Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica (2 page)

BOOK: Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica
4.07Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

When I first met Brian Potts in 1964—a grade school classmate I knew only from a distance—he adamantly insisted that I come over and listen to Beatles records at his house.
When I told him that I had no interest in listening to music by four obnoxiously cute British guys in similar suits and cereal-bowl haircuts, he played me “It Won’t Be Long,” which opened
With the Beatles
with thunderous joy. I immediately shut up. Brian and I became, for a few years, inseparable friends. Much later, we even shared Dylan’s epic “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” from
Blonde on Blonde
. I remember both of us, wide-eyed twelve-year-olds, in dazed silence, trying to find suitable words to explain how such a poetically dense song could hold us for the whole side of an album. But that’s generally how we come to discover the music we fall in love with: the serendipity of friendship. There are other times, though, when music has a way of discovering you rather than the other way around. Unlike most pop music, it can connect with you in such an immediate and startling way that you ultimately have to catch up to it. The encounter does more than simply defy your expectations—it renders them inadequate to the occasion. So it was with Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band’s 1969 double-LP,
Trout Mask Replica
. As with the previously discovered records, it, too, was a friend who introduced me to it.

In 1972, I had been working at a Youth Centre in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada, a small industrial town where General Motors was the economic engine of the city. With very little cultural life going on and boredom always looming on the horizon, some kids just naturally turned to drugs. One of them was my friend Mike, a young speed dealer who sampled his own merchandise maybe a little too often. A few years earlier, Mike had lost part of his leg when, much to his horror, he couldn’t outrun a moving train. Now hiding a partial limp, he moved through life as if he were still within earshot of that
predatory caboose. One day, Mike came up to the Centre while I was on shift helping other youngsters find ways to get off drugs. It was pretty common for folks to just wander in and hang out and chat, while waiting to see what crisis might come through the door. Oddly enough, it was in this centre that Mike always seemed relaxed and friendly. Who knows? Maybe it was in this sanctuary that he felt no longer encumbered by his street identity as the speed dealer.

On this particular day, I was talking to a coworker about
Hot Rats
, a 1969 Frank Zappa album I had first heard a couple of summers earlier. I commented on how the record had opened up, for me, a world of fascinating sounds by providing a storehouse of musical technique. It was liberating, I suggested, to hear energetic music that so freely combined such vastly diverse styles. Suddenly, Mike piped up from across the room, “Have you ever heard
Trout Mask Replica
?” Others in the office chuckled, as if some joke were being cracked to challenge a title as ridiculous as
Hot Rats
. But I had actually heard of
Trout Mask
. In fact, I knew of Captain Beefheart. He sang the only song that wasn’t an instrumental on
Hot Rats
, a blistering blues track called “Willie the Pimp.” Under the searing melody of Sugarcane Harris’s violin and fuelled by Zappa’s blast furnace guitar, Beefheart introduced Willie with a deep growling snarl that suggested Howlin’ Wolf on a midnight prowl. “I’m a little pimp with my hair gassed back,” he announced with libidinal delight, “pair of khaki pants and my shoes shined black.” It’s a powerhouse performance, but it was a brief one, since the epic track was for the most part an instrumental showcase for Zappa’s dexterous guitar work.

Although “Willie the Pimp” served as an overwhelming introduction to Beefheart’s limitless power as a blues singer, I
was familiar with little else about him. A few months earlier, I had purchased a record called
Zapped
, a sampler anthology that Zappa’s record company had released featuring a number of artists signed to his Bizarre/Straight label. On this album, among tracks by Alice Cooper; a schizophrenic street busker named Wild Man Fischer; fifties hipster poet Lord Buckley; folkies Tim Buckley, Jerry Yester, and Judy Henske; the GTO’s (a female groupie band); plus Zappa’s own Mothers of Invention were two songs by Captain Beefheart (“The Blimp (mousetrapreplica)” and “Old Fart at Play”) from
Trout Mask Replica
.

Upon reading the liner notes on
Zapped
, I saw that Zappa had actually produced
Trout Mask
. “The Blimp (mousetrapreplica)” was a frenzied poetic recitation by a member of Beefheart’s Magic Band and recorded by Zappa over the telephone in the studio. He layered this delirious reading simultaneously overtop a repetitive bed of abstract jazz by the Mothers. “The Blimp” was a hilariously wild yarn of sexual terror cast in the famous soundscape of the Hindenberg disaster broadcast:

All the people stir
’n the girl’s knees tremble
’n run their hands over the blimp, the blimp.

By contrast, “Old Fart at Play” had Beefheart himself reading a luxuriantly textured sensual limerick:

Her stockings down caught dust ’n doughballs
She cracked ’er mouth glaze caught one eyelash
Rubbed ’er hands on ’er gorgeous gingham.

For over its two-minute length, the song evolved into an intangible story of a man being reborn in a “wooden fish-head.” Since the track was sandwiched between “Lucille Has Messed My Mind Up,” a straightforward R&B performance by ex-Mother Jeff Simmons (with Zappa providing some tasty blues licks on the guitar), and the Mothers’ own Kurt Weill–flavoured “Holiday in Berlin, Full Blown,” “Old Fart at Play” seemed more a musical segue on
Zapped
than a clue to what secrets
Trout Mask Replica
actually held.

In answer to Mike’s question, I told him that I knew a couple of tracks from the record, but that was it. He persevered, “Yeah, but have you heard the whole album?” I pleaded ignorance. “No. I haven’t even seen it, Mike,” I replied. “Well, I’ve got it,” he said as if he’d just revealed ownership of the Maltese Falcon. Being both curious and excited, I asked him if I could borrow it. “Borrow it?” he asked incredulously. “You can
have
it!” All eyes in the room suddenly looked to Mike as if he were privy to a long dark secret we all wanted in on. “I can’t listen to it, Courrier,” he said wincing at the very thought of hearing it. “It’s a horrible record! Noise, just nothing but noise. It makes me … nervous.” After a man has lost part of his leg to a moving train, one begins to quickly wonder what kind of music could possibly make him “nervous.” But I accepted his offer and took
Trout Mask Replica
off his hands.

When Mike delivered the record, I realized that I first needed to get past the front cover before I could ever come close to sampling the music. Some of Zappa’s album covers had been intimidating, too, but they were also so oddly amusing, so deliberately poking fun, that they became ultimately approachable. The front cover of
Trout Mask Replica
didn’t
seem funny at all. It was earnest rather than satirical. It exuded a quiet comfort about its own weirdness which just added to my discomfort looking at it. The back cover (featuring the refurbished Magic Band in their exotic apparel) merely confirmed my fears of what a hippie commune would look like once it had gone to seed. Their names were stranger than their looks. Someone named Zoot Horn Rollo was on glass-finger guitar and flute. I would later discover he was a young blues guitarist named Bill Harkleroad. (“Contrary to what was written on
Trout Mask Replica
, I never played flute with the band,” Harkleroad asserts today.) Antennae Jimmy Semens, who turned out to be Harkleroad’s friend Jeff Cotton, was listed as playing a steel-appendage guitar. The Mascara Snake, who was Beefheart’s cousin and also a painter, played bass clarinet and sang. (“He couldn’t play a lick but had a lot of attitude,” Harkleroad adds.) The bass player had the oddly quirky name of Rockette Morton (Beefheart: “What do you run on Rockette Morton? Say beans.” Morton: “I run on beans. I run on laser beans”). He turned out to be Mark Boston, another musical pal of Harkleroad’s. Oddly, there was no drummer credited. You certainly heard one once you played this record. There wasn’t anyone—anywhere—who got sounds like these from his drum kit. In time, I discovered his name was John French (who had earned the appropriate moniker Drumbo, a Disney pun), and he turned out to be a pivotal figure in the making of this music. Although uncredited in the liner notes, French is featured on the back cover lurking under the bridge beneath the rest of the band. So why was he was airbrushed (momentarily) out of history? It took years to find out.

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.

BOOK: Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica
4.07Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Shock Point by April Henry
Sparrow Migrations by Cari Noga
Freddie Ramos Takes Off by Jacqueline Jules
The Lantern by Deborah Lawrenson
Butter Safe Than Sorry by Tamar Myers
To Wed a Werewolf by Kryssie Fortune
Revival by Stephen King
Every Whispered Word by Karyn Monk
Alien Coffee by Carroll, John H.
Legacy by Jeanette Baker