metalluk's Full Review: Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart & His Magi...
There are few albums in pop music history that polarize listener response as much as does Trout Mask Replica. Most reviewers rate it at either five stars or one star. One has to turn to other arenas of musical expression to find a similar division of opinions. There're classical composers like Schoenberg, Webern, or Elliott Carter, and jazz musicians like Ornette Coleman or Cecil Taylor that provoke similar splits in critical response. There were moments in the history of music when even the likes of Igor Stravinsky, Bela Bartok, Frank Zappa, or Chuck Berry had that kind of effect on mainstream music lovers. What all these folks and Captain Beefheart share in common is that all were avant-garde for their time and genre. All were actively committed to pushing the envelope in relation to what music is and can be, by experiments in tonality, rhythm, sound effects, and, sometimes, lyrics. A given music lover is not necessarily unintelligent or lacking in taste for rejecting any or all avant-garde music; nor is a listener automatically "cooler" or "more sophisticated" for liking it. If there is one construct that most distinguishes fans of "far-out" music from those who reject it, it is probably "open mindedness." You have to be willing to stretch your ideas about what comprises music, rather than clinging to a familiar comfort zone of conventional melody and four-four rhythms. On the other hand, it's just as certain that not all avant-garde music is good music as it is for more conventional music.
"Captain Beefheart" was the stage name of Don Vliet, a man of raw genius who grew up in California during the forties and fifties. Vliet was in the same class (1958) as Frank Zappa at Antelope Valley High. The two got to know each other, but not until the second half of their senior year. Vliet had picked up Zappa when the latter was hitchhiking in town because Zappa "looked so woebegone." They quickly discovered that they had similar musical tastes (doo-wop groups like the Spaniels and Paragons and blues greats like Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, and Johnny "Guitar" Watson) and struck up a friendship that centered around getting together after school at Frank's house to listen to records for hours on end. They would also sometimes cruise for girls (unsuccessfully) in Vliet's powder blue '49 Oldsmobile, which had a werewolf figurine attached to the steering wheel.
Don's father drove a bakery truck and the two youthful friends would pig out on left over pastries. When the father suddenly died of a heart attack in 1958, Vliet quit school and took over his father's route to support the family. Vliet's uncle lived in the same household and would sometimes expose himself when Vliet's girlfriend was walking by the bathroom. He'd flash his glans penis and declare, "Ahh, what a beauty. It looks just like a big, fine beef heart." When Zappa later wrote a part for Vliet into an intended Rock & Roll opera (entitled "I Was a Teenage Maltshop") that never materialized, Vliet's character was named Captain Beefheart, and the name stuck ever after. That was in 1964 shortly after Zappa had acquired Studio Z in Cucamonga. Don also later added a "Van" in front of his surname, but it was originally just "Vliet."
Between around 1965 and 1968, Vliet and Zappa went their separate ways, the former starting up his "Magic Band" in 1965 and the latter writing music and performing with the early version of The Mothers of Invention, but both young men eagerly followed each other's progress, from a distance. Van Vliet was heavily into the psychedelic scene in Pomona Valley while Zappa was rigidly anti-drug. Around the same time that Zappa was releasing the albums Freak Out! (1966), Absolutely Free (1967), and We're Only in it for the Money (1968), Van Vliet was releasing Safe As Milk, Mirror Man, and Strictly Personal, but he was plagued by record company problems and changing line-ups to an extent that his work was not presented to best effect. When Zappa started his Bizarre label in response to his own dissatisfactions with the record companies, he immediately contacted his old friend and invited him to release a new album on Bizarre. Vliet's old "Magic Band" had fallen apart, so he hired new, younger musicians, assuming the role of band guru. He even gave the band members new stage names to loosen them from their previous identities so that he could indoctrinate them into his radical ideas about how music should be made. Bill Harkelroad became Zoot Horn Rollo, Mark Boston was Rockette Morton, Jeff Cotton was re-dubbed Antennae Jimmy Semens, drummer John French was called "Drumbo," and Victor Hayden, who was Vliet's cousin, was re-Christened "Mascara Snake."
The entire band lived together in an old house on a wooded road in San Fernando Valley and rehearsed the music that would ultimately be recorded on Trout Mask Replica incessantly for a year. Zappa had the organizational skills and technical know-how that Captain Beefheart was lacking, but otherwise went out of his way not to modify Vliet's artistic vision in any way with his own. When Zappa completed the mixing, the entire band gathered in Zappa's studio on Easter of 1969 and were delighted with the result, as well they might be. The album would soon represent the pinnacle of Captain Beefheart's recording career. Even so, Beefheart and Zappa soon had a falling out over the way that Zappa marketed the album, essentially portraying his old friend as something of a nut case. Later, in 1975, the two reconciled long enough to join forces on Zappa's album Bongo Fury.
The influences evident in Trout Mask Replica are enormously varied, ranging from rhythm & blues and delta blues to avant-garde rock, Dadaism, and free jazz. Beefheart sings or speaks in a raspy, gravelly voice reminiscent of bluesman Howlin' Wolf. Meanwhile, the band plays multiple dissonant strands of independent and shifting tonalities. Drumbo pounds on a wide assortment of drums in complex polyrhythms. At first, it all seems chaotic and freely improvised, but there's method in the madness. Small fragments repeat themselves in cohesive patterns that reveal splashes of crazed genius within a deeply layered cacophony. The lyrics are as original as the music, consisting of poetic musings strung together in a sort of stream-of-consciousness manner around themes that range from sociopolitical, to pictorial imagery, to such typical topics as sex, death, and religion. Sometimes the lines border on unintelligible but generally reveal hidden wonders upon reflection. Sometimes musical tracks are separated by nonsense dialog fragments, which is probably the one feature of the album that most reflected Zappa's influence.
Track Listing:
1. Frownland 1:39
2. The Dust Blows Forward 'N The Dust Blows Back 1:53
3. Dachau Blues 2:21
4. Ella Guru 2:23
5. Hair Pie: Bake 1 4:57
6. Moonlight On Vermont 3:55
7. Pachuco Cadaver 4:37
8. Bills Corpse 1:47
9. Sweet Sweet Bulbs 2:17
10. Neon Meate Dream of a Octofish 2:25
11. China Pig 3:56
12. My Human Gets Me Blues 2:25
13. Dali's Car 1:25
14. Hair Pie: Bake 2 2:23
15. Pena 2:31
16. Well 2:05
17. When Big Joan Sets Up 5:19
18. Fallin' Ditch 2:03
19. Sugar "N Spikes 2:29
20. Ant Man Bee 3:55
21. Orange Claw Hammer 3:35
22. Wild Life 3:07
23. She's Too Much For My Mirror 1:42
24. Hobo Chang Ba 2:01
25. The Blimp (mousetrapreptica) 2:04
26. Steal Softly Thru Snow 2:13
27. Old Fart At Play 1:54
28. Veteran's Day Poppy 4:30
Track Analysis:
The brief opening track, Frownland, starts right off with Captain Beefheart's gravelly voice pounding out highly original acid-drenched lyrics, while the band plays densely cacophonous backing music:
My smile is stuck
I cannot go back t' yer Frownland
My Spirit's made up of the ocean
And the sky 'n the sun 'n the moon
'n all my eye can see.
Then, The Dust Blows Forward 'N The Dust Blows Back, is the first of several a capella pieces. For this one, Beefheart seems to be singing into a handheld tape recorder, since you can actually hear it click off and on between successive lines. The lyrics paint a remarkable image of a man on a fishing trip, lost between nature and his own unfettered train of thought.
Dachau Blues is the album's most political song, bemoaning the misery of the Jews at Dachau and pleading for an end to such horrors. Here the discordant sounds of the band fit perfectly with the subject matter. Ella Guru is one of those songs about how much men enjoy the way many women sashay when they walk: "She do what she mean, she do what she do, Got sumptin' fo' me sumptin' fo' you, She sho' sumptin', She's young too." The vocal harmonies are exquisite and the background music superb.
Hair Pie: Bake 1 is a cacophonous instrumental interchange between Beefheart's saxophone and his cousin Mascera Snake's bass clarinet, before the rest of the band finally joins in for a rousing atonal jam session over an ever changing drum rhythm. Moonlight On Vermont, with a straighter than usual rock beat and blues sound, is one of the album's most accessible pieces, reflecting on how moonlight turns the folks of Vermont into a bunch of loonies. There's some great guitar licks from Zoot Horn Rollo behind Beefheart's vocal line.
Pachuco Cadaver is a song about an old woman with an excess of libido: "When she walks flowers surround her, Let their nectar come into the air around her, She loves her love sticks out like stars," yet "all the pachucos start withold'n hands." Meanwhile, the band plays slinky, syncopated stanzas that evoke images of various body parts bobbing haphazardly in all directions. Bills Corpse is another acid-inspired number about death. My favorite line is this song describes the bones of "Various species grouped together according to their past beliefs." It reminds one of the lunacy of sectarian violence.
Sweet Sweet Bulbs has lyrics built around sexual innuendo and some spicy guitar riffs behind Beefheart's singing. Neon Meate Dream of a Octofish is a wild bit of joyous word salad, including the lines "Fack 'n feast 'n tubes tubs bulbs, In jest incest injest injust in feast incest, 'n specks 'n spreckled spreckled, Speckled speculation." The musical backing is equally unfettered from the confines of reason.
China Pig is a bluesy song about a lad having to kill his pig in order to buy shoes. Now we hear the influence of Howlin' Wolf shining through. The emotion is raw and accompanied mainly by plaintive guitar strains. My Human Gets Me Blues reflects almost incoherently on some of the hypocrisies of religion. Dali's Car and Hair Pie: Bake 2 are excellent and complex instrumental numbers, nicely exemplifying the Magic Band's arsenal of polytonal and polyrhythmic techniques.
Mascara Snake provides high-pitched vocals for the humorous number Pena, which is about a mindless bimbo out enjoying the sun and sitting on a plugged-in waffle iron with smoke billowing up from between her legs. Well, by contrast, is an old-fashioned Southern work song, with Beefheart returning to his a capella mode. Then, it's back to the rocker mode for When Big Joan Sets Up. Big Joan, we soon understand, has hands that are too small and a naval that compares favorably to the moon. Beefheart interrupts the vocals in this extended polytonal jam for some wild improvisation on his saxophone.
Fallin' Ditch is a blues number, with the title words metaphorical for death. Rockette Morton on bass really shines on this track. Sugar "N Spikes is a play on the old nursery rhyme phrase "Sugar 'N Spice," suggesting that life is typically a lot tougher than the nursery rhyme suggests. Some of the lines defy ready interpretation: "Pies steam slate shoes move broom 'n pale." That's out of context, but, even in context, it's a bit baffling.
Ant Man Bee is a reflection on racism: "All the ants in God's garden, they can't get along." The music for this piece really rocks. Orange Claw Hammer is the third a capella number and deals broadly with travails of being on the move. "Uh thick cloud caught uh piper cubs tail, The match struck blue on uh railroad rail, The old puff horse was just pullin' thru, 'n uh' man wore a peg leg forever." Wild Life is a return to the blues mode with a fine bit of improvisation by Beefheart on the saxophone.
She's Too Much For My Mirror is another blues numbers reflecting on a woman who's more trouble than she's worth. The bass and the guitar carry the main burden of the background accompaniment. Hobo Chang Ba is a chaotic number about the life of a hobo. The Blimp (mousetrapreptica) is a proto-rap number with just a light rhythmic backing. "The Blimp" was apparently the band's language for "bit hit."
Steal Softly Thru Snow is an emotional song of longing, as the singer observes the geese migrating south and yearns for a similar opportunity to enjoy the sun's warmth. Old Fart At Play is an enormously funny song about an old country couple engaging in bizarre erotic game playing, thereby working each other into a frenzy of anticipation. The closing track, Veteran's Day Poppy, is a psychedelic rocker and a rousing conclusion for the album.
Evaluation: Although this album consists of a single CD, there are 79 solid minutes of music. So, love it or hate it, you'll have plenty of time to reinforce your view. This album was picked by Rolling Stone as #58 for its list of 500 Greatest Albums of All Time." More to the point, Mojo picked it as #1 on its list of 50 Most Out There Albums of All Time. That really is the crux of the matter. You really have to give Beefheart and his Magic Band credit for trying to do something at the cutting edge of musical innovation. That they substantially succeeded is evident from the fact that this album still stirs controversy almost forty years after it was made! What is "far out" in one year usually becomes quite ordinary a decade or two later, but not so with Trout Mask Replica. It remains perhaps the most extremely innovative, avant-garde pop album made to date. I value originality, so this album ranks among my top fifty albums of the sixties, but only at #47, largely because Beefheart's vocal quality is so uniformly characteristic that the gravelly sound becomes a bit monotonous over the course of 79 minutes. Contrary to what some listeners imagine about this album, it is not unpolished, chaotic improvisation, but the result of intense and prolonged rehearsal and clear intention. It is methodically calculated chaos.
What are the chances that you'll like this album? Almost nil, because the two usual responses to it are love or hate, rather than like. I think the best indication of which camp you're likely to find yourself joining in relation to this album is to ask yourself how much experience you've had with avant-garde music in any musical genre and how you've reacted to it. Think about Zappa's atonal tracks or perhaps the Grateful Dead in the Rock domain, Coltrane or Ornette Coleman for jazz, and Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Lutoslawski, Crumb, Ligeti, or Penderecki in the classical arena. Then add another positive mark if you enjoy deep delta blues singers, like Howlin' Wolf or Muddy Waters. If you've had no experience with any of those, why jump into the deep end of the pool before learning some basic strokes? I'm giving this sprawling canvas of unrefined genius four stars because it is highly innovative, incredibly sophisticated, entertaining, and largely but not entirely musically satisfying.
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