Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica (3 page)

This book is for him.

Everybody hears my music, but the thing is, it’s a matter of whether they want to or not. I don’t know how people can say they don’t hear … like that [car] horn, when that horn is there. That’s what gets me. What the hell are they doing, man? What are they doing? I mean, people must know they’re wrong. They must know some of the things they’re doing are so far back that a train don’t go there.

—Don Van Vliet, “Captain Beefheart
Pulls a Hat Out of His Rabbit”

Trout Mask Replica
is an album so assured in its isolated world-view that no matter how much it might alienate potential listeners, it still demands to be heard—on its own terms. Yet unlike most commercial pop, Beefheart doesn’t write songs to seduce an audience. We’re not asked to identify with him in
this music because his songs aren’t a conventional baring of the artist’s soul. Beefheart invites us to experience
Trout Mask Replica
, rather than telling us what to experience. So whoever you choose to share this strident and peculiar record with, you’re always going to be on your own with it. Which is why
Trout Mask Replica
embodied the punk aesthetic eight years before it exploded in the UK with the Sex Pistols. If the 60s hippie culture was clannish, punks were solitary. “Punks were self-consciously outsiders in school and at work,” critic Greil Marcus told Geoff Pevere of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “They picked things to like that nobody else did. They dressed differently, talked differently, and they weren’t joiners.”
Trout Mask
would quite naturally inspire countless other artists—from the Clash to P.J. Harvey—in finding their own sound, their own voice—to walk comfortably alone in the world. “If you listen to it, you will find a world of voices speaking to you from all directions,” Marcus explained. “You might feel both exhilarated and completely lost.” Perhaps it was this very quality of being lost that made Mike feel so “nervous” about
Trout Mask
. The record didn’t provide a map to guide him in finding his way back into the larger world again, the way most great pop music can. This album was about discovering yourself as an alien, about being as different as Mike once felt minus part of his leg. Beefheart’s utopia wasn’t borne out of the real world, a world that Mike had wished himself to be part of again. Beefheart’s utopia is the true definition of the word—nowhere—a desert island of the mind.

Curiously, a few years after Mike handed me the
Trout Mask Replica
album, the record became part of a particular desert island study among music critics: What album would you take with you if you were isolated on a desert island? It’s
always been a tempting question, essentially a popular party staple which allows music critics a casual forum to defend their tastes, test the wits of others, plus brag about rare records that nobody but them gives a damn about. The idea is also a bit ridiculous. (What critic would ever want to be isolated on a desert island with no access to concerts, free CDs, records, or even an outlet to express his or her persuasive views?) After all, isn’t music, even in the current age of iPods, still best enjoyed in a communal environment? A desert island seems to negate the whole purpose of music. It denies music an audience, save for that one lone fan, to test its true value. Yet this question became the subject of a 1979 book called
Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island
, in which twenty prominent American rock critics were asked by fellow scribe Greil Marcus to contribute an essay in response to this curious (and appetizing) request.

The concept of the desert island was intended to be a purely metaphorical one. But was it? In his introduction to
Stranded
, Marcus comments, “When I began to call up people I thought would be interested and asked them that question, asked them to contribute, the response was enthusiastic, but in many cases for a reason I hadn’t anticipated. ‘A great idea,’ said one person after another. ‘I feel like I’ve been living on a desert island for years.’” A remark like that can lead a reader to think that, included in
Stranded
, there will be essays about music that can only be nurtured in isolation, in the mind and tastes of the writer. Upon looking through some of the selections, though, the desert island records invited more of a crowd than many of these writers thought. For example, Simon Frith, a former columnist for
Creem
and
Melody Maker
, decided to bring along
Beggar’s Banquet
(1968), the Rolling
Stones’ exquisitely popular tribute to country blues—hardly a record you could imagine wanting to hear alone. M. Mark, the former arts editor of the
Village Voice
, provided a fascinating overview of the mystically dark Celtic poetry of Van Morrison. This brooding Belfast Cowboy with his wailing brogue certainly wasn’t a voice made for a desert island. The late Lester Bangs, who described how Morrison’s
Astral Weeks
(1968) actually pulled him
out
of the painful isolation of a horrible year, makes the opposite argument of the book.

Most of the artists cited—whether it was Tom Smucker on the glorious gospel recordings of Thomas A. Dorsey or Kit Rachlis on the hauntingly lonely sound of Neil Young’s voice—were people that ultimately did reach (and intended to reach) a larger audience. Even if their work originated from a private, sometimes isolated pain (like Young), their records continued to exist because their purpose was to create a bridge from those desert islands to a broader civilization—where anxious ears were yearning to listen to them. Most of the essays were private musings by intelligent critics eloquently championing their favorite music. (Since he was the editor, Greil Marcus actually got to cheat and bring most of his own record collection to the island.)

The only essay in the book that, for me, made a convincing argument was Langdon Winner’s on
Trout Mask Replica
. Winner, formerly a political theorist, had written extensively about rock and roll for a variety of music magazines. He instinctively knew that this record was not one that was shaped for popular tastes, or one that an audience would (or could) quickly embrace. He easily recognized that this is an album which actually forces the desert island experience on a listener—whether the listener wanted to retreat to one or not.
He realized that
Trout Mask
was an endurance test for most listeners and it was a record that strongly divided and confounded more people perhaps than any other pop album. It may indeed be this very attribute that made
Trout Mask
such an inspired choice for a desert island disc, for it was conjured in that island’s sequestered spirit long before the listener took the journey there. “One reason … that
Trout Mask Replica
would be my personal choice for a desert island is that a desert island is possibly the only place where I could play the record without being asked by friends and neighbors to take the damned thing off,” Winner wrote.
Trout Mask Replica
, for Winner, provided a very succinct argument for desert island listening. “Created in isolation by a renegade artist/genius/madman and his band of unquestioning disciples, hermetic almost to the point of catatonia, yet challenging in every moment of its seventy-nine-minute duration,
Trout Mask
is a record uniquely suited to years and years of isolated listening,” Winner further explained.

Trout Mask Replica
earned its desert island exile because it has a way of spurning simple, or easy categorization. Throughout its twenty-eight tracks, the album mixes and combines various genres of music, including Delta blues, free jazz and expressionist lyricism, and does it at the speed of a Cuisinart. The record is a scrapbook collection of songs and poems, impishly acted out with Dadaist abandon and jack-in-the-box hijinks, performed with jagged rhythms and sharp conflicting atonal melodies. Ultimately, the record comes to raise important questions about just what constitutes musical entertainment and what an audience’s relationship might be to it. “People like to hear music in tune because they hear it in tune all the time,” Beefheart once told Robert Carey of the
New York Rocker
. “I tried to break that all down on
Trout Mask Replica
. I made it all out of focus.” It may be out of focus, but the music is never blurry.

According to Winner, Beefheart’s most radical move was removing from his songs the security of harmony (“the mother’s heartbeat,” according to Beefheart), where we traditionally seek a warm spot in the songs we come to love. “Beefheart’s music offers none of the qualities of a ‘good’ record; engaging melodies; a solid, interesting groove; poignant hook lines; and an intelligible reflection of the life of the listener,” Winner explained. “If the purpose of a phonograph record is to soothe us, to provide a beat for dancing, a pulse for making love, a set of themes to reassure us in the joys and troubles of life’s daily commerce, then
Trout Mask
fails utterly.… But if a record is legitimate in trying to overthrow our somnambulistic habits of hearing, seeing, and touching things, if it is valid in seeking to jolt our sensibilities and restructure the way we experience music and everything else, then Beefheart’s strange collection of songs begins to make sense.”

The songs themselves, though, are an odd lot in which to try and make sense. There may be no lulling melodies to draw us into the musical canvas of
Trout Mask
, but that doesn’t mean that melodies don’t exist. It’s just that these spiky and jagged themes are quickly gone before we can catch them on first listen. The fleeting let’s-try-it-on inventiveness of the compositions, in fact, comes across with a shocking ebullience. “It was a little like throwing a bomb,” is how Tim Page, the former music critic at the
Washington Post
, described the initial impact of this album:

From the moment the phonograph needle settled into a Beefheart groove … everything changed. A crunching dissonance rent the air. Complicated time signatures and opaque poetry upset polite conversation and rattled the Mateus rose. Beefheart’s roar of purest gravel and the untrammelled violence of the rhythms sent resident hippies into bummers; lovers could find no slow dances; young professors would sniff around the turntable, scrutinize the spinning disc, pronounce the music “Um … interesting,” and then move as far away from the loudspeakers as possible. Meanwhile, a small but significant counterforce of Beefheart fans would surround the captured stereo, beaming with anarchic triumph.

Quoting composer Charles Wuorinen on Arnold Schoenberg’s equally demanding
Pierrot Lunaire
, Page said that listening to
Trout Mask
is “rather like trying to befriend a porcupine.” With “laughing-gas silliness aplenty,” the album illustrated, for Page, the way Beefheart explored “the interface of two aesthetics that had never before been mated: namely, the heartfelt emotionalism of rhythm and blues and the cool celebration of high surrealism.” That’s a pretty good description of the bomb that Page claims had been hurled at listeners. But the record is also a mating of two other sources seldom acknowledged: the world of abstract expressionist painting and the urban blues (“Jackson Pollock trying to play like John Lee Hooker,” is how Magic Band guitarist Bill Harkleroad accurately described the music to David Bowman of
Salon
).

Unlike many of the jazz artists and critics of the late 50s, rock fans (and rock critics) of the 60s and 70s seldom delved
very far into the visual art world. “Music was always more accessible than art,” said art critic Roberto Ohrt about rock audiences. “[The 70s] was a generation that regarded painting, in particular, as anachronistic, outworn, even decadent. Both concert goers and record collectors accepted and practised a degree of musical specialisation that outsiders often found positively grotesque, while any comparable degree of fanaticism applied to painting or to art in general was dismissed out of hand.” Audiences may not have grasped just how much Beefheart (an abstract expressionist painter himself) drew upon that world in creating
Trout Mask Replica
. He treated music no differently than the way abstract expressionist painters, like Arshile Gorky or Jean Dubuffet, treated paint. Beefheart was after, in sound, the immediate sensation of musical color explosively hitting a canvas. The rock audience, largely unfamiliar with abstract art, couldn’t truly account for the expressionism in Beefheart’s record, since there was nothing in the pop music world to compare it to.

The sensibility at work in
Trout Mask
can also be tied to early twentieth century Dadaist sound poets like Hugo Ball, who mesmerized—and shocked—audiences in Zurich at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916. “I shall be reading poems that are meant to dispense with conventional language, no less, and have done with it,” Ball wrote in the
Dada Manifesto
. “I don’t want words that other people have invented … I want my own stuff, my own rhythm, and vowels and consonants too, matching the rhythm and all my own. If this pulsation is seven yards long, I want words that are seven yards long.” Like Ball, Beefheart chose to dispense with conventional language. He hypnotically tore into the syllables and consonants of his lyrics in quest of that pulsation. But unlike Ball, who
was burdened by the solemn mysticism of Catholicism, Beefheart takes off—guilt-free—into the vapours by spinning yarns and springing puns. Just listen to a wildly playful song like “My Human Gets Me Blues” (“I knew you were under duress / I knew you were under yer dress”), where he subliminally channels poet Gregory Corso, who similarly got caught up in conceptual wordplay.

Although
Trout Mask Replica
is generally considered a landmark avant-garde rock record, it’s essential to note that Beefheart and his group didn’t set out to make an Art Statement—like the Dadaists. Declarations always have a clearly defined purpose, a political intent that fixes them in time. It makes for easy explanations and pigeonholing, too. For example, when Lou Reed made
Metal Machine Music
(1975), a two-record assault featuring nothing but sonic feedback, he clearly intended to outrage fans and annoy his record company.
Trout Mask
doesn’t set out to deliberately anger anyone, even if it ultimately does, because Beefheart sincerely wants to entertain us. The record is also not in the adventurous cast of filmmaker Stan Brakhage, who decorated the film frame in
Mothlight
(1963) by pasting moth’s wings onto film stock and then running it through an optical printer therefore making us aware of cinema’s tactile qualities. Nor is Beefheart’s record in the same world as Andy Warhol, when he extended the epic form of filmmaking in the somnambulistic
Empire
(1965), where we lay witness to a static shot of the Empire State Building for twenty-four-hours. Beefheart’s effort is the exact opposite of minimalist art, it’s as maximalist as music can get. Yet what ultimately makes
Trout Mask
a bigger artistic challenge than any of those other departures from convention is that, while it effortlessly tears apart the
conventions of songwriting, it attempts it within the commercial world of pop. “I thought
Trout Mask Replica
was a very commercial album,” Beefheart told Nick Kent of
New Musical Express
in 1974. “There was a lot of humour on that album that I thought people would pick up on.” The lyrics, in particular, are written with such polymorphous glee and wit (“A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast ’n’ bulbous. Got me?” is but one sample) that the record overturns any avant-garde solemnity. But the rock audience was still generally deaf to it. Defiantly original,
Trout Mask Replica
is a declaration of the American imagination that speaks in an unknown language, not fully comprehended, yet spoken candidly without fear of recrimination.