Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica (11 page)

For much of the late autumn of 1968, into the early winter of 1969, the group rehearsed the music endlessly until Zappa returned from his tour to begin producing the record. However, as nourished as they were by playing this new music, they were literally starving. “We were all totally broke,” French explained. “There was no money. Basically Don’s mother was supporting the band and [Harkleroad’s] mother would send down cheques to pay the rent and buy food. I remember once going for a month and all we had to eat every day was one little ration of a four-ounce cup of soya beans.” The group was in fact so poor they even resorted to stealing food. One time, they actually got caught. Before heading out on the tour, Zappa bailed them out of jail. “I remember waking up in the middle of the night,” French remembered. “I could hear everybody sleeping, so I
crawled into the kitchen on my hands and knees, very very quietly. I took a piece of bread … I lay with my head under my blanket, munching on this bread, like it was a feast.… I actually remember one time drinking pancake syrup. I was so hungry I just poured it in a glass and drank it. I had to have something in my stomach.”

Beefheart drove the musicians hard, making them play twelve to fourteen hours a day. He was “conditioning” the band by keeping them talking for up to thirty-six hours straight. “When I first joined the group, Don was going to the library looking up books on how to control people, and literally how to brainwash these young kids,” Harkleroad recalled. “We’re talking sleep deprivation, food deprivation.” Working so close to Beefheart, French saw how Don would use the same underhanded techniques to gain control that he used to get Doug Moon out of the group. “We’d have these, what I used to call, ‘brainwashing sessions,’ where he’d decide someone in the band was Public Enemy #1. He’d centre in on them for two or three days, feed them coffee and not let them sleep until their sense of deprivation was such that they’d say, ‘I’ll do anything you say!’ Then they’d fall apart and cry or something … it was very emotionally disturbing to all of us and it took us a long time to get past that.” The band never saw anyone outside the house—in fact, they rarely left the residence. Just prior to recording
Trout Mask
, French, Jeff Cotton, and Mark Boston tried to escape in the middle of the night. Boston even had his clothes hidden across the road in a field. Often Vliet would make emotional appeals for them to stay.

Beefheart once said that paranoia was a good propeller.
He used it here to instill fear in the group, grinding the band into his own personal sounding board and, eventually, earning their loyalty. Sometimes he would do spontaneous readings of his lyrics looking specifically for some response. At the end of “Old Fart at Play,” for example, you can hear an excerpt from one of those sessions where Jeff Cotton (Antennae Jimmy Semens) is heard saying, “Oh man, that’s so heavy!” He would play cultural impresario, introducing them to the works of various contemporary artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Willem De Kooning, sometimes talking endlessly about Monet, or regaling them about the passion he felt for the work of Modigliani. Despite the cultlike atmosphere, with a tyrant now in charge, the music the group played was itself strangely liberating. “Those tunes became magical to my ears—they felt like a part of me,” Harkleroad wrote in
Lunar Notes
. “It was all so new and I felt I was participating in something that defied description.” By the time Zappa returned to Los Angeles in the spring, the group was ready to begin defying reality.

You can physically drown in paint, you can mentally drown in music.

—Don Van Vliet

The quest for pure freedom that
Trout Mask Replica
sought came out of nowhere in the world of rock and roll. The ground it travelled, however, had already been tilled in the other arts. For example, its roots lay in abstract expressionism, where painters applied their paint gesturally and nongeometrically to the canvas with speed and force, to convey depth of emotion through sensation. The pure spontaneity in the work of Franz Kline, Hans Hoffman, Jean Dubuffet, Willem de Kooning, and especially Jackson Pollock, cut through the limits of realism by suggesting that the expressive method of painting was just as valuable as the painting itself. As a movement, originating in the 40s, it would soon become fiercely popular in the visual arts world of the 50s.

At the turn of the twentieth century, a number of classical composers were growing weary of tonality and wishing to dispense with the adherence to a single key as the one accepted foundation for musical composition. In response, Arnold Schoenberg developed a twelve-tone system in which all twelve notes in the chromatic scale were performed before the initial note was played again. Anton Webern offered his own interpretation of twelve-tone serialism by using it to create an abstract sparseness in his pieces. Igor Stravinsky became inspired to take music back to a pre-romantic era. From there, he could explore form rather than content, ultimately leading him into neoclassicism and interpreting the music of the past. Composer Edgard Varèse wished to clear the decks altogether by reinventing western music at its core. He explored it as a scientific construct of sounds, creating a whole new world of music yet unheard.

As for American jazz music, many of its practitioners already considered it free, built on improvisation, soloing, and liberated voices calling out to one another. But by the 50s, there were some who claimed it wasn’t free enough. “Free jazz” became a radical deviation from the form that challenged the conventional chord progressions and time signatures at its foundation. It erupted out of the untimely death of Charlie Parker, who opened the door for innovators to rethink the legacy they inherited. Pianist Cecil Taylor, for instance, decided to bring the ideas of Schoenberg and Webern into the land of Bud Powell and Horace Silver. In 1957, he appeared at the Newport Jazz Festival with an abstract atonal sound that, as he put it, “imitate[s] on the piano the leaps in space a dancer makes.” Those leaps began in a lonely loft where by night, after returning from his dull
day job delivering sandwiches, he would hold “imaginary concerts” of his music, envisioning an audience that could one day hear and appreciate it.

Ornette Coleman, a Texas-born saxophone player who eventually sojourned to LA, took his own leaps into space with his quartet by playing jazz music that abandoned form altogether. When he appeared at the Five Spot nightclub in New York in the early winter of 1959, he inspired a small riot resembling the larger one Stravinsky had instigated in 1913 with
Le Sacre du Printemps
. “It was like I was E.T. or something, just dropped in from the moon,” Coleman remembered. He achieved extraterrestrial status by abandoning harmony. Coleman sought rhythm the way abstract expressionist painters went after sensation through dazzling speed. Melody was experienced through a musical maze, an acceleration of tempo, demanding that the audience follow along as he abandoned jazz’s adherence to strict time. Naturally, Coleman’s music became a favorite of painter Jackson Pollock, who provided a canvas of exploding color for the cover of the self-explanatory
Free Jazz
(1960).

While all these tributaries fed into the river that baptised Don Van Vliet, one significant stream was the work of John Coltrane. While stylistically Beefheart is closer to the work of Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, and the abstract expressionists, he cuts through the blues with the same sharp precision that Coltrane cut through jazz. This is by no means comparing the primitive talent of Beefheart with the pure genius of Coltrane, but both men were pioneers of a similar cause. For twenty years, between 1947 and 1967, Coltrane played saxophone engrossed with a desire to reach a place yet unheard, unfelt, and spiritually solvent. Beginning his career with a
desire to be “consumed” by the spirit of Charlie Parker, in actuality, he was consumed in the early years by drugs and alcohol. One day, he had a spiritual awakening through vegetarianism and eastern religion, which lead him on a quest “to make others happy through music.”

His career had begun with Dizzy Gillespie’s band in the late 40s, until Coltrane hooked up with trumpeter Miles Davis in the mid-50s, when he began to hone a virtuosity in improvisation. They were an audacious contrast in styles. Where Davis was a master of spareness, Coltrane could never seem to cram enough notes into a bar of music. His heroin problem got him kicked out of Davis’s group, but then he began a short term with pianist Thelonious Monk before kicking his habit permanently. Coltrane had found a mentor in Monk. Monk taught him methods of creating complex harmonic structures within his sax solos, which in time would be long, difficult excursions into abstract blues. Coltrane could take a conventional pop song, like Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “My Favorite Things” in 1960, and enlarge the melody on soprano saxophone by building an extended solo overtop the basic chords of the theme. Within a year, though, in a series of concerts at the Village Vanguard, Coltrane used melody as merely a starting place for epic solos that built in intensity like a chainsaw cutting through a tornado. Sometimes they would last close to an hour. “Chasin’ the Trane,” for example, featured over eighty choruses that were built upon a twelve-bar blues. That intensity would reach a spiritual epiphany in 1964 with the luxuriant devotional suite
A Love Supreme
. Like Blind Willie Johnson years earlier, Coltrane was possessed by a higher power and a purpose that was expressed through a fervent desire to remake himself through his art. “My music is the
spiritual expression of what I am—my faith, my knowledge, my being,” Coltrane remarked.

Where many would take the path of sanctimony, Coltrane sought out dissonance rather than harmony. It reached its zenith a year later in Seattle in 1965. That year, he was recording a phenomenal amount of music, each piece becoming more abstract than the last. One night, he had a dream in which he and the band had played a show without reference to chords or chordal sequences. In his dream, he discovered that he was seeking, in the words of jazz critic Keith Raether in
Earshot Jazz
, “dialogues of tonal and atonal sections similar to the parallel octave passages found in African vocal music.” The sessions Coltrane recorded after his dream were the kind that could cause others to have nightmares. “We did two takes and both had that kind of thing in them that makes people scream,” saxophonist Marion Brown explained. During the concert in Seattle, Coltrane decided to take his group, which also included Pharoah Sanders on sax, Elvin Jones on drums, and Jimmy Garrison on bass, through the most atonal abstractions he’d ever played. The purpose? “I don’t think I’ll know what’s missing from my playing until I find it,” Coltrane told a journalist from
Melody Maker
before the show. One of the tracks, “Evolution,” was a thirty-six-minute excursion into an extravagant sheet of combative chords that filled close to two sides of an LP. The Harold Arlen standard “Out of This World” became literally that. It was so dense in atonality that the recording engineer, Jan Kurtis, who knew Coltrane’s original recording of the song, didn’t recognize it until well into the piece. In what became an understatement of perception, Kurtis told Keith Raether:
“Coltrane seemed to be thinking about a lot of things. There must have been an enormous amount of music going on inside him.”

The enormity of that music was overwhelming for most people to consume. When a friend of mine, who loves Coltrane, bought a used CD of
John Coltrane: Live in Seattle
(on my recommendation), he phoned me shortly after hearing only a portion of it. “I’m taking this back,” he cried. Somewhat puzzled, I asked him why. He replied pejoratively, “This is.… Beefheart!” He had heard in Coltrane what he once perceived briefly in
Trout Mask
. At that moment, I suddenly recalled playing him about twenty-five seconds of the record (before he begged me to turn it off). By Seattle, Coltrane had dispensed of conventional melodies in his own search for what Blind Willie Johnson had been looking for in his gospel blues: the soul of a man. For both men, the soul of a man was not a harmonious place. So the octane Coltrane provided was pure force, a streaming of notes too primal to contain, a musical speaking in tongues, so to speak. For my friend, of course, it was much less than that. It was tongues that were garbled, pure noise, no more than an unlistenable cacophony. Music from the other side of the fence. When Beefheart released
Trout Mask Replica
, it was spawned from the same type of spiritual hermitage that took Coltrane to Seattle four years earlier.

Although
Trout Mask Replica
has its antecedents in all these varied sources, it has none in the world of rock. That is partly due to the fact that—unlike the visual arts, classical music, and jazz—rock is a populist music. Classical music and jazz, arguably, have a comparatively minority audience. “Pop music provides immediate emotional gratifications that the subtler
and deeper and more lasting pleasures of jazz can’t prevail against,” film critic Pauline Kael once wrote in her ambivalent praise of
Lady Sings the Blues
, the movie biography of singer Billie Holiday. “Pop drives jazz back underground,” she explained. It’s in that underground, though, where a laboratory of experimentation can flourish. Since the huge dollars and the mass audience don’t drive that world, lone dreamers (like Cecil Taylor) could endlessly perform their imaginary concerts. That underground made these distinct kinds of propulsive forces possible, in a way that they never could in rock and roll. The stage that Elvis Presley and the Beatles built, as big and as bold as it was, couldn’t break totally free from the huge business that ultimately needed to make money from its art. This is why the emergence of
Trout Mask Replica
seemed so abhorrent when it hit the record stores in 1969. Who the fuck would want to listen to this? It’s Beefheart!

* * *

By the late winter of 1969, when Beefheart and the group were ready to begin recording their album, Frank Zappa already had an idea of how he wanted to produce it. During the road tour with the Mothers, he had been recording their live gigs with an ingeniously inexpensive unit. Sound engineer Dick Kunc had a Shure eight-channel mixer mounted in a portable briefcase. At all performances, Kunc would simply sit in a corner and adjust levels through his headphones, whereby he could monitor the band through the briefcase mixer that was feeding a portable state-of-the-art Uher reel-to-reel recorder. “It was a tough little machine and it made spectacular recordings,” Kunc said. “Sometimes I used just
the single stereo microphone that came with it; other times I set up four separate mics or so and fed them to the Uher.” Since the road tapes turned out so well, Zappa figured it might also work for recording
Trout Mask
. “I thought it would be great to go to Don’s house with this portable rig and put the drums in the bedroom, the bass clarinet in the kitchen, and the vocals in the bathroom, complete isolation just like in a studio—except that the band members probably would feel more at home, since they were at home,” he wrote in
The Real Frank Zappa Book
. Zappa approached the album as an anthropological field recording—just as he had done with
An Evening with Wild Man Fischer
. He treated the band’s home as their own organic recording studio. “I think it’s a valid way to approach what we were doing, because who lives in a house for nine months, playing twelve, fourteen hours a day these same tunes?” explained Bill Harkleroad to Alex Duke and Rob DeNunzio of the internet site the Captain Beefheart Radar Station.