Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica (7 page)

Harvest moon be nimble
Apples bob and tremble
Fish pond streaks love kind
Found the child I had to find.

Other unusual items emerged, like “Plastic Factory,” which Don co-wrote with Jerry Handley and which evoked the ecological concerns later found on
Trout Mask
’s “Ant Man Bee”:

Bee ’n flower growin’
Boy ’n girl are glowin’
Fac’trys no place for me
Boss man let me be.

Other R&B-flavoured tracks like “Call on Me” and “I’m Glad” were being considered for the group’s first record—whenever they could find an interested label. Soon all of this would be remedied.

After many band meetings, Beefheart insisted that the group move to LA once they were dropped by A&M. There was good reason for the maneuver. The Magic Band had drawn interest from Bob Krasnow, the California head of Kama Sutra Records. Krasnow had been a huge fan of “Diddy Wah Diddy” and was hoping to sign Beefheart to Kama Sutra’s new subsidiary, Buddha Records. But not all the band members saw light at the end of this tunnel. “A lot of problems started to surface then,” Doug Moon
remembered. “People were doing drugs and one thing or another. When we left Lancaster we got into the influence of LA—all the people and stuff down there—and it got crazy. Don was listening to everybody. And everybody had their own opinion. The band, at some point in there, lost its soul.” Whether the group was losing its soul was up for debate, but they were certainly about to lose Moon, who was being singled out for “incompetence” by the Captain. Although Moon was a perfectly competent player, Beefheart was desperate to squeeze Cooder into the group. When it became clear to Gary Marker that Moon was being prepped for departure, he sought out his old band-mate. Marker convinced Cooder that, even though in name it was Captain Beefheart & his Magic Band, it could easily be the Ry Cooder Group.

It turned out that Krasnow was just as eager as Beefheart to have Cooder in the Magic Band. He even called up Cooder and told him that Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band were “going to be the biggest thing since the Beatles, bigger than the Beatles.” The hyperbole was definitely enticing to Cooder, but it didn’t alleviate his uneasiness. Cooder had already witnessed Doug Moon’s emotional exhaustion from all the abuse he was taking from Don Van Vliet. After figuring that he shared many similar musical ideas with Beefheart, though, he relented anyway and joined the group. On Cooder’s first day at rehearsals, he saw Moon’s firing firsthand. “[Van Vliet said,] ‘Well, I’ll tell you what we’re doing and what we’re not doing,” Cooder recalled. Pointing at Moon, Beefheart continued his tirade. “‘Get outta here, Doug, just get outta here. You’re no use to us now.’” To paraphrase Beefheart
biographer Mike Barnes, the hornet’s nest was being stirred.

* * *

When Doug Moon complained that the group was losing its soul, what he was perhaps perceiving was the dissolution of the band as a collaborative entity. Beefheart’s quest to find democratic freedom in his art found him becoming something of an authoritarian to do it. The path to
Trout Mask Replica
was not outlined by the quixotic zeal of a group breaking all the rules to find themselves. It was etched by one man’s narrow will to achieve his own artistic liberation. Within that ambiguous quest, casualties were certain. Since Alex Snouffer’s guitar playing had waned during his stint as the group’s drummer, Don Van Vliet was able to gain complete control of the band when Ry Cooder came onboard. Doug Moon’s firing would turn out to be moot anyway. He didn’t see any place for himself on the band’s first record,
Safe as Milk
. “By the time the album finally came out, those songs had evolved to become a little bit more avant-garde and a little bit more hinting at things to come in Don’s later albums,” Moon explained to Elaine Shepherd of the BBC in 1995. “That was the transitional period and that’s why I left, because of those influences. I did not have that calling. When it got a little too far out, a little too weird, unsyncopated and bizarre and avant-garde, it just did not work with me.”

When
Safe as Milk
was released in September 1967, it was clear to anyone who heard it that Beefheart’s music had begun to evolve dramatically from the basic blues style in which it began. They started doing the new record in
Sunset Sound, an eight-track studio, with Gary Marker engineering and Richard Perry, who would later produce a bevy of artists including Ringo Starr, Barbara Streisand, Harry Nilsson, and Burton Cummings, at the helm. Since Perry felt more comfortable working in a four-track setup, they moved to RCA Studios. Unfortunately, the change affected the overall sound of the album, which Jerry Handling especially thought made it less forceful than their single, “Diddy Wah Diddy.” What it lacked in force, however, it made up in pure texture.

Out of the quiet, Ry Cooder’s slide calls out to Beefheart, who answers in the opening blues tune, “Sure ’Nuff ’N Yes I Do.” Based on Muddy Waters’ “Rollin’ & Tumblin’,” Beefheart’s lyrics for “Sure ’Nuff” point toward a more obscure American landscape than the Waters original. “I was born in the desert,” Beefheart moans over the whine of Cooder’s slide, “came up from New Orleans.” After fusing his own birthplace with that of jazz and blues, Beefheart quickly reaches for the ethereal. “Came upon a tornado, saw light in the sky,” he sings. “I went around all day with the moon stickin’ in my eye.” From there, the song gallops into an aggressive prowl filled with sexual adventure. “Got the time to teach ya now,” Beefheart snears. “Bet you’ll learn some too.” From there, the record broadens its scope from the psychedelia of “Zig Zag Wanderer,” the R&B doo-wop of “Call on Me,” to the light pop of “Yellow Brick Road.” In a sense, the record is a map of Beefheart’s intent to transform varied blues and R&B forms, just as Frank Zappa’s debut,
Freak Out!
did a year earlier.

While “Sure ’Nuff ’N Yes I Do” has the snake moan
sound of Beefheart’s early material, there was nothing quite like the theremin-driven psychedelic blues of “Electricity.” The theremin was the world’s first electronic instrument, a precursor to the moog synthesizer, created by the Russian emigré Leon Theremin shortly after the turn of the twentieth century. It is the only electronic instrument that is played without ever being physically touched. The pitches are played electronically by slowly moving your hand over the base of the instrument. In the 20s and 30s, Theremin had launched an orchestra of theremin players performing a wide repertoire of nineteenth-century romantic music. But after he was mysteriously kidnapped by Russian government officials and disappeared, the theremin fell into the hands of avant-garde musicians and film composers who heard a more sinister world lurking in its unearthly wailing. Composer Miklos Rozsa, for instance, would use the theremin to indicate Gregory Peck’s repressed fears in Alfred Hitchcock’s
Spellbound
(1945). Rozsa would repeat the exercise using the theremin to depict Ray Milland’s alcoholic delusions in
The Lost Weekend
(1945). In the 1951 science-fiction classic,
The Day the Earth Stood Still
, Bernard Herrmann would impart an otherworldly atmosphere by using it to provide ominous color to Klaatu’s robot, Gort. Brian Wilson, in the Beach Boys’ 1966 single “Good Vibrations,” briefly returned the theremin to its more romantic origins, until Beefheart brought it back to the realm of spooky foreboding.

The theremin became part of “Electricity” actually by chance. Beefheart originally wanted Gary Marker to use the sound of a circular saw to create the buzz under his phrasing of EEE-LECC-TRI-CITTYYY, but it didn’t mix
too well. “His instincts were right but the technology wasn’t there at the time,” Marker explained. The theremin was used to duplicate the buzzing sound. There was nothing to duplicate the power of Beefheart’s voice, though, when he blew out a $1,200 Telefunken microphone during the recording of his vocals. As for the syncopated drum part in “Electricity,” Beefheart sang the rhythm guitar parts for John French to translate into the percussion section. This was a move that anticipated the style of arranging both men used on
Trout Mask
. If the white soul balladry of “Call on Me” was Beefheart at his most seductive, the Indian-influenced rhythms of “Abba Zaba” had him at his most transfixing—even if the song’s subject matter concerned nothing more exotic than a peanut bar that features a baboon logo on the wrapper. According to Alex Snouffer, the guitar melody was lifted from a sitar lick heard on one of Ravi Shankar’s album.

Despite the broad musical scope of
Safe as Milk
, the sessions were hardly seamless. While Alex Snouffer, Ry Cooder, Jerry Handley, and John French were well rehearsed, seasoned musicians, Beefheart was scattered as if he were perpetually caught in a windstorm. The windstorm, though, was of his own making, brought on by his trips on LSD which, according to French, led to acute hypochondria. “What followed were constant requests from Don to ‘feel my heart’ and ‘check my pulse,’” French explained. “[I]t became a tedious, wearing, and stressful daily routine for the entire band.” French had to organize Beefheart’s lyrics, which he still kept on scrap pieces of paper. “[A]s I would work on one song, I’d put them in order on the floor and then write them down by looking at
the scraps on the floor,” he recalled. Since French didn’t possess a typewriter, he’d print them out by hand. Richard Perry would then suggest to Beefheart where in the song each lyric would be sung.

Although the mixing of
Safe as Milk
became a long, laborious process, it resulted in a pop album that was filled with quick bursts of chimerical inspiration. Unlike many of the contemporary psychedelic records, ones that conceded to the trends of the moment,
Safe as Milk
challenged all others to keep up. Buddha Records, in particular, was hoping they could get some mileage out of Beefheart’s success by having the group play the Monterey Pop Festival that summer in 1967. It’s fascinating to consider just how Beefheart’s band would have fit into a lineup that included the Byrds, the Mamas and Papas, Ravi Shankar, Janis Joplin, Otis Redding, the Who, and the landmark performance by Jimi Hendrix. However, a gig at a “Love-In” at Mt. Tamalpais in San Francisco changed all of that. Dressed in the natty suits of gangsters, rather than the rustic garb of hippies, they mounted a stage in a show they shared with Tim Buckley, Jefferson Airplane, and the Byrds. But Beefheart was on edge to begin with, feeling the anxiety of performing in front of a large audience, as well as tripping from heavy LSD usage. They started to play “Electricity,” the second song in their set, when Beefheart stopped in middle of the song. “He just froze, turned, and walked off the back of the ten-foot stage, falling on top of [Bob] Krasnow,” John French recalled. Once again, lost in a whirlpool, the omnipresent image of the fish reemerged to cause both panic and dread. Vliet had looked down at a girl in the audience during the song and watched as she turned
into a vertebrate with gills and bubbles coming out of her mouth. Beefheart’s reaction was to walk right off the stage with the hope that just maybe she’d catch him. She didn’t—and the show ended.

Immediately after the performance, Ry Cooder decided to walk right out of the band. French tried to persuade him to stay until after the Monterey gig, but Cooder was exasperated by all the nonsense, not to mention the anxiety generated within the group by Don Van Vliet. “He’s a Nazi,” Cooder remarked. “It makes you feel like Anne Frank to be around him.” Thanks to Beefheart’s meltdown, the Monterey Pop Festival was not only definitely out, they had to scramble to find a new replacement for Cooder. Beefheart ultimately chose Jeff Cotton to be their new lead guitarist, alongside Snouffer, in October 1967. Cotton was basically a blues player who had once played with John French in Blues in a Bottle. He was an experimentalist eager to try new approaches to the genre. Cotton quickly moved into the band’s digs in Laurel Canyon to begin work on what was to be the group’s biggest gamble.

It Comes to You in a Plain Brown Wrapper
was conceived as a complete reimagining of the American blues to be spread out over two records. With Bob Krasnow at the production desk, the group began recording sessions in TTG studios in Hollywood. On this record, Beefheart wanted to present a boldly new improvisational music integrating the Delta blues sound with the improvisational textures of modern jazz. The first recordings began as a series of long blues jams, slowly building songs like the astonishingly extemporized nineteen-minute epic “Tarotplane,” where the group dipped into Robert Johnson’s “Terraplane
Blues,” caught echoes of Blind Willie Johnson’s passionate plea “You’re Going to Need Somebody on Your Bond,” then added a sampling of Willie Dixon’s saucy “Wang Dang Doodle” for good measure. Beefheart would call out verse after verse, punctuating each one with his squeaking blues harp. What Beefheart sought—and would actually find two years later on
Trout Mask
—was a music that was, as Greil Marcus once described, “as far ahead of its time as it was behind it.” Beefheart was out to destroy what Frank Zappa would later call the affliction of time. In particular, how time imposes certain values on life and art, where innovative deviations from the norm get considered out of time, or ahead of their time—rather than timeless. “A lot of people think they have time, you see, and they put on a little circle on their wrists, which is really amusing:
keeping
time,” Beefheart told
Downbeat
in 1971. Beefheart’s long musical excursions were attempts to shatter time, make it irrelevant as a point of definition or reference, and rather explore it as an infinite playground with no imposed boundaries.

On “25th Century Quaker,” Beefheart opens the song by introducing the shinei, an Indian reed instrument given to him by Ornette Coleman. He bends time along with the musical grain by wedding a flower child of the 60s, who has eyes “that flutter like a wide-open shutter,” with a Quaker of the future. On “Trust Us,” his answer to “We Love You,” the Rolling Stones’ 1967 drug bust anthem to their supportive fans, Beefheart calls out to trust us “before you turn to dust,” stating that mortality is merely a dot that punctuates time. The abstract ballad, “Beatle Bones ’N’ Smokin’ Stones,” is his reply to the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever.” John Lennon’s beautifully
mournful dirge about childhood lost, where time itself slipped away and became locked eternally into the caste of a Salvation Army orphanage. Beefheart’s reply is an elliptical meditation on timeless bereavement. “Blue veins through grey felt tomorrows,” Beefheart laments, “celluloid sailboat your own feathered kind, blow it into a pond swaying in circles.”