Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica (6 page)

BOOK: Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica
4Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Charlie Parker changed jazz soloing by playing within the chords of the piece rather than within the melody. Beefheart & the Magic Band, however, performed music that reduced the melody to the individual sounds of the instruments, as if each were a piece of sculpture. “The best description [of
Trout Mask
] that I can come up with is to call it sound sculptures,” Harkleroad explained. “It was both polyphonic and polyrhythmic—with some repeated shapes. We would play in various time signatures, often at the same time. For instance, one part might be in 3/4 time while another was in 4/4 time. Only when they touched down together after twelve beats would we move on to the next section of the piece.… You’d hold on to your part for dear life against the thrust of what everybody else was doing.”

Many years ago, jazz trumpeter Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong, the great traditionalist, attended a rehearsal of Dizzy Gillespie’s group. Armstrong had once altered the art form of jazz by radically redefining the role of the soloist within the band. He was now the reluctant witness to the work of an inheritor. But this inheritor was a “be-bopper,” changing all the rules of a music that Armstrong once revolutionized. After hearing a mere sample of this radical new sound from Gillespie’s group, Armstrong quickly approached him. In a backhanded compliment from the past to the present, Satch told Dizzy, “You know, you have to know how to play pretty damn good before you can learn to play that bad.” In the years leading up to
Trout Mask Replica
, Beefheart and his group became pretty damn good themselves—before they learned to play that bad.

* * *

They may have been billed as Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band, but it was definitely Alex Snouffer’s group. For without Snouffer, it was doubtful that Don Van Vliet would have ever had opportunity—or even the desire—to be their lead singer. Vliet would later tell John French, “Alex was the dictator of the group—from his Prussian background—he came to me and told me, gave me an order, more or less, that I was going to sing in his band.” For the first few months in 1964, the group would hold their practices at Jerry Handley’s house where they would perform old blues songs and do Rolling Stones covers. Vic Mortensen would book their dates in the Lancaster area, while Snouffer would run the rehearsals, showing the individual musicians which parts to play and introducing them to their repertoire.

In April 1965, after performing a number of dances and Battle of the Bands contests, the group finally landed a show at the Teenage Fair, an annual rock event held at the Palladium in Hollywood. Besides taking them out of their usual desert digs, the gig provided a glimpse of their future. First of all, sixteen-year-old John French first encountered them at the show. “I was playing there in a surf band called the Maltesemen,” French recalled. “Our first performance was in a booth, and next to our booth was a band that seemed very strange to me.” The strange group he was encountering was an LA blues outfit called the Rising Sons. They featured a tall black singer named Taj Mahal, a bass player named Gary Marker, a bald drummer called Ed Cassidy (who would later join Spirit), and a brilliant slide guitarist known as Ry Cooder.

The great gospel singer Pop Staples had once said that Cooder’s playing had a way of haunting him. “[Cooder sent] shivers down my spine,” Staples explained. “[He] comes out with this old tune your parents taught you, and it [was] like going back in time.” Cooder played the blues like some shapeshifting musical alchemist, a crafty archaeologist whose records took you places that were seemingly long hidden from the rest of the world. Eventually, he would become one of the finest session men in demand. A self-taught guitarist, Cooder began his musical life transfixed by the blues music of Josh White. White’s version of the traditional folk ballad “House of the Rising Sun” had made a lasting impression on him, as it would also on Dave Van Ronk and Bob Dylan (who would later even steal Van Ronk’s arrangement in order to record it on his first record).

Most of Cooder’s teenage years were spent at an LA blues club called the Ash Grove. The club became his personal laboratory for experimentation, where he would learn the mandolin and the banjo, and play with a variety of people including singers Jackie De Shannon and Gary Davies. By 1964, he had already mastered the bottleneck blues guitar style that would, years later, become his stock in trade. It was during one of those occasions that Taj Mahal wandered into the Ash Grove in search of a kindred spirit and found one in Cooder. Before long, they formed the Rising Sons (in honor of Josh White) and began work on their first record. They would break up before that record would ever be finished, but not before their debut performance at the Teenage Fair. Their impact on Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band was about as indelible as Josh White’s was on Cooder. It didn’t go unnoticed by the
Rising Sons. “We were playing ‘Travelling Riverside Blues,’ and here’s this weird guy [Beefheart] with long hair and big bright baby blue eyes, wearing a big leather coat,” Sons’ bass player Gary Marker recalled. “On one of the breaks, I see him lean over and grab Doug [Moon] by the arm and he gets this really angry look on his face. He points at Cooder and he says, ‘There! That’s the shit I’m talkin’ about! That’s what I want you to play!’” Moon stood there with a terrified look, according to Marker, wondering just how the hell he was going to sound like Ry Cooder—since, even at seventeen, Cooder sounded as seasoned as he does today. At that moment, Beefheart started considering ways to entice Cooder into the Magic Band.

Another fortuitous meeting took place after the show. A promoter named Dorothy Heard had taken interest in the band and told them that she could hook them up with agent Leonard Grant. With Grant at the helm, she felt, the band would start getting jobs at various colleges and auditoriums. She was right. He got them gigs in the Whisky-a-Go-Go in both Los Angeles and Denver. Grant also signed the group to a two-single deal at A&M Records in 1966. But just before they could start recording, Vic Mortensen got his draft notice for duty in Vietnam. With their drummer now AWOL, Snouffer decided to switch from guitar to drums. As a replacement, they hired a new guitarist, Rich Hepner, from a Denver band called the Jags. Their first recording session was scheduled for Sunset Sound Recorders on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, where their producer was slated to be David Gates.

In retrospect, it may seem a deeply perverse joke that David Gates, later the vastly successful leader of the MOR
soft-rock group Bread (“Baby, I’m a Want You”), would have anything to do with a group as idiosyncratic as Beefheart’s. But, at that time, Gates was something of an adventurous producer, one eagerly seeking out distinct talent. He was also a great R&B fan with good taste. His favorite song just happened to be Bo Diddley’s mid-50s hit “Diddy Wah Diddy,” and he was dead right in figuring that it was a perfect tune for Beefheart to sing. He didn’t have much choice, in any case, since the band didn’t have much in the way of original material to record.

By 1966, Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band were playing the kind of electric blues music already having a huge revival in Britain. In the early part of the decade, white Brits such as Alexis Korner, John Mayall, the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, and, later, Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac and Cream built their careers doing cover tributes of their blues heroes. This included covering a vast catalogue of songs by Elmore James, Robert Johnson, John Lee Hooker, Slim Harpo, Muddy Waters, and Howlin’ Wolf. While in America, the home of these icons, white blues bands took a different approach to the music. Perhaps being a little too embarrassed to earnestly try and imitate their betters, they mixed the blues together with a very basic, more rough-edged rock sound. While doing so, they kept the blues rhythm, which was perfect for AM radio airplay, but it also stripped the music of its soul. Many bands like the Amboy Dukes (“Baby, Please Don’t Go”), Count Five (“Psychotic Reaction”), the Leaves (“Hey Joe”), Haunted (“125”), and the Standells (“Dirty Water”), found new life out of a blues hybrid that came to called “garage rock.”

At the time they recorded “Diddy Wah Diddy,”
Beefheart’s group superficially resembled a garage rock band, but Don’s powerhouse voice and nimble harp playing gave them a blues authenticity. Once again, credit David Gates, who kept the blues spirit alive by giving this jabbing song a grungy veneer. “[Gates] came up with the idea of plugging the bass directly through the board so he could control it better,” Jerry Handley explained. “I could see the glass in the booth shaking.” Since it was rare to hear a bass cranked up so high in the mix, Handley loved hearing that glass rattle. But so did Vliet, whose voice and harp tore through the song. Snouffer recalled Gates, like a field general, pushing Beefheart beyond himself. “I mean, he was telling Don, ‘I want high notes on the harp
here
,’” Snouffer remarked.

On first listen, “Diddy Wah Diddy” resembles “a freight train coming through your speakers,” just as Handley would remember it. With the distorted fuzz tone of his bass pulling us into the song, Beefheart starts wailing on his harp with the speed and fury of Sonny Boy Williamson:

I got a gal in Diddy Wah Diddy
Ain’t no town and it ain’t no city
She loves a man till it’s a pity
Crazy ’bout my gal in Diddy Wah Diddy.

He sings it with gusto and confidence. To augment the coarse blues/rock sound, Gates added a harpsichord on the bridge which gave the rough edges of the song a quaintly colourful palette. This powerful single debuted in April 1966, but it failed to chart—except in California, where DJ
Wolfman Jack heard a soulmate in the howl of Beefheart’s voice. The commercial failure of the song, though, lay not so much with the track itself as it did with its timing. Apparently, an East Coast outfit from Boston called the Remains had simultaneously released “Diddy Wah Diddy” as their first single. That version dominated radio airplay in the east, while Beefheart won the West Coast.

David Gates oversaw a number of Beefheart songs at the A&M sessions including the punchy “Frying Pan,” “Here I Am, I Always Am,” and “Who Do You Think You’re Fooling?” But he also decided to contribute a pop song himself called “Moonchild,” a tune he thought was “pretty out there.” Others, however, thought it was pretty out to lunch. While trying for an elliptically poetic effect (“Every time there’s a full moon up above / Then she’s out of this world”), Gates fashioned the kind of pop oddity that made Beefheart sound more like a spiritual cousin to Rod McKuen. “Well, let’s put it this way, [‘Moonchild’] was never our ‘cup of tea,’” Snouffer said diplomatically. Nevertheless, Gates decided to release it as their next single backed with the much superior “Frying Pan.” Not only did it flop, it created a huge dissension within the band. The argument led to the departure of Leonard Grant and guitarist Richard Hepner, forcing Alex Snouffer off the drum kit and back on guitar. But the failure of “Moonchild” did have one positive effect: Beefheart started writing more and more original material.

One of those new songs was an innovative psychedelic blues track called “Electricity”—and it placed the final nail in the group’s coffin at A&M Records. With the lyrics co-written by Herb Bermann, a poet/playwright Vliet had
recently met, “Electricity” diverted dramatically from the basic blues of “Diddy Wah Diddy.” When co-founder Jerry Moss heard lyrics like “Midnight cowboy stains in black reads dark roads without a map / To free-seeking electricity,” he lost his bearings. He immediately described the tune as “too negative” for the label—even deeming it too dangerous for his daughter’s mental health. A&M decided to drop the group from their roster. Since there was no immediate interest in the pure voltage of Beef-heart’s revamped poetic output, the band withdrew to lay the foundations of what would unwittingly evolve into
Trout Mask Replica
.

* * *

When the band retreated to Beefheart’s mother’s house in the fall of 1966, with no recording contract, they were in disarray. Yet Vliet seemed to thrive on the chaos within the group. For one thing, he began composing more songs that broke from the traditional blues and R&B forms. He began providing some new direction as well by slowly taking over the band from Snouffer. Since Beefheart wasn’t technically gifted, he initially conveyed his ideas by translating them through Doug Moon. “I would fall into a little riff maybe that I heard off a blues album, and Don would pick up on something: ‘Hey! Keep doing that, Man!’” Moon recalled. Vliet would then grab lyrics, written on scraps of paper, from a brown paper bag and compose songs based on Moon’s chord changes—just as he would a few years later on the acoustic blues track “China Pig” from
Trout Mask Replica
. He would devise a musical shorthand
by whistling and humming melodies, as Thelonious Monk often did with his ensembles, to teach the band the new songs. But he was becoming more and more obsessed with including Ry Cooder and finding ways to get rid of Doug Moon.

Beefheart began his little coup by bringing some new blood into the band. He called up John French and invited him to join. “Don called and said, ‘This is Don Vliet, do you know who this is?’ French remarked. “Then very hesitantly: ‘Do you wanna, ah—well, I was wondering if you’d like, ah—I was thinking—maybe you would like to blow drums with us?’” Vliet looked up Gary Marker from the Rising Sons, with whom he had now developed a stronger friendship after the Teenage Fair gig. It was Marker, a former jazz player, who introduced him to the modern jazz of Ornette Coleman and Roland Kirk. Besides inspiring Beefheart’s own interest in the saxophone, the exposure to modern jazz helped influence many of the conceptual ideas found on
Trout Mask
.

What began to distinguish the new songs from the old, though, was the increasing presence of marijuana and hallucinogens, which were introduced into the mix by Beefheart’s cousin Victor Hayden, a long-haired urchin, who would later be dubbed the Mascara Snake on
Trout Mask Replica
. Since grass is a very social drug, it encouraged the group to work together, even if their rehearsals resembled an ad hoc pot party. The material naturally started to grow more strangely abstract and complex, with psychedelic overtones. “Autumn’s Child,” for example, also co-written with Herb Bermann, was an early blueprint for many of the songs on
Trout Mask Replica
. Once again
invoking the image of the fish out of school seeking personal freedom, Beefheart sings:

BOOK: Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica
4Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

The Sweetheart by Angelina Mirabella
The Odds by Kathleen George
Vision Quest by A.F. Henley; Kelly Wyre
Amok and Other Stories by Stefan Zweig
Babel No More by Michael Erard
EPIC WIN FOR ANONYMOUS by Stryker, Cole