Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica (15 page)

“People are just too far out—far away from nature,” Beefheart said in
Rolling Stone
. “Wild Life” tells us just how far. It’s the perhaps the most prescient of Beefheart’s songs on
Trout Mask Replica
, since he would eventually abandon the music business and retreat to a trailer far removed from urban centres altogether. “Wild Life,” though, is hardly the most lyrically imaginative track (“Wild life along with my wife / I’m goin’ up on the mountain fo’ the rest uh m’ life”), but outside of “When Big Joan Sets Up” and the conclusion of “Ant Man Bee,” it does have some of Beefheart’s finest horn solos. On
“Wild Life,” he even tries to imitate his own speech patterns. “[I]t was the best horn playing Don did,” Harkleroad asserted. “Of course, he didn’t know what he was doing, but he got pretty good at squeezing out a great tone.” It was such a good tone that in 1982, Magic Band guitarist Gary Lucas transcribed the sax solo for his guitar melody on “The Host the Ghost Most Holy-O” included on
Ice Cream for Crow
.

“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 preparation,” 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.

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.”