Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica (16 page)

Eliot Wald, writing a few years later in
Oui
, knew what Bangs had heard in
Trout Mask
, but he also understood what offended listeners as well. “[Lester Bangs] described [
Trout Mask
] as the most astounding and important work of art ever
to appear on a phonograph record,” he began. “However, it was not to everyone’s taste.… Rhythms are totally unpredictable; what starts out as a blues boogie may end up sounding like a surrealist waltz. Everybody seems to be playing whatever came to mind, including Beefheart, whose sax, musette and simran horn solos (played through tubes that allow him to play two instruments at the same time) swoop and dive, mirroring his incredible four-octave voice. Lyrically, it’s absurdist poetry.…
Trout Mask Replica
was not an overnight sensation.” Not only was it not an overnight sensation, it took (for some people) many nights of listening to fully comprehend its strange power. “The first time I heard
Trout Mask
, when I was fifteen years old, I thought it was the worst thing I’d ever heard,” remembered Matt Groening, the creator of
The Simpsons
, and long-time fan and friend of Frank Zappa. “I said to myself, ‘They’re not even trying!’ It was just a sloppy cacophony. Then I listened to it a couple more times because I couldn’t believe Frank Zappa could do this to me—and because a double album cost a lot of money. About the third time, I realized they were doing it on purpose: they meant it to sound exactly this way. About the sixth or seventh time, it clicked in and I thought it was the greatest album I ever heard.”

The greatest album ever heard? In 1987,
Rolling Stone
did list it as number 33 in their Top 100 Best Rock Albums issue, describing it as “rock’s most visionary album.” Critic Paul Gambaccini later gathered other scribes who listed the record at number 81 in a Top 100 list of the best rock and roll albums of all time.
The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Rock
describes
Trout Mask
as “one of the most advanced overall concepts in rock music.”
Record Collector
describes Beefheart’s epic opus as
“a major musical achievement,” while the
Trouser Press Record Guide
calls it a “masterpiece.” As recent as March 2005,
Mojo
magazine declared
Trout Mask
the “ultimate Out There! album.” It was a “triumph of genius” (beating out such competition as Sun Ra’s 1973
Space Is the Place
, on which his Astro Intergalactic Infinity Arkestra attempted to musically define the history of the universe) according to the popular British music magazine and “matched by a collective work ethic that threatened the health of everyone involved.” British music critic Ben Watson couldn’t compare
Trout Mask
to any other recording. “
Trout Mask
is the only record ever made for which no other music is suitable ‘preparation,’” he wrote.

As visionary as
Trout Mask
is, its influence in the years to follow was not as straightforward as other significant pop artists. As critic Steve Huey remarked, “[T]he influence of
Trout Mask Replica
was felt more in spirit than in direct copy-catting, as a catalyst rather than a literal musical starting point.” That spirit, which stretched itself down many winding pathways, proved Beefheart right when he pronounced one day that everyone drinks from the same pond. One such drinker from that pond was John Graham Mellor, a middle-class grave digger, who would later be reborn as Joe Strummer. Years before he dreamed of making a dent in the rock conglomerate with the Clash, Strummer told critic Greil Marcus, “When I was sixteen, [
Trout Mask Replica
] was the only record I listened to—for a year.” Marcus actually heard
Trout Mask
stewing under the surface of the Clash’s 1977 debut. “The Clash have taken Beefheart’s aesthetic of scorched vocals, guitar discords, melody reversals, and rhythmic conflict and made the whole seem anything but avant-garde: in their hands that aesthetic speaks with clarity and
immediacy, a demand you have to accept or refuse,” he wrote in
New West
in 1978. That either/or ultimatum, which became the standard provocation offered by punk in the late 70s, wasn’t exactly the stand that
Trout Mask
took when it appeared in 1969. Beefheart held a more an ambiguous position than punk itself offered.
Trout Mask Replica
was an inhabitor of the pond, possessing those who wished to be different fish.

Another artist transformed was Mark Mothersbaugh, the founder of the synth-punk band Devo. Formed in Akron, Ohio, in 1972, by two Kent State art students, Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale came upon the notion of a “devolving” American society out of the ashes of the fatal shootings of four students at Kent State by the National Guard. In their mind, mankind was regressing, becoming rigid in its thinking and more authoritarian in attitude. Devo mirrored that world in their music with robotic rhythms and nerdish demeanour. “Beefheart was a major influence on Devo as far as direction goes,” Mothersbaugh explained in 1978. “
Trout Mask Replica
… there’s so many people that were affected by that album that he probably doesn’t even know about, a silent movement of people.” That movement of people seemed silent only because the record, nurtured in isolation, inspired a quiet need to be unique. So its spirit became shared subliminally among a scattering of diverse voices in a wilderness.

One such individual was Lora Logic (Sara Whitby), formerly of the punk band X-Ray Spex, who found the post-punk ensemble Essential Logic in 1978. In her song, “Aerosol Burns,” from
Fanfare in the Garden
, her voice bursts forth like Bjork on steroids as she breaks the song’s title into spit consonants and vowels. While twisting her saxophone into squeaks curling around the broken sounds, Logic marries
some of the raw power of punk honed in earlier bands to Beefheart’s style of intricately shifting melodies. But Lora Logic wasn’t the only woman inspired by the wilderness of Beefheart’s music.

Another such individual inhabiting a wilderness was Polly Jean Harvey. Born in England the year
Trout Mask
was released, she taught herself guitar by listening to her parents’ Beefheart albums. When she recorded her debut
Dry
in 1992, she integrated the primal charge of punk with the raw texture of the blues. With a wry humour, like Beefheart, she savaged pop convention with a frankness that set her apart from the more self-conscious brooding of Sinead O’Connor.

One of the more obvious figures drinking from the pond is Tom Waits. Ironically, once signed to Zappa’s Bizarre/Straight label (even touring with Zappa in the early 70s), Waits began as a melancholic singer/songwriter sitting at the piano bellowing heartache and longing like Hoagy Carmichael reborn as a beatnik. With a raspy growl, Waits spent the 70s depicting the lives of hipster lowlifes in songs like “Bad Liver and a Broken Heart” and “Heartattack and Vine.” In 1983, he moved from Asylum Records to Island, after firing his manager and his producer, then dramatically changed his recording approach with
Swordfishtrombones
. His new songs (“Underground,” “16 Shells from a Thirty-Ought Six”) took on the shape of soundscapes, abstract short stories in which even his voice became part of the grain of the piece. An existential Harry Parch, Waits would include (among the standard bass guitars, pianos, and drums) utilitarian devices like brake drums, metal aunglongs, and buzz saws. He incorporated the rough surface of Beefheart’s music without surrendering to its primal power.

As highly imaginative and riveting as Waits’s music is, it is still the music of a very sane man playing the abstract artist. When Waits became a movie actor in the 80s, he learned how to vary the role-playing he exhibited too narrowly in his hipster persona of the 70s. On later records,
Rain Dogs
(1985),
Frank’s Wild Years
(1987), and the terrific
Mule Variations
(1999), he remade the blues and gospel with the same sonic eclecticism Beefheart put into
Trout Mask Replica
. But he did so by acting the part of a different fish rather than becoming one. Which is why Tom Waits, as wonderfully innovative as he is, won’t scare people away from their stereos.

There are many other contemporary groups that have tried to unlock the mystery of
Trout Mask
’s power and replicate it. “Frownland” was covered by the underground post-punk Scottish band Nectarine No. 9 on their 1994 album
Guitar Thieves
. Drawing from the well of free jazz and Beat poetry, Nectarine No. 9 is a musical hybrid of Albert Ayler and Vic Godard & the Subway Sect. “Frownland” also inspired the five-piece Seattle band of the same name (their latest CD, slyly incorporating Dylan, was
Sad Eyed Lady of the Frownlands
). Mixing droning guitars with Patrice Tullai’s airy vocals, Frownland provides what one writer described as “melancholic elegance.” Former Mothers’ drummer Jimmy Carl Black and singer Eugene Chadbourne went on to form a band called Pachuco Cadaver. On CD and in concert, they covered a range of Zappa and Beefheart material (including an epic interpretation of “Veteran’s Day Poppy”). A rock group soon popped up in Detroit called Bill’s Corpse, a five-piece band with two drummers. Another five-piece group calling themselves Sweet Sweet Bulbs emerged out of the Big Wheel Blues Festival as a distinctive cover band doing the
dark repertoire of Cowboy Junkies, John Martyn, and Nick Cave. “We are more motivational than an Anthony Robbins lecture,” they reminded us with a dark chuckle.

“Dali’s Car” inspired the name of the short-lived 1984 band formed by the vocalist and lyricist Peter Murphy of Bauhaus and bassist Mick Karn of Japan. The duo recorded one record,
The Waking Hour
, that included the aptly titled single “The Judgement is the Mirror.” The record, as a collection of keyboard- and bass-driven songs, was a commercial disaster. Part of the problem lay in the discontentment of their collaboration. Unlike the Magic Band, Murphy and Karn had not spent time together writing or recording the songs. They preferred to send the tapes back and forth. In fact, most of the tunes were written before they came together in the studio. When they did show up together, they clashed so often that neither wanted to work together again. “Situations full of tension can often be the most creative,” Mick Karn remarked echoing the underpinnings that shaped
Trout Mask Replica
. “Perhaps due to our strong, opposing opinions, there’s a certain strength to Dali’s Car. I doubt if there will be a reunion.” There wasn’t.

Other bands would turn up calling themselves Ant Man Bee or Ella Guru, some lasting, others luxuriating in obscurity like some secret society. But there were other established groups who preferred to cover the music itself. In 2000, the White Stripes would release a CD EP called
Party of Special Things to Do
, a three-song tribute to Beefheart, which included a rousing rendition of “China Pig.” The punk band Dead Kennedys would do their own pulsing version of “Orange Claw Hammer.” In 2003, a tribute album called
Neon Meate Dream of a Octafish
appeared (appropriately enough) on
Animal World Recordings. Beside a scattering of songs from across Beefheart’s career,
Trout Mask
is well represented by A Warm Palindrome’s sharp interpretation of “Orange Claw Hammer.” Miss Murgatroid gives a sonic splendour to the title track, understanding the song’s roots in sound poetry. Truman’s Water does a lively punk version of “Hair Pie: Bake 2,” while 25 Suaves take a thrash metal approach to “Dachau Blues.”

For those who are under the misconception that only men listen to Beefheart, a tribute CD called
Mama Kangaroos: Woman of Philadelphia Sing Captain Beefheart
appeared in 2005. The album featured twenty female bands from Philly giving a whole new interpretation to songs like “Well” and “Orange Claw Hammer.” Gary Lucas, who joined the Magic Band in the 80s, said the music ranged from “old timey to camp cabaret to bloozy rawk ’n roll.” Lucas would start his own tribute band called Fast ’n’ Bulbous, making its first appearance at the Jazz en Agosto Festival in Lisbon, Portugal, on August 13, 2005. The group’s purpose was to take Beefheart’s music as a vehicle for both improvisation and arranging. Taking the place of Beefheart’s booming voice was a four-piece horn section.

Music wasn’t the only area infiltrated by
Trout Mask
. In 1997, novelist Robert Rankin wrote an absurdist autobiography titled
Sprout Mask Replica
. The front jacket is a facsimile of the album cover, featuring a man in a fedora with a sprout face wearing a suit and tie with slogan buttons all over his jacket. The book is an elliptical tale filled with short anecdotes about Rankin’s mythical ancestors. While one group, the Crombies, eats metal, Rankin himself is portrayed as a man with the power of a chaos butterfly (an insect of transformation
out of “Pena”). Like Beefheart’s record, Rankin isn’t interested in telling a formal story. The narrative is told through many threads, some leading down paranoid trails to conspiracy theories. Rankin draws inspiration from the record by making the characters aware that they are in a book, just as Zappa and Beefheart consistently made the listeners aware that they were listening to a record. For an album that few people cared to listen to in 1969,
Trout Mask Replica
was finding its way, like a termite through wood, into the unconsciousness of the culture at large.

* * *

Over the years, while others were happily drinking from the same pond, the man who created it was getting no such sustenance. Paranoia was always a lethal fuel in the air. After
Trout Mask Replica
was released, Beefheart began unleashing hostility toward John French. It took root back when the group was still working on the record. Victor Hayden had invited Jeff Bruchell, a friend, to the house to watch the band rehearsals. “Don and Jeff would observe me practising for
Trout Mask
and Jeff would say, ‘I would love to do that,’” French recalled. “Don would say loudly enough for me to hear, ‘Yeah, and I bet you could, too.’” Not long after the album was finished, Bruchell was suddenly sitting in with the group and French was asked to “take a walk.” French did just that. He went to Wyoming to work on a cattle ranch only to soon discover, upon the album’s release, that he wasn’t credited on the record—despite all his invaluable contributions. (The CD has since corrected the historic revisionism.)