvinced by them. Itwas becoming obvious that the Trout Mask 'style' was exclusive toCaptain Beefheart and His Magic Band.
On the opening song, 'Frownland,' the new universeof Trout Mask Replica is glimpsed in a one-and-a-half-minute microcosm.For the listener, at least, the tortuous rehearsals, hardship and deprivationhad all been worth it. The standard role of the two guitars, bass and drumsrock line-up is subverted to the point where nothing ever settles or isrepeated to any extent. Stuttering drums vie for space with an angularbass and atonal guitar motif in a different metre, and soon a keening leadguitar line rips its way out of the tangled undergrowth. Less than fifteenseconds in, it dissolves into a torrent, the instruments thrashing aroundeach other in complex contrapuntal patterns. But the music carries an inexorableforward motion, it rocks, in other words. The last piece in the puzzleis Van Vliet's vocal roar. He bellows out a yearning, soulful blues whichfurther warps the already warped structure, pleading, 'I want my own land',realizing that his wish is becoming fulfilled as he sings the words.
Here at last was his free record: 'free' as in 'unconstrained.'And he barged into this new territory with adrenalized power. Some of themusical elements are recognizable from previous albums. French's tom-tomrhythms and cross-hand hi-hat snatches hark back to the syncopations ofsongs on Strictly Personal but with his radical new approach theynow fell over themselves, as if his entire drum kit was being rolled downa bumpy slope.
The interlocking guitars that had sounded radicallyjagged on 'Kandy Korn' here wrestle with each other, before strugglingfree to run along separate paths, only to meet again head on. Boston'sbass playing is equally astonishing, corresponding with the other instrumentsin an unprecedented way. The instrument's sound is flat and woody and itis clawed, strummed, its neck wrung. The production sounds different too,exacerbating the music's astringency and giving the sound a flattened,desert dryness. Paradoxically the shifting planes produced hologram-likeillusions of three-dimensional shapes. And Van Vliet's voice was liberated,expanding into a gallery of new vocal styles.
Even when one understands the methodology of compositionand the mechanics of the music, Trout Mask Replica still resistsdemystification. There is an untouchable magic at its core. In 1991, VanVliet assessed the album retrospectively. To Lars Movin: 'It is tryingto break up the mind in many different directions, causing them not tobe able to fixate, this is what I was trying to do.'
Fred Frith was guitarist of Henry Cow when he offeredthese perceptive views in New Musical Express in 1974: 'It is alwaysalarming to hear people playing together and yet not in any recognizablerhythmic pattern. This is not free music; it is completely controlled allthe time, which is one of the reasons it's remarkable, forces that usuallyemerge in improvisation are harnessed and made constant, repeatable.'
Trout Mask Replica is, to coin a phrase, prettyfar out. On first listening it comes across as an avant-garde statementwith few precedents and sharing little or no overlap with other stylesor genres. But within its unique structures are found a multiplicity oflyrical and musical ideas which tie in with other strands of American cultureand music, especially the blues. As the sixties moved towards the seventies,groups in the rock mainstream saw the blues as a vein of raw material tobe plundered with impunity. The genre proved strong enough to withstandthe mauling of the blues-rockers on both sides of the Atlantic, from thegroup in the local pub knocking out a twelve-bar blues to the biggest arenarockers. While Led Zeppelin made no apologies for taking the blues andusing them as fuel for their hard-rock juggernaut, Electric Flag and TheButterfield Blues Band took a more reverential tack. Jimi Hendrix was milesahead of the competition, setting the blues tradition on fire and marvelingat the beauty of the flames. But the treatment that Cream meted out toWillie Dixon's 'Spoonful' substituted the rough-hewn power of Howlin' Wolf'sversion with insubstantial flash. Such was the cost of progression, theEuropeanization of the blues appeared complete.
W.C. Handy was a black musician and bandleader activein the early part of the century whose interest in blues was awakened,according to legend, when he saw a guitarist (reputedly Charley Patton)by the Tutwiler railway station playing a guitar using a knife as a slide.At this point, blues tunes often hinged on a standard change based aroundone chord (initially derived from the limitations of an earlier one-stringedinstrument, the Diddley Bow). Or the pattern could be based on a shiftingnumber of bars, with irregular chord changes. In John Lee Hooker's case,there would sometimes appear to be a chord change in the offing, but insteadhe would sing a different melodic passage over the same backing.
In his heyday, Handy was more of a popularizer andpublisher than a blues performer (although his orchestra did play a formalizedversion) and documented a lot of blues music as sheet music. In doing so,he had to pin down its mercurial nature, standardizing it with chord changeswithin a twelve-bar structure. This was accepted by many schooled musiciansof the time, thus strengthening the format and making it more 'musical'in a European sense. By the sixties, the 'one-chord blues' was unusual,although it lived on in the work of northern Mississippi bluesmen likeMississippi Fred McDowell and Mississippi John Hurt.
Van Vliet's own take on the 'Spoonful' riff was 'GimmeDat Harp Boy' (from Strictly Personal). There, he eschewed any blues-rockguitar fireworks for a neo-urban blues approach that echoed Howlin' Wolf,when the latter claimed his band played music 'Low down and dirty as wecould.' Van Vliet's interest in the blues encompassed all points from countryblues to urban R&B, but the blues that informs Trout Mask isthe older, almost 'songster' style.
On Trout Mask, the syncopation of the Deltablues is echoed in the piano lines which yielded the raw musical material,and is still evident in French's drum patterns. That Van Vliet might nothave been able to play the same line twice actually sits him comfortablyalongside a blues tradition where structures of songs were so flexiblethat every performance would be different to some extent. Taken individually,the guitar lines played by (Bill) Harkleroad and (Jeff) Cotton are notso far removed from the way John Lee Hooker's staccato guitar articulationsjump around the linear flow of his music, often sounding as if he's tryingto race ahead of himself. Likewise some of Hubert Sumlin's guitar workwith Howlin' Wolf has a peculiar keening quality that would cut deep intothe music before shooting off on a tangent.
Howlin' Wolf said of his mentor, Patton: 'It tooka good musician to play behind him because it was kind of off-beat or off-time.'A 'sliding shifting rhythmic pulse' was how Giles Oakley described Patton'stiming in The Devil's Music. It would not be stretching the pointto draw comparisons with Van Vliet's own sense of timing and the way theinstruments react to each other on Trout Mask.
Robert Pete Williams (whose 'Grown So Ugly' was coveredon Safe As Milk) was a prime exponent of the old spontaneous never-played-the-same-twiceform of country blues, where the vocal and guitar lines were interwovenas if in a conversation. Van Vliet's music was also a conversation, butwith five conversationalists. Although first recorded in the late fifties,a lot of Williams's music harked back to the thirties, when he first learnedto play, and was as strange, haunted and death-obsessed as anything byRobert Johnson. Legendary American guitarist John Fahey's memories of Williamsmake him sound like one of the amphibious, half-human, half-race of Dagonmonstrosities from one of HP Lovecraft's Gothic horror tales. '[He was]the strangest person I ever met. He was like some alien from another worldwho was part alligator or something.'
Blues lyrics dug deep back into the collective unconsciousof folk tradition and brought with them echoes of a semi-tangible, ancientstrangeness. Howlin' Wolf rewrote Tommy Johnson's 'Cool Drink Of WaterBlues' as 'I Asked Her For Water (She Gave Me Gasoline)' and came up withdisturbing tales like that of the hapless abattoir worker who looks backon his missed chances in 'Killing Floor.' In the sixties, Bob Dylan summedup folk tradition thus: 'The main body of it is just based on myth andthe Bible and plague and famine and all kinds of things like that whichare nothing but mystery and you can see it in all of the songs. Roses growingout of people's hearts and naked cats in bed with spears growing rightout of their backs and seven years of this and eight years of that andit's all really something that nobody can really touch.'
On Trout Mask, Van Vliet's lyrics showed aquantum leap from his previous work, mixing up folk tales with a sort ofneo-Beat poetry and his own highly individual, non-linear narratives. Thisnew take on the American cultural mythos was mixed up with the kaleidoscopicimagery of surrealism-through-psychedelia, beautifully etched lines anddroll wit, not forgetting the corny puns. According to Van Vliet, a numberof the lyrics were originally poems. As such they have a similar sort ofmusicality to that which Robert Creely attained in the fifties, when headdressed jazz and blues modulations via poems like 'The Joke' and 'Jack'sBlues.'
Sonically and structurally Trout Mask Replicawas still way outside the prevailing trends in rock music, not least inthe brevity of the material. The impetus of psychedelia was petering out,but the lengthy explorations born from that music, in which Van Vliet haddabbled the previous year, were about to be further extended into the evenlengthier formalized structures of progressive rock. This path was epitomizedby the English group The Nice, who went from the psychedelic freak-outsof 1967-8 to keyboard player Keith Emerson's classical adaptations andtwenty-minute suites within a year. The longest track on Trout Maskwas just over five minutes, the majority clocked in at less than three.
'Moonlight On Vermont,' from the initial recordingsessions, stands on the threshold of the full-blown Trout Mask style,though it still casts a backward glance towards Strictly Personal.Harkleroad's guitar lines are razor sharp and it all locks together intoa complicated, serpentine activity. Lyrically, it refers to the fortiespop song 'Moonlight In Vermont,' with the moon exerting a strange pullon the locals' behaviour. As the song closes, Van Vliet sings a tongue-in-cheekversion of the old gospel hymn 'Old Time Religion,' mixed with the refrain'Come out to show dem' from Steve Reich's 1966 piece 'Come Out' (on whichhe subjected a 'found' voice to tape loop phasing).
In her book I'm With The Band, Pamela DesBarres of the GTOs described an incident when they went round to the MagicBand's house, ostensibly because one of the group had a crush on French.'We smoked a lot of pot and Don put on a record [Reich's 'Come Out']. Welounged around the living room while a guy with a really deep voice repeatedthe phrase overandoverandover until it turned into many different ideas.When the record was over, the needle skipped and skipped, so we listenedto that for a while too. I, personally, could find no meaning in it, butI tried. We went outside and stood around in a circle, in a semblance ofmeditation. I rolled my eyeballs in one direction and then the other, tryingto stop them in midspin. It was almost impossible.'
From the same sessions, 'Veteran's Day Poppy' isfull of R&B elements, but the guitars lend aggressive syncopation tothe lengthy instrumental coda. Conscription to fight in Vietnam was a realthreat, and here Van Vliet chronicles a bereaved mother's lament for herson. Vietnam was a messy conflict which didn't yield many heroes, and VanVliet finds a powerful anti-war metaphor in the defiant mother who refusesto make the empty gesture of buying the poppy, as 'It can never grow anotherson.'
A wide timespan of American culture is recontextualizedon Trout Mask Replica, demonstrated by the obvious quote from 'OldTime Religion.' But another stylistic device is one so personal to VanVliet that few people have noticed. He had demonstrated on earlier recordingsthat he had a magpie mentality, putting together musical styles and quotationsthat he particularly liked. Throughout the album, the guitars play snippetsof melody from the music of his youth and childhood, which he whistledfor them to replicate. In this instance the main slide guitar refrain onthe first part of the song is a direct lift from a song that was popularin California in the forties entitled 'Ranchero Grande.'
'Sugar 'N Spikes' half-conceals another one of VanVliet's favourite tunes. It starts off on an agitated Delta blues rhythmbut the mood swiftly changes as the singing guitar lines shadow the vocalsin the chorus. This section is constructed around a melody lifted directlyfrom Miles Davis and Gil Evans's version of Joaqu’n Rodrigo's 'ConciertoDe Aranjuez' from Sketches Of Spain (1959), an album he and Zappaused to listen to as teenagers. The lyrics, however, take the listenerback to his homeland. A tale is told of a man in a cold-water flat with'No H on my faucet' and 'no bed for my mouse.' But the lyrics are wry andhumorous and the music melodic, with a later instrumental 'Aranjuez' chorusdisrupted by French suddenly rushing off in a flurry of free-time playing.
'Ella Guru' is a pop tune that audibly fracturesas the guitars begin to pull in different directions. Meanwhile Van Vlietis hanging out, watching the girls go by, casually informing us in a deepbestial voice, 'Here she comes walkin' lookin' like uh zoo', before goinginto a series of colourful verbal puns, 'Hi/High', 'yella/Ella' and 'Highblue she blew'. Cotton joins in the fun, gurgling and giggling like a hyperventilatingcartoon character.
'Sweet Sweet Bulbs' is the album's most touchingsong. It explores a romantic theme: Van Vliet meeting his true love inher garden, where 'warm sun fingers wave'. Carrying on the 'sun' themehe embraces her but becomes detached just before a kiss, looking up andexclaiming that he can see the sun, 'Phoebe,' in her bonnet 'with the sunsetwritten on it.' The music is in a languid mid-tempo, with a gorgeous bassrefrain, though the song goes through patches of turbulence before themelody re-emerges. A few years later, Van Vliet explained the 'bulbs' inquestion, saying that he and his wife, Jan, 'have a garden and we eat alot of sprouts, all kinds of sprouts.'
These songs, although hardly straightforward, arestill constructed on recognizable lines. At the opposite end of the spectrumsits 'Dachau Blues,' a refractory composition over which Van Vliet virtuallydrowns out the music with the intensity of his incantations. It soundsas if he's using his bass clarinet to rail against the atrocities of warin some desperate, garbled language, horrified by visions of a death-danceof skeletons 'dyin' in the ovens'. At the end, three children appear bearingcautionary doves, 'Cryin' please old man stop this misery.' The music isdark and convoluted, but on the recordings made in the group's house theinstrumental backing track sounds surprisingly different without Van Vliet'smassive voice. When he sings across the instrumentation with this kindof power, it creates a sort of auditory hallucination that blurs the music,the drum parts in particular.
See PartTwo of Mike Barnes' epic tome on Trout Mask Replica
Also see UncleFester's and theeditor'sTrout Mask Replica critiques
Also see the rest of the PSF Beefhearttribute
Combining elements of free jazz, blues and rock, Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band produced what is commonly regarded by critics and fans as one of rock’s few truly original bodies of work.
Don Van Vliet (aka Captain Beefheart) retired from the music industry after 1982’s Ice Cream For Crow album to concentrate on his primary love – paint.
Captain Beefheart Trout Mask Replica Vinyl
The Radar Station is a purely fan-run site which aims to document every twist and turn in the tale of this unique individual.
Captain Beefheart Wikipedia
Header photograph copyright Anton Corbijn, used with kind permission.