Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica Read online

  On the front, there was Beefheart in a green coat lined with dirty white fur hanging limply around his neck. It resembled some malnourished fox that had taken rest there many years earlier (and since died). Beefheart wore a huge stovepipe hat on his head, with a swizzle bulb on the top, as if he were the Grand Wazoo of some rogue band of Shriners. Covering his face was a real trout mask, with its eyes glaring out into the great beyond. Its open mouth was framed by an elegant thread-thin moustache, while Beefheart’s hand, holding the trout mask in place, was open-palmed. His pose suggested he was casually waving to someone across the street. The music? There was nothing casual about that.

  On the opening track, “Frownland,” I heard an urgent manifesto, one boldly declaring a new world and a new music. Off the mark, Beefheart states defiantly that his spirit is in harmony with the natural world. He’d never go back to “yer Frownland.” Yet the music that surrounds him is anything but harmonious. The sound seems to come from some hidden gulag in Frownland. The charging guitar chords that begin the tune are as recognizably insolent as the ones that open “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” But the moment Beefheart declares that his “smile is stuck,” the rhythms clash and collide around that paralysed grin like a collection of rocks crumbling down in a mountain avalanche. You’re forced to think: If this man is happy, what can Frownland possibly be like? “With that voice, he sounds like he’s been a resident in Frownland his whole life,” a friend suggested years later. There is an open paradox in the song revealing to listeners a romantic who doesn’t feel part of a harmonious landscape. Of course, that puts him in good company with a number of American musical artists—from Charles Ives to Harry Partch—who defined their work by boldly sparring with the young and turbulent country that spawned them. Yet with Beefheart, the rancour doesn’t seem driven by a need to sound different. It resembles the declarations of a man who was different because it was the only way he could truly be himself.

  As a listening experience, Trout Mask Replica is the story of an artist who finds himself at his most free. It is a tale of one who refuses the comforts of security, yet still continues to dream of a world where man and beast can commingle in harmony. In staking that territory, from a musical standpoint, Beefheart doesn’t rely on the lovely pop hooks that we ache to hear as listeners. The freedom Trout Mask offers is freedom from the familiar—the very element that often makes an album a hit, or at least, an audience favorite.

  Despite the abrasive atonality of the music, the varied themes on Trout Mask are never less than inviting. Whether it’s the pure erotic sensuality of the passionate wet sex in “Neon Meate Dream of a Octafish”; or the abstract a cappella recitation of “The Dust Blows Forward ’n the Dust Blows Back,” which seems to conjure up a Walt Whitman poem after it has been soaked in hillbilly booze; or “Dachau Blues,” where the horror of the Holocaust gets dipped in an abstract rendering of apocalyptic gospel, Beefheart openly welcomes listeners to hear him rail against a world that is often at odds with his own distinct brand of humanism. The unsettling nature of the songs somehow guarantees a more hermetic audience for this album. Beefheart defined that sensibility years later as “music from the other side of the fence.” By drawing that line in the sand, he continually puts his audience to the test in trying to define exactly how that fence separates his music from all others’. Elvis, the Beatles, the Stones, they all reached out with their best songs to create a larger popular appeal, a culture that would share the pleasures held within their music. Beefheart, on Trout Mask, assures us that those pleasures could only be reaped in isolation. His was not a party album—unless you wanted the party to go home.

  If Trout Mask is to be considered a hermetic experience, it ultimately inherited a secret society of followers consistently keeping its spirit alive. Unfortunately, the same couldn’t be said for Mike. After he divested himself of the record, he just couldn’t find solace in anything else. Within a few weeks of my receiving Trout Mask, Mike committed suicide. His death continues to overshadow my listening to the record, not only because the record had once spooked him, but because Trout Mask Replica became a parting gift before I could ever tell him my thoughts about it. Lost was an opportunity to remove his burden of being “nervous” about its contents. But stories never do end so simply.

  As it turns out, I didn’t have to consider my possession of Trout Mask for long. Just before the funeral, his mother came to visit me at my apartment looking for items he may have recently lent to his friends. “I’d like to bury him with some of his favourite things,” she told me. Maybe if I had kept my mouth shut, I might still own that original first pressing of Trout Mask Replica on Straight Records, and he wouldn’t have literally taken it to his grave. But while telling her about this strange record, she immediately assumed that I was lying about being the new owner and wanted the album back. How could I argue with a grieving mother? I reluctantly gave it to her and never saw her again. I didn’t buy another copy until Halloween night in 1987.

  On that evening, I was going out on a second date with a woman I recently met. There I was dressed in a powder blue suit with a wicked cat’s face painted on my face, and we were off to see Clive Barker’s movie Hellraiser in preparation for a radio interview I was doing with him a few days later. Before arriving for the special screening at the Bloor Cinema in Toronto, I detoured into Peter Dunn’s Vinyl Museum to look for records. While combing through the stacks, grinning through my painted whiskers at curious onlookers, I found a brand new sealed copy of Trout Mask Replica on Reprise Records. Without thinking, I immediately snapped it up and ran to the counter. As the clerk was ringing it up, I started thinking of Mike, fifteen years in his grave, helplessly cradling the very record that had once so unnerved him. That night, masked and disguised, as Beefheart was himself on the cover, I had once again inherited this album. Mike and I now both possessed it. But I was to go forward into the years ahead, continuing to plumb the bottomless mysteries of this odd epic masterpiece. The very friend who introduced me to it lay motionless, somewhere deep in a hole in Oshawa, still being chased by the music he couldn’t escape.

  This book is for him.

  Chapter One

  A Desert Island of the Mind

  Everybody hears my music, but the thing is, it’s a matter of whether they want to or not. I don’t know how people can say they don’t hear … like that [car] horn, when that horn is there. That’s what gets me. What the hell are they doing, man? What are they doing? I mean, people must know they’re wrong. They must know some of the things they’re doing are so far back that a train don’t go there.

  —Don Van Vliet, “Captain Beefheart

  Pulls a Hat Out of His Rabbit”

  Trout Mask Replica is an album so assured in its isolated world-view that no matter how much it might alienate potential listeners, it still demands to be heard—on its own terms. Yet unlike most commercial pop, Beefheart doesn’t write songs to seduce an audience. We’re not asked to identify with him in this music because his songs aren’t a conventional baring of the artist’s soul. Beefheart invites us to experience Trout Mask Replica, rather than telling us what to experience. So whoever you choose to share this strident and peculiar record with, you’re always going to be on your own with it. Which is why Trout Mask Replica embodied the punk aesthetic eight years before it exploded in the UK with the Sex Pistols. If the 60s hippie culture was clannish, punks were solitary. “Punks were self-consciously outsiders in school and at work,” critic Greil Marcus told Geoff Pevere of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “They picked things to like that nobody else did. They dressed differently, talked differently, and they weren’t joiners.” Trout Mask would quite naturally inspire countless other artists—from the Clash to P.J. Harvey—in finding their own sound, their own voice—to walk comfortably alone in the world. “If you listen to it, you will find a world of voices speaking to you from all directions,” Marcus explained. “You might feel both exhilarated and completely lost.” Perhaps it w
as this very quality of being lost that made Mike feel so “nervous” about Trout Mask. The record didn’t provide a map to guide him in finding his way back into the larger world again, the way most great pop music can. This album was about discovering yourself as an alien, about being as different as Mike once felt minus part of his leg. Beefheart’s utopia wasn’t borne out of the real world, a world that Mike had wished himself to be part of again. Beefheart’s utopia is the true definition of the word—nowhere—a desert island of the mind.

  Curiously, a few years after Mike handed me the Trout Mask Replica album, the record became part of a particular desert island study among music critics: What album would you take with you if you were isolated on a desert island? It’s always been a tempting question, essentially a popular party staple which allows music critics a casual forum to defend their tastes, test the wits of others, plus brag about rare records that nobody but them gives a damn about. The idea is also a bit ridiculous. (What critic would ever want to be isolated on a desert island with no access to concerts, free CDs, records, or even an outlet to express his or her persuasive views?) After all, isn’t music, even in the current age of iPods, still best enjoyed in a communal environment? A desert island seems to negate the whole purpose of music. It denies music an audience, save for that one lone fan, to test its true value. Yet this question became the subject of a 1979 book called Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island, in which twenty prominent American rock critics were asked by fellow scribe Greil Marcus to contribute an essay in response to this curious (and appetizing) request.

  The concept of the desert island was intended to be a purely metaphorical one. But was it? In his introduction to Stranded, Marcus comments, “When I began to call up people I thought would be interested and asked them that question, asked them to contribute, the response was enthusiastic, but in many cases for a reason I hadn’t anticipated. ‘A great idea,’ said one person after another. ‘I feel like I’ve been living on a desert island for years.’” A remark like that can lead a reader to think that, included in Stranded, there will be essays about music that can only be nurtured in isolation, in the mind and tastes of the writer. Upon looking through some of the selections, though, the desert island records invited more of a crowd than many of these writers thought. For example, Simon Frith, a former columnist for Creem and Melody Maker, decided to bring along Beggar’s Banquet (1968), the Rolling Stones’ exquisitely popular tribute to country blues—hardly a record you could imagine wanting to hear alone. M. Mark, the former arts editor of the Village Voice, provided a fascinating overview of the mystically dark Celtic poetry of Van Morrison. This brooding Belfast Cowboy with his wailing brogue certainly wasn’t a voice made for a desert island. The late Lester Bangs, who described how Morrison’s Astral Weeks (1968) actually pulled him out of the painful isolation of a horrible year, makes the opposite argument of the book.

  Most of the artists cited—whether it was Tom Smucker on the glorious gospel recordings of Thomas A. Dorsey or Kit Rachlis on the hauntingly lonely sound of Neil Young’s voice—were people that ultimately did reach (and intended to reach) a larger audience. Even if their work originated from a private, sometimes isolated pain (like Young), their records continued to exist because their purpose was to create a bridge from those desert islands to a broader civilization—where anxious ears were yearning to listen to them. Most of the essays were private musings by intelligent critics eloquently championing their favorite music. (Since he was the editor, Greil Marcus actually got to cheat and bring most of his own record collection to the island.)

  The only essay in the book that, for me, made a convincing argument was Langdon Winner’s on Trout Mask Replica. Winner, formerly a political theorist, had written extensively about rock and roll for a variety of music magazines. He instinctively knew that this record was not one that was shaped for popular tastes, or one that an audience would (or could) quickly embrace. He easily recognized that this is an album which actually forces the desert island experience on a listener—whether the listener wanted to retreat to one or not. He realized that Trout Mask was an endurance test for most listeners and it was a record that strongly divided and confounded more people perhaps than any other pop album. It may indeed be this very attribute that made Trout Mask such an inspired choice for a desert island disc, for it was conjured in that island’s sequestered spirit long before the listener took the journey there. “One reason … that Trout Mask Replica would be my personal choice for a desert island is that a desert island is possibly the only place where I could play the record without being asked by friends and neighbors to take the damned thing off,” Winner wrote. Trout Mask Replica, for Winner, provided a very succinct argument for desert island listening. “Created in isolation by a renegade artist/genius/madman and his band of unquestioning disciples, hermetic almost to the point of catatonia, yet challenging in every moment of its seventy-nine-minute duration, Trout Mask is a record uniquely suited to years and years of isolated listening,” Winner further explained.

  Trout Mask Replica earned its desert island exile because it has a way of spurning simple, or easy categorization. Throughout its twenty-eight tracks, the album mixes and combines various genres of music, including Delta blues, free jazz and expressionist lyricism, and does it at the speed of a Cuisinart. The record is a scrapbook collection of songs and poems, impishly acted out with Dadaist abandon and jack-in-the-box hijinks, performed with jagged rhythms and sharp conflicting atonal melodies. Ultimately, the record comes to raise important questions about just what constitutes musical entertainment and what an audience’s relationship might be to it. “People like to hear music in tune because they hear it in tune all the time,” Beefheart once told Robert Carey of the New York Rocker. “I tried to break that all down on Trout Mask Replica. I made it all out of focus.” It may be out of focus, but the music is never blurry.

  According to Winner, Beefheart’s most radical move was removing from his songs the security of harmony (“the mother’s heartbeat,” according to Beefheart), where we traditionally seek a warm spot in the songs we come to love. “Beefheart’s music offers none of the qualities of a ‘good’ record; engaging melodies; a solid, interesting groove; poignant hook lines; and an intelligible reflection of the life of the listener,” Winner explained. “If the purpose of a phonograph record is to soothe us, to provide a beat for dancing, a pulse for making love, a set of themes to reassure us in the joys and troubles of life’s daily commerce, then Trout Mask fails utterly.… But if a record is legitimate in trying to overthrow our somnambulistic habits of hearing, seeing, and touching things, if it is valid in seeking to jolt our sensibilities and restructure the way we experience music and everything else, then Beefheart’s strange collection of songs begins to make sense.”

  The songs themselves, though, are an odd lot in which to try and make sense. There may be no lulling melodies to draw us into the musical canvas of Trout Mask, but that doesn’t mean that melodies don’t exist. It’s just that these spiky and jagged themes are quickly gone before we can catch them on first listen. The fleeting let’s-try-it-on inventiveness of the compositions, in fact, comes across with a shocking ebullience. “It was a little like throwing a bomb,” is how Tim Page, the former music critic at the Washington Post, described the initial impact of this album:

  From the moment the phonograph needle settled into a Beefheart groove … everything changed. A crunching dissonance rent the air. Complicated time signatures and opaque poetry upset polite conversation and rattled the Mateus rose. Beefheart’s roar of purest gravel and the untrammelled violence of the rhythms sent resident hippies into bummers; lovers could find no slow dances; young professors would sniff around the turntable, scrutinize the spinning disc, pronounce the music “Um … interesting,” and then move as far away from the loudspeakers as possible. Meanwhile, a small but significant counterforce of Beefheart fans would surround the captured stereo, beaming with anarchic triumph.

  Quoting
composer Charles Wuorinen on Arnold Schoenberg’s equally demanding Pierrot Lunaire, Page said that listening to Trout Mask is “rather like trying to befriend a porcupine.” With “laughing-gas silliness aplenty,” the album illustrated, for Page, the way Beefheart explored “the interface of two aesthetics that had never before been mated: namely, the heartfelt emotionalism of rhythm and blues and the cool celebration of high surrealism.” That’s a pretty good description of the bomb that Page claims had been hurled at listeners. But the record is also a mating of two other sources seldom acknowledged: the world of abstract expressionist painting and the urban blues (“Jackson Pollock trying to play like John Lee Hooker,” is how Magic Band guitarist Bill Harkleroad accurately described the music to David Bowman of Salon).

  Unlike many of the jazz artists and critics of the late 50s, rock fans (and rock critics) of the 60s and 70s seldom delved very far into the visual art world. “Music was always more accessible than art,” said art critic Roberto Ohrt about rock audiences. “[The 70s] was a generation that regarded painting, in particular, as anachronistic, outworn, even decadent. Both concert goers and record collectors accepted and practised a degree of musical specialisation that outsiders often found positively grotesque, while any comparable degree of fanaticism applied to painting or to art in general was dismissed out of hand.” Audiences may not have grasped just how much Beefheart (an abstract expressionist painter himself) drew upon that world in creating Trout Mask Replica. He treated music no differently than the way abstract expressionist painters, like Arshile Gorky or Jean Dubuffet, treated paint. Beefheart was after, in sound, the immediate sensation of musical color explosively hitting a canvas. The rock audience, largely unfamiliar with abstract art, couldn’t truly account for the expressionism in Beefheart’s record, since there was nothing in the pop music world to compare it to.