Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica (17 page)

His departure wasn’t long lasting though. In the fall of
1969, Bruchell and Jeff Cotton got into an ugly fight leading to Cotton suffering some broken ribs. By this time, Cotton had enough and left the group. But it wasn’t just the broken bones that prompted his departure, it was Beefheart’s consistent behaviour of railing against the group. Bruchell also abandoned ship, leaving Bill Harkleroad as the new music director. In the spring of 1970, French was invited back into the group. Upon arriving, he discovered that Beefheart had hired Art Tripp, Zappa’s former percussionist in the Mothers. Tripp introduced the marimba to the group (his instrument of choice in the Mothers of Invention); French strolled right back to his drum kit. Once more, French picked up the practice of transcribing Beefheart’s whistling and humming for the group’s follow up album,
Lick My Decals Off, Baby
(1970). Initially, Dick Kunc was involved engineering the album. After making one small suggestion, though, Beefheart smelled betrayal. Kunc was fired, never to return. The record itself was a more refined version of
Trout Mask
, with Tripp’s marimba providing contrapuntal swing to contrast to French’s polyphonic drumming.

After completing the production on
Trout Mask
, Zappa was finishing up his second solo album,
Hot Rats
, which was largely an instrumental record. He had Beefheart sing the epic blues song “Willie the Pimp.” In the fall of 1969, before John French returned, Zappa served as road manager for Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band when they attended the Amougies Pop Festival in Belgium to perform alongside the Soft Machine, Pink Floyd, and jazz saxophonist Archie Shepp. When they returned, Beefheart followed up
Lick My Decals Off, Baby
with the dirgelike
The Spotlight Kid
(1972). It was while working on
Clear Spot
later in 1972 that Beefheart decided
to unload his barrage of invective on Zappa. Was it jealousy? Perhaps. Zappa was about to launch another record label called DiscReet, after Bizarre/Straight was dropped by Warner Brothers. Where Zappa’s notoriety was growing in the 70s, Beefheart was becoming a cult figure. The hard work the group put into the radiant
Clear Spot
, which was a streamlined version of Beefheart’s music (without losing any of its shimmering beauty), was a commercial disappointment, charting at number 191.

Now desperate, Beefheart started an ill-advised attempt to go commercial. He signed a contract with Mercury Records in 1974 (Virgin in the UK), with a manager, Andy DiMartino, programming him to sell out. Beefheart’s first album on Mercury was
Unconditionally Guaranteed
, a record bereft of any magic. Featuring conventional jazz/pop arrangements, Beefheart’s growling voice was buried in the mix. The cover art was as hopeless as the music: Beefheart eagerly grabbing a fistful of money. Did he really believe that he’d finally hit the big time? Beefheart sounded anything but big; his attempt to be a common pop crooner made him sound ridiculously fake.
Unconditionally Guaranteed
charted even worse than
Clear Spot
. The original Magic Band members were naturally appalled. They decided immediately to leave the group. At which point, Beefheart’s audience started to abandon him as well, which made him angrier. When challenged, he would tell everyone that he had a right to win a Grammy. The different fish now wanted to be a common trout.

Unconditionally Guaranteed
was followed by
Bluejeans & Moonbeams
(1974), another lacklustre effort with an anonymous studio band backing him. With his career almost over, he once again contacted Frank Zappa. After apologizing for
all the insults, Beefheart was asked if he wanted to join the fall rehearsals for Zappa’s band. He showed up just before the group’s Halloween shows, but he flunked the audition because he couldn’t fit into Zappa’s airtight rhythm section. By the spring of 1975, though, Beefheart found his rhythm and nailed a spot in the band before their first gig at Pomona College in Claremont on April 11th. He toured the US with the group for the entire spring. When the band arrived in Austin, Texas, at the Armadillo for two nights, on May 20 and 21, 1975, they recorded what was to be the next Zappa album,
Bongo Fury
. It became something of a collaboration.
Bongo Fury
was basically an affectionate and humorous memoir about their early friendship. They traded songs and anecdotes and exchanged experiences. Without ever once getting maudlin, they reminisced about their early days in Lancaster. But it was shortlived.
Bongo Fury
would be the last collaboration between Zappa and Beefheart.

Although Captain Beefheart’s career was once again revitalized thanks to the
Bongo Fury
tour, his next album,
Bat Chain Puller
, would become a casualty of a vicious lawsuit between Zappa and his former manager, Herb Cohen. Beefheart’s record was initially to be released on Zappa’s DiscReet label. In talking to the press, Zappa considered
Bat Chain Puller
to be “[Beefheart’s] best album since
Trout Mask Replica
.” Once again, Beefheart had found his true voice. But after getting caught in the legal crossfire,
Bat Chain Puller
was never issued (although some songs would be rerecorded and put out on Beefheart’s next three albums on Virgin). The clash, though, brought on the final falling-out between Zappa and Beefheart. When Zappa eventually gained possession of the
Bat Chain Puller
tapes from Cohen in 1982, Beefheart and
Magic Band guitarist Gary Lucas visited Zappa with the intent of using outtakes from that session to fill out Beefheart’s latest album,
Ice Cream for Crow
.

According to Lucas, Zappa had changed his mind about handing over the tapes. He told Lucas that he thought there might be a higher market in “Beefheartland” if the set was left intact. Zappa instead offered a song from the
Bongo Fury
tour, written by Zappa but sung by Beefheart, called “The Torture Never Stops.” While Lucas tried in vain to negotiate with Zappa, a depressed Beefheart started accompanying their arguing with his sarcastic poem about the record business, called “There Ain’t No Santa Claus on the Evening Stage.” Lucas ultimately refused “The Torture Never Stops,” but the torture didn’t end. Zappa abruptly concluded the conversation, went back to work, and he never worked with Beefheart again. Not long after the release of
Ice Cream for Crow
in 1982, Beefheart had had enough of recording. He decided to retire from the music business. Exhausted from living out a desert island of the mind, he soon retreated to a real one, with his wife Jan, to live in a trailer and paint. There would be occasional art shows throughout the United States, but there would be no more songs from the Captain.

As for the personal dispute between him and Zappa, it finally did reach a resolution in 1993, while Zappa was dying of prostate cancer. If their friendship had begun with some harmless musical mischief at the expense of a Webcor reel-to-reel, it had been the business of music that tore them apart. Not surprisingly, music would once again become a connecting link between these two iconoclasts in the end. I read somewhere that, in their final conversation, it wasn’t apologies or regrets that were exchanged. After all, what words could
heal—or even change—the polar dynamics of both men? Over the phone, they did what best friends who love music always do. They played each other their old favorite records, in the end, sharing their common language.

Despite the good music that followed
Trout Mask
, there was really nowhere further for Captain Beefheart to go. Once you break down walls and find your freedom, you start to erect other walls to protect it. You end up ultimately losing the freedom you’ve won. None of the albums after
Trout Mask
inspired the ongoing debate that still rages over this particular record. Yet nearly forty years later,
Trout Mask Replica
is still in print, having sold to this date over 80,000 copies. But it will always be a lonely masterpiece, a record that forever carries the aura of the desert island within its grooves. As such, it will likely never inspire an intimate moment between friends, or become a touchstone for lovers. But one thing
Trout Mask
certainly isn’t is negligible.

When Gertrude Stein recited what history teaches, she was taking into account that history isn’t what we prefer it to be. It simply is. For some,
Trout Mask Replica
is the worst record ever made. For others, a neglected masterpiece. History records both views and backs them up. But it doesn’t settle a thing. This album creates the kind of fuss that leads people to ask questions about what defines great music. It’s what makes
Trout Mask
more significant than the instant and disposable pop records that dominate the charts and soon disappear.

As music,
Trout Mask Replica
will continue to resonate because it forces us to hear things that can change our way of listening. In the current turbulent political climate, it’s become desirable to have our views consistently confirmed, rather
than letting ourselves be truly informed. We prefer seeking security in the warm bosom of our own personal values and beliefs to expanding our ways of seeing and hearing into areas beyond personal taste. “The voice of Don Van Vliet, alias Captain Beefheart, was a signal and a proof that something else is possible—that nothing has to stay the way it is,” art critic Roberto Ohrt wrote about the lasting quality of
Trout Mask Replica
. “His music came out of a space in which the power of existing laws was broken. It expanded the framework of the imaginable, for the members of a generation whose own attitudes and ideas embodied a radical aspiration, but who had let their own lives be defined by a set of descriptions and signs over which they had virtually no control.”

As the 60s came to a close, there were two unrelated events that had that power to break those existing laws. I like to believe that, in some conceptual way, they mirrored each other. In the same summer month that
Trout Mask Replica
was released, a celebrated astronaut named Neil Armstrong stepped where no other man had ever walked before—on another desert island known as the moon. As Armstrong took his one small step for mankind, viewers marvelled at the brave new world unfolding before them. Meanwhile, a group of oddball musicians were about to deliver, unto an unsuspecting public, an album that just as easily could have come from Mars. Everyone drinks from the same pond indeed.

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