On this day in rock history, Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band released a double album in 1969 called Trout Mask Replica which is either an unlistenable pile of crap or an unmistakable work of genius. There seems to be no in-between in the opinions of the album, composed by Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet) and arranged by drummer John “Dumbo” French.
Trout Mask Replica is a bizarre album combining R&B, garage rock, blues, free jazz, and avant-garde composition elements. Today, it’s regarded as an essential work of experimental rock. The unconventional musical style of the album includes polyrhythms, multi-octave vocals, and polytonality, and it has a reputation as one of the most challenging records of the 20th century.
The album was produced by fellow musical weirdo Frank Zappa and recorded in March 1969 in Glendale, California, following months of intense rehearsals at a small rented communal house in LA. Beefheart played several brass and woodwind instruments on the record, including the sax, musette, and natural horn, and contributed most of the vocal parts.
Trout Mask Replica sold poorly on its initial release in America, failing to appear in any charts. Interestingly, it was more successful in the U.K., where it spent a week at No. 21 on the U.K. album charts. Even more interestingly, in recent years, the bizarre album has been unearthed and widely regarded as Captain Beefheart’s masterpiece and a significant influence on other artists. Rolling Stone ranked it at No. 60 in its 2012 edition of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list, and it has appeared on many other best-of lists.
Trout Mask Replica begins to make more sense once you understand its background. Beefheart had a notoriously difficult history of relationships with record labels. The band had been dropped by a couple of labels by 1968, and around this time, Beefheart’s high school friend Zappa had started his own labels, Bizarre and Straight. Zappa offered Captain Beefheart, the name he had given them, the chance to record an album with complete artistic freedom. Maybe too much freedom.
The band rehearsed Beefheart’s complicated compositions for eight months while living communally in a small rented house in Los Angeles. Beefheart forced his vision and asserted complete artistic and emotional domination of the musicians that were rehearsing. Beefheart would berate them, sometimes for days, until some musicians would break down in tears. The sessions often included physical violence, and some have described the situation as “cult-like.”
Beefheart was a strange fellow, just like the music he created. He claimed the LA house was haunted and that he was communicating with spirits. He also gave the band new nicknames like Zoot Horn Rollo (guitarist Bill Harkleroad) and Rockette Morton (bass player Mark Boston). He bestowed the name of Drumbo on John French.
Other parts of the recording circumstances were equally strange and precarious. The band had little to no income other than contributions from relatives, and they survived on a bare subsistence diet. One of the musicians, French, later described living on a diet of a small cup of soybeans daily for a month. At one point, band members were arrested for shoplifting food (Zappa bailed them out). They were all in poor health, and they looked it, according to visitors to the house. Beefheart’s band was also restricted from leaving the house, and they often practiced for fourteen or more hours daily.
Despite the morally questionable way it was recorded, Trout Mask Replica is highly esteemed by many critics today. Filmmaker David Lynch has said it’s his favorite album of all time and guitar virtuoso Stev Vai has praised it, though saying he was taken aback by how out of tune Beefheart’s vocals sound when he first listened to it. John Frusciante of the Chilli Peppers once said in an interview that Zoot Horn’s playing on the album is his most important influence. “If I listen to it first thing in the morning,” Frusciante told Guitar Player magazine in 1991, “I’m assured a day of unbridled creativity.”
Many listeners think the album sounds like disjointed noise, but it was meticulously planned. Beefheart composed every part on the piano, which was notated by his drummer, French. No matter what all the critics say, Trout Mask Replica is a challenging album to get into – listen for yourself if you haven’t already. The polyrhythms mean much of it sounds simply out-of-tune, though that was the intention. It’s high-concept art and certainly not for everyone. But some psychedelic music from the classic era of the late Sixties is like that, and this is likely the most “far-out” record of the Sixties.
I’m turned off by hearing of Beefheart’s cult-leader-like behavior in recording the album. But it’s a part of rock history and it has an immense legacy, whether I agree with it or not. It’s like the musical equivalent of Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury – baffling, hailed as brilliant by many, but I don’t get it for the most part.
Parting words: “If everyone’s a creator today, then who’s the audience?”
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