Trout Mask Replica
Praise for the series:
It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric Ladyland are as significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in the Rye or Middlemarch.… The series, which now comprises 29 titles with more in the works, is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration—The New York Times Book Review
Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t enough—Rolling Stone
One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet—Bookslut
These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds—Vice
A brilliant series…each one a work of real love—NME (UK)
Passionate, obsessive, and smart—Nylon
Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful—Boldtype
[A] consistently excellent series—Uncut (UK)
We…aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way…watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Continuum’s “33 1/3” series of books.—Pitchfork
For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our website at www.continuumbooks.com and 33third.blogspot.com
Also available in this series:
Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes
Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans
Harvest by Sam Inglis
The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller
Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh
Abba Gold by Elisabeth Vincentelli
Electric Ladyland by John Perry
Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott
Sign ‘O’ the Times by Michaelangelo Matos
The Velvet Underground and Nico by Joe Harvard
Let It Be by Steve Matteo
Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk
Aqualung by Allan Moore
OK Computer by Dai Griffiths
Let It Be by Colin Meloy
Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis
Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno
Exile on Main Street by Bill Janovitz
Grace by Daphne Brooks
Murmur by J. Niimi
Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli
Ramones by Nicholas Rombes
Endtroducing… by Eliot Wilder
Kick Out the Jams by Don McLeese
Low by Hugo Wilcken
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Kim Cooper
Music from Big Pink by John Niven
Paul’s Boutique by Dan LeRoy
Doolittle by Ben Sisario
There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Miles Marshall Lewis
Stone Roses by Alex Green
Bee Thousand by Marc Woodsworth
The Who Sell Out by John Dougan
Highway 61 Revisited by Mark Polizzotti
Loveless by Mike McGonigal
The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck
Court and Spark by Sean Nelson
69 Love Songs by LD Beghtol
Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth Lundy
Use Your Illusion I and II by Eric Weisbard
Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns
Forthcoming in this series:
London Calling by David L. Ulin
People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm by Shawn Taylor
Double Nickels on the Dime by Michael T. Fournier
and many more …
Trout Mask Replica
Kevin Courrier
2007
The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc
80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038
The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
www.continuumbooks.com
Copyright © 2007 by Kevin Courrier
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers or their agents.
Printed in Canada
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Courrier, Kevin, 1954-
Trout mask replica / by Kevin Courrier.
p. cm. -- (33 1/3)
eISBN-13: 978-1-4411-9269-1
1. Captain Beefheart. Trout mask replica. 2. Rock music--1961-1970--History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series.
ML420.C2535C68 2007
782.42166092--dc22
2007002716
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
The Truth Has No Patterns
Chapter One
A Desert Island of the Mind
Chapter Two
A Different Fish
Chapter Three
Jumping Out of School
Chapter Four
A Little Paranoia is a Good Propeller
Chapter Five
Music from the Other Side of the Fence
Chapter Six
Fast ’N Bulbous
Epilogue
Everyone Drinks from the Same Pond
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Although this was the most enjoyable (and least disruptive) experience I’ve had yet writing a book, the idea for this little tome followed some rather unfortunate circumstances. After working as a film critic at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for close to fifteen years, I was let go in 2005 by an aspiring executive who didn’t find me (among other things) consumer-friendly enough. It therefore seemed perfectly fitting to go on to write a book about an album that was even less consumer-friendly than me.
For that, I have to offer deep thanks to David Barker, my editor at Continuum press, for giving me the opportunity to delve deeply—but quickly—into my love for a peculiar record that makes demands on that love. Besides being the progenitor of a fascinating series of books for those who truly adore music, David continues to affirm my faith that there are still sharp editors dedicated to creating a nurturing climate for good writing. (He also returns every e-mail query promptly.) Gabriella Page-Fort supplied a concise copyedit, too, which made my job as a writer about as painless as anyone could hope for.
While writing is always a solitary act, I have a few readers to thank who made it less lonely. Shlomo Schwartzberg bravely tore through this text, and offered invaluable advice, even though he could barely stand to listen to two minutes of the actual album. Naomi Boxer was unflinchingly supportive, extremely helpful, and enormously generous in her comments. Besides being a great friend, John Corcelli offered some deeply insightful suggestions that cleared my head long enough to take the text further than I had planned. Adam Nayman, who is one of the brightest young film critics around, is also a cherished and deeply valued friend. Our endless conversations consistently opened up ideas that found there way into informing this book. David Churchill, one of my oldest and dearest friends, always asks the right questions and provides the best answers. Donald Brackett is every bit part of the fabric of this book. As with my previous efforts on Randy Newman and Frank Zappa, this one also grew out of long passionate discussions about music dating back to 1985.
There are some other special people to th
ank for the indispensable role they play (or have played) in my both my personal and professional life: Albert & Sheila Vezeau, Scott and Shawn Courrier, Steve Vineberg, Annie Bryant, Mimi Gellman, Dave King and Lynne Godfrey, Avril Orloff, Susan Green, Judith Edwards, Leonore Johnston, Lynne Teperman, Nick Power, Jean Jinnah, Brian Quinn & Vi, Mi-Kyong Shim, Bob Douglas and Gayle Burns, Larry Rooney, Jack David, Jen Hale, the late Tom Fulton, Dave Downey, Anton Leo, Janice Newton, Sandra Kerr, and my special colleagues and friends at Public Outreach, who every day remind me of the value of professional integrity and dedicated idealism.
Special gratitude also goes to Mimi Divinsky, who truly made this book possible with her profuse generosity and precious friendship.
I set out to write this book with a keen ear for the larger culture that informs Beefheart’s work, in an effort to prove that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s an important aspect of what a good critic does. For those fans on Internet sites, though, who only crave “new information” (i.e. minutiae), or resent other informed voices who value digging into the “nilly-willy” in order to get at the “nitty-gritty,” this book may not satisfy any fetishistic urges. I can only paraphrase Frank Zappa: information is not knowledge. For those fans inquiring enough to delve into what is maybe (for you) a familiar story, I’ve tried to magnify my appraisal of one of America’s most original artists by including those (like Blind Willie Johnson) who also occupy a kindred spirit of invention. In that vein, I hope you find this book an enjoyable and valuable edition to the ongoing discussion of Trout Mask Replica.
Kevin Courrier
February, 2007.
Preface
The Truth Has No Patterns
Like most stories, the tale of this particular book begins with an earlier one. It’s about a love affair with music, and how our liaison with music takes unpredictable twists and turns. As our encounters in romance can begin so suddenly, so innocently, so mysteriously, timeless music can also follow a similar course. A record will sometimes hit us quite unexpectedly on a car radio, right at that moment when the music and the commercials blend into one totally innocuous whole. That’s how I discovered Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” for instance, on a family vacation to Florida. My father, who was driving the car (and who hated rock and roll), became so transfixed by the tidal pull of the song that even he couldn’t find the will to change the station. Other times, it happens through chance encounters with an acquaintance.
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 t
hat 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.
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