Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica

by Courrier, Kevin

  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:

  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 mater
ial, 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.