Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica

by Courrier, Kevin

  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.”

  Never losing sight of the blues, however, Beefheart castigated pretenders to the cause in “Gimme Dat Harp Boy.” He invented dense blues figures for simple confections like “Kandy Korn.” But it was “Mirror Man” that would become the skeleton key which opened the Pandora’s box leading to Trout Mask Replica. Based on a 1966 piece performed in Lancaster by the now outcast Doug Moon, “Mirror Man” was an epic exploration, not only of the musical language of the blues, but of language itself. Beefheart breaks apart the phrases of the title into syllables and consonants. He invents puns on the spot (“Mirror Man is but a mere man”) and transforms the song into sound fragments boldly illustrating a painter’s love of splashing color on the canvas. “Mirror Man” wasn’t an exercise in endless noodling, though, as was the fashion of the time by bands like Iron Butterfly (“In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”). Beefheart was reshaping the power of the blues by altering the timbre of the music rather than its message. It became clear, while listening to “Mirror Man,” that as the music became less formally structured, Beefheart was becoming more lyrically expressionistic. The group started to weave its way illustriously through the soundscapes emerging spontaneously out of these improvisations. “The guitars are not so much underpinned as jostled by French, whose drumming was becoming more individual—incisive accents incorporated into rolling, roaming tom-tom, snare, and hi-hat patterns,” observed Mike Barnes.

  After recording these tracks, Bob Krasnow sent the band on tour in Europe. It was hardly the second coming of Beatlemania. The first stop was in Germany, at a record convention, where they flopped due to poor sound brought on by lousy equipment. In London, because of a lack of work permits, they spent a night in a detention hall before finally playing on John Peel’s BBC sessions. From there, it was Cannes, France, where they attended the MIDEM Music Festival, met Paul McCartney (who was there to receive an award), and played a set on the beach to some bewildered industry folks who safely kept their distance. When the band got home, there was still no release date on the new album. But should anyone be surprised that the label who put out the 1910 Fruitgum Co.’s “Chewy, Chewy”
would respond so unfavorably to songs like “Tarotplane” and “Beatle Bones ’N’ Smokin’ Stones?” Krasnow assured them he’d work it out. He did so by disingenuously misfiling their Buddha contract so that the option wouldn’t be picked up and he could sign them to another label. That label, Blue Thumb Records, an offshoot of Kama Sutra, was one that Krasnow created himself. Krasnow used the move to Blue Thumb to bankroll the recording sessions that would ultimately become Strictly Personal. (The material intended for the abandoned Brown Wrapper record would later in 1971 be released as Mirror Man.)

  The Strictly Personal sessions got underway over eight days between April and May 1968. Some of the material intended for Wrapper found its way onto Strictly Personal, such as “Beatle Bones ’N’ Smokin’ Stones,” “Trust Us,” and “Safe as Milk.” The new songs further developed the inventive blues model the group was already experimenting with. They recast Son House’s “Death Letter Blues,” a passionate song of grief over receiving a correspondence about a girl’s passing, into “Ah Feel Like Ahcid.” In the song, a surreal blues holler, the singer licks the LSD from a stamp and hallucinates her return as a duck/chicken “flapping” merrily down his street. The track was eventually cut into pieces and used as a leitmotif threading its way throughout the finished album. “Son of Mirror Man—Mere Man” became a more distilled version of “Mirror Man.”

  With the recording finished, the band hit the road. While on tour, however, Krasnow (in a state of stoned bliss on acid) secretly took the master tapes for Strictly Personal and littered them with various electronic phasing effects plus other psychedelic clamour to make the album more trendy and saleable—without getting permission from the group. In London, the band received a visit from Krasnow, eager to play them their newly remixed opus, as if he were Santa Claus coming to town. On first listen, John French was quite taken with all the murky compression used on the tracks. “We sat there in London, listening to it on this big sound system, and I kind of liked the way it sounded,” French said excitingly. “I thought, well it’s contemporary. It’ll work for now.” For Beefheart, on the other hand, it didn’t work at all. He was so outraged that he immediately disowned it, even telling French that the effects sounded like “psychedelic bromo seltzer.”

  By June 1968, the tour was immediately aborted and the band was again in disarray. Although Strictly Personal arrived in stores by the fall, the musicians were starting to fall out. Some of them didn’t care for the new direction the music was taking—despite the bromo seltzer. For one, Snouffer found the compositions too disorganized, as did Jerry Handling. They resented Beefheart’s iron will and chaotic habits, as well. They saw no part for them in this evolving music, just as Doug Moon had earlier. But Don Aldridge, a friend of Beefheart’s dating back to their days in Lancaster, saw other reasons for their departure—as well as the Magic Band’s emerging musical mosaic. “I always will believe Frank [Zappa] was the catalyst,” Aldridge told Mike Barnes. “Frank was actually becoming wealthy and famous doing what they had experimented with as kids. Don could not accomplish his goal with the Safe as Milk band.”

  It was true. By 1968, Zappa had accomplished a fair bit compared to Beefheart. When he abandoned Studio Z in Cucamonga in early 1964, Zappa had just been asked to join a local R&B bar band called the Soul Giants. The call came from their lead singer Ray Collins, who Zappa had played with earlier at Studio Z. They recorded a variety of surf rock and novelty comedy singles, including an affectionate doo-wop tribute for Cleave Duncan and the Penguins called “Memories of El Monte.” While initially sticking to standard R&B fodder in their bar gigs, Zappa decided that if the group was going to go anywhere they should try doing original material—meaning, his own. He saw the group potentially as the antithesis of the cute pop bands now filling the charts. On Mother’s Day 1964, with an image designed to scare your mother, they became the Mothers of Invention. (Because the simple phrase “the Mothers” was street slang for a collection of motherfuckers, they had to—out of necessity—become the Mothers of Invention.) The repertoire Zappa provided for the group was a hybrid of the serialist classical school, R&B, doo-wop, and the blues, sprinkled with an abundance of social satire and irreverence. “I composed a composite, gap-filling product that fills most of the gaps between so-called serious music and so-called popular music,” he would later write, describing it as his Project/Object.

  The timing for Zappa’s Project/Object was fortuitous because it began in the wake of a budding nonconformist freak scene in Los Angeles. The British Invasion had just sent American record companies on a mad search to find—and sign—any band that could write songs and play their own instruments. In LA, there was a huge folk music scene already beginning and merging with the rock being played in the clubs. One such club owner was Herb Cohen, a feisty political and musical activist, who was a promoter of folk artists like Odetta, plus blues performers Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee. Cohen met Zappa during the filming of a faux tabloid documentary called Mondo Hollywood, which was supposed to reveal the shocking underside of the Hollywood freak scene. Although he didn’t have a clue as to what Zappa’s Project/Object was about, he did recognize both his talent and intelligence. He immediately became the band’s manager.

  By July 1966, the Mothers of Invention had secured a contract at MGM/Verve Records, the prestigious jazz label. They’d also landed producer Tom Wilson, who had produced landmark jazz records in the 50s by avant-garde pianist Cecil Taylor (Jazz Advance) and saxophonist John Coltrane (Coltrane Time), as well as working the controls for Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” in 1965. Their debut, Freak Out! was a double-LP concept album that provided a provocative, eclectic chart of Zappa’s Project/Object—drawing on all his influences from Varèse to Richard Berry (“Louie Louie”). The record was a cornucopia of American musical genres, including doo-wop parodies (“Go Cry on Somebody Else’s Shoulder”), sophisticated R&B arrangements (“How Could I Be Such a Fool?”), abstract dissonant rock (“Who Are the Brain Police?”), an outlandish tribute to both Igor Stravinsky’s ballet scores and the Igor of horror movies (“The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet”), social protest blues (“Trouble Every Day”), and political advocacy (“Hungry Freaks, Daddy”).

  In 1967, the Mothers’ second album, Absolutely Free, was an absurdist oratorio. “We play the new free music—music as absolutely free, unencumbered by American cultural suppression,” Zappa explained. To pull it off, Zappa hired some highly gifted sight-reading musicians—Bunk Gardner on saxophone and Don Preston on keyboards—to augment the bar band veterans. The idea was to create an ensemble that dissolved the imposed boundaries between the “low culture” of rock and roll and the “high culture” of orchestral music. Zappa would follow up Absolutely Free with a solo orchestral album, Lumpy Gravy, a ballet score that resembled a cross between a Mad magazine collage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. The orchestral music, played by an ad hoc session group called the Abnuceals Emuukha Electric Symphony Orchestra, was continually broken up by snatches of random dialogue, musique-concrète, surf rock, and cartoon tone clusters suggesting a radio dial madly spinning across the network.

  Later in the year, the Mothers would reconvene to skewer the hippie utopianism of the previous Summer of Love on We’re Only in it for the Money, which used the Beatles’ sunny Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band as their point of parody; create a neo-classical appraisal of 50s doo-wop on Cruising with Ruben & the Jets, and begin Uncle Meat, the fullest design of the Project/Object. It was perhaps this particular record that would have a significant impact on Zappa’s production of Trout Mask Replica. Originally to be a soundtrack for the Mothers’ first film (which was incomplete due to lack of financing), Uncle Meat became a surreal scrapbook of personal and musical history. To play the difficult and complex scores, Zappa first added more highly experienced players such as Ruth Komonoff on marimba and Ruth’s future husband, Ian Underwood, on a variety of wind and keyboard instruments. The record combined clips of the band cutting loose (�
��King Kong”), audio-verité of band members complaining about poverty (“If we’d all been living in California”), performances of tricky electronic serialist scores (“Zolar Czakl,” “We Can Shoot You”), brilliantly dense cross-pollinations of doo-wop and serialism (“Dog Breath, in the Year of the Plague”), and ample samples of their stage absurdities like “Louie Louie” being played on the pipe organ at the Royal Albert Hall in London. In 1968, when Beefheart encountered him, Zappa was preparing an album that was essentially an anthropological musical study of the Mothers of Invention. It would not only serve as a documentary collage of the band’s progress; Uncle Meat would document and define their place in the lexicon of American popular music.

  Although Zappa was making huge progress as a composer, by the time of Uncle Meat, he was (like Beefheart) having contractual difficulties with his label. But unlike Don Van Vliet, Zappa was a businessman who thought of his work in terms of business. In December 1967, he discovered that Verve had made the mistake of not picking up the option on his contract with the label. So Zappa and Herb Cohen decided to use that as leverage to negotiate a deal to create a logo within the company. It was to be called—appropriately enough—Bizarre Productions. Their logo was a nineteenth-century picturesque engraving of a vacuum pump. Initially, Mothers’ albums on Bizarre would be released through MGM/Verve, until 1969, when Warner Brothers would acquire the production label. Zappa and Cohen formed Bizarre/Straight Records for Herb Cohen’s most unconventional artists. “We make records that are a little different,” Zappa made clear in his mission statement. “We present musical and sociological material which the important record companies would probably not allow you to hear.” He then added with caustic irony: “Just what the world needs … another record company.”