Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica

by Courrier, Kevin

  We’re Only in It for the Money, released in January 1968, became the first album under the Bizarre logo. However, the first record showcasing one of Bizarre’s unusual finds appeared that summer. It was called An Evening with Wild Man Fischer and you certainly couldn’t accuse it of being in it for the money—or predicting it ever to make any either. An Evening with Wild Man Fischer was a collection of a cappella folk songs by an aggressive and alarming busker named Larry “Wild Man” Fischer. Fischer was born in Los Angeles in 1945, and he became a familiar figure along the Sunset Strip in the mid-60s. While making his living spontaneously composing his own songs for small change, he’d actually been institutionalized by his mother after attempting to kill her. Fischer was homeless and jobless, hanging out at clubs along the Sunset Strip. The subsequent double album, produced by Zappa, gathered his street recordings and monologues in the studio, as well as songs featuring percussion overdubs. The unsettling montage cover was by Cal Schenkel, Zappa’s in-house cover artist, and it featured the deranged Fischer holding a knife to the throat of a cardboard cut-out woman (who many assumed to be his mother).

  An Evening with Wild Man Fischer demonstrated Zappa’s specialized interest in music as a sociological construct. Each individual he signed to his new label had a distinctive mould he wished to uncork. “There’s some people that break that mould and in that moment they’re who they really are, and Frank could always pull that out of somebody,” his wife Gail Zappa explained. “He could always recognize it when it was there.” An Evening with Wild Man Fischer is an unsettling sample of that recognition. It’s a rock and roll album conceived as a piece of social anthropology. Fischer’s songs suggested simple childlike tunes, but they were also seeped in violence, fantasy, and family dysfunction. Besides studio sessions of Larry telling Zappa his life story and singing his songs, engineer Dick Kunc provided street recordings of Fischer in action on the street. “My first task was to literally follow him around the streets for several days, carrying a Uher two-track, chronicling whatever madness he got into,” Kunc recalled.

  The second release on Bizarre/Straight was just as unusual. Christine Frka and Pamela Miller were members of a groupie clan that was designated the Laurel Canyon Ballet Company. This gathering included Miss Sandra, Miss Cinderella, and Miss Mercy. While they were visiting the Zappa house, he suggested that they come up with some material for an album. Encouraged, they put together a number of songs about their lifestyle and named themselves the GTO’s (Girls Together Outrageously). “I thought it would be interesting to share their experiences with people who had never come in contact with anything like that,” Zappa explained. “So I encouraged them to set music to their songs or get somebody to help them put their poems to music and I would record them.” Permanent Damage was an alluring documentary sample of that lifestyle. Since Zappa treats subject matter, dialogue, and song as musical material, Permanent Damage has a casual off-color quality.

  Permanent Damage and An Evening with Wild Man Fischer were works of oddball sociology as much as they were rock and roll records. Zappa set out to produce albums freely documenting unexplored folkloric aspects of American culture. He went after folks who were both frowned upon by cultural imprimaturs and rejected as outcasts considered not talented enough to be making records. Other new releases on Bizarre/Straight were only slightly less peculiar: Alice Cooper (Pretties for You), a psychedelic band that would find fame a few years later; folk singers Tim Dawe (Penrod), Tim Buckley (Blue Afternoon), and Judy Henske and Jerry Yester (Farewell Aldebaran). Zappa had a particular interest in 50s hipster jazz poet Lord Buckley, whose influence on Lenny Bruce didn’t go unnoticed. A Most Immaculately Hip Aristocrat contained six performance pieces originally recorded in 1956 by Lyle Griffen, which Zappa edited for the album. It was in the early winter of 1968, at a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Los Angeles, just as Zappa was beginning to sign his roster of optionally alternate entertainment to the Bizarre/Straight label, where he and Beefheart talked about working together.

  While Zappa clearly wanted to give Don Van Vliet an opportunity to make his best music, free of the restrictions imposed upon him by bad advice and contract problems, they just didn’t mix together very well. “Both Frank and Don had two very extreme personalities, and how they ever did anything together is a mystery to me,” Don Preston of the Mothers observed. Beefheart was essentially a musical primitive. His integration of free jazz, Delta blues, absurdism, and idiosyncratic verse was an instinctual choice. Zappa mixed his own musical colors with a deliberate intent. “Van Vliet drew on the paradox of ordered disorder exploited by Hugo Ball in his sound poetry, together with the ‘primitivism’ of [Tristan] Tzara, rendered urgently audible in the free jazz of Ornette Coleman,” wrote Michel Delville and Andrew Norris in Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and the Secret History of Maximalism. “While Zappa fell in love with the materiality of sound, and the theatrical extravagances of burlesque, key components in his self-recharging brand of social satire … Van Vliet played with the paradox, evolving his own surrealist slant on those odd overdetermined objects so dear to Zappa, the latter branched out and out into parody, satire and beyond.” The blending of their sensibilities would make for a rare masterpiece in Trout Mask Replica, but it would also secure constant strife in their working relationship.

  Some time before their reunion, Beefheart had moved the remaining Strictly Personal band into a house on Entrada Drive in Woodland Hills just outside the San Fernando Valley. The place itself had two bedrooms—one for Beefheart and a tiny one for the rest of the group. The living room was set up for rehearsals. The back yard had a large tropical garden and a small bridge featured on the back cover of Trout Mask. From there, Beefheart began to recruit new members. To replace Jerry Handley, he turned to his old friend and engineer Gary Marker, who proved to be a sufficient bass player in the Rising Sons. As for Alex Snouffer’s replacement, Beefheart brought in a young protegé named Bill Harkleroad. Harkleroad had grown up in Southern California, where (like many California boys before him) he played surf music. But in 1964, after a year of twanging guitar work, he heard Wolfman Jack on XERB playing Howlin’ Wolf and BB King, and from there Harkleroad became a blues fanatic.

  One of his friends, P.G. Blakely, who played drums on “Diddy Wah Diddy,” invited Harkleroad to jam with the Magic Band in 1967. He may have only been eighteen at the time, but he was determined to fit in with the rest of them. “Like most kids I thought I was real hot because I knew about seven licks,” Harkleroad recalled. Although he caught the attention of the other bandmembers, Harkleroad went instead to Lake Tahoe to do Jimi Hendrix covers with his new group. While in Lake Tahoe, he encountered a cult called the Brotherhood, which worshipped Timothy Leary, gleaned the psychedelic Zen prayer books of Alan Watts, and devoured copious tabs of LSD. He was happily blissed out on acid the day the call came to audition for the Magic Band after their aborted tour in June 1968. Shortly after the audition, the group headed off to Frank Zappa’s house in Laurel Canyon for a huge jam session featuring Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, and Pete Townshend. After a fun evening playing blues and 50s rock and roll, it was decided that Beefheart would re-record the Strictly Personal album. That fall, in 1968, Beefheart and Zappa talked about laying down some tracks at Sunset Sound in Hollywood. What may have started as the rehabilitation of Strictly Personal, though, soon became the strictly personal odyssey of Trout Mask Replica.

  Chapter Four

  A Little Paranoia Is a Good

  Propeller

  A perfect writer would make words sing, dance, kiss, do the male and female act, bear children, weep, bleed, rage, stab, steal, fire cannon, steer ships, sack cities, charge with cavalry or infantry, or do any thing, that man or woman or the natural powers can do.

  —Walt Whitman, “The Renovated

  English Speech,” An American Primer, 1904

  When you listen to Beefheart’s voice on Trout Mask Replica, it doesn’t define itself as clearly as other blues or rock singe
rs. Some people say they hear Howlin’ Wolf in the lascivious growl of Beefheart’s tenor. Others insist on hearing the raucous spirit of Richard Berry—not the Berry of “Louie Louie,” mind you, but rather the sly narrator of the Robins’ hit “Riot on Cell Block #9.” Occasionally, a few detect a little of Muddy Waters, a pinch of the attitude of Charley Patton, perhaps the rhythms of Robert Pete Williams. Not bad company and not entirely wrong. But Beefheart isn’t so much an inheritor as he is inhabited. He doesn’t suggest influences; he demonstrates pure possession. “I was never influenced,” he insisted. “Possessed, but never influenced.” Which is why when I listen to Beefheart, the voice of Texas-born blues singer Blind Willie Johnson comes immediately to mind. Johnson’s voice, possessed of an unearthly power, holds an unfathomable mystery in its texture. So does Don Van Vliet’s.

  Born in 1897 in Brenham, Texas, Johnson was blinded at the age of seven when, according to legend, his mother threw lye in his face to avenge a beating from his father. Undaunted, he still taught himself to play a distinctive bottleneck guitar. Johnson performed at Baptist Association meetings and churches, where he quickly came to see the light. Much has been written about Johnson’s accomplished guitar style, probably the most influential in blues history, but less ink has been devoted to his voice. In a series of recordings he made for Columbia Records between 1927 and 1930, Johnson recorded nothing but religious songs, but he stripped them of all piety. His style was paradoxical. He sang with an intensity known only to the blues, but he mixed it with Pentecostal fire. Johnson had a raspy tenor that could take flight, lose control, and then ride out the contours of the space his voice opened up around him. The force of that voice was so great that he was once arrested in New Orleans for causing a riot. By singing his Samson and Delilah story, “If I Had My Way I’d Tear This Building Down,” some people were inspired to almost act on it.

  In song after song, Johnson told biblical tales, from “Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed” to “John the Revelator,” posing as many questions as he offered answers. Each track spoke apocalyptic fire while offering up riddles and unending spiritual quests. Each song plumbed the depths of an eternal question that Johnson would ask explicitly in “Soul of a Man” (“I want somebody to tell me / Just what is the soul of man?”). The question was basic, but Johnson’s query had a sense of urgent drama suggesting that this knowledge wasn’t enough. Whether it was “God Moves on the Water,” adapted to address the fate of the Titanic, or “Can’t Nobody Hide from God,” which was later turned loose on America’s enemies during World War II, Johnson’s songs tore up the soul as much as they sought its definition. In “Dark Was the Night (Cold Was the Ground),” the ultimate story of the crucifixion, he didn’t use words. Over the slow whine of his guitar, Johnson quietly moans and wails the dark mystery of Jesus’s last night on the cross, as if singing lyrics would diminish that fateful event. He knew the story so intimately that, perhaps approximating his own blindness, he deprived us of a language to explain it. Yet without words, the song became cryptic, eerie, and otherworldly to experience. You began to think that Johnson wasn’t just depicting the death of Christ, but addressing His eternal question of the Heavenly Father: Why dost thou forsake me? That part of the riddle was clearly felt—if not understood—by all who heard it. On the Voyager 1, launched by NASA in 1977, among collections of ancient chants, sound effects, and sublime recordings by Bach and Beethoven, astronomer Carl Sagan wisely included Blind Willie Johnson’s dramatic reading of the crucifixion. Someday Johnson’s enigmatic story may be heard by some extraterrestrial life curiously encountering that space probe. Maybe they’ll even wonder, as they listen intently, just what is the soul of man?

  Although many of Blind Willie Johnson’s songs eventually found earthly homes in the catalogue of Led Zeppelin (“Nobody’s Fault but Mine,” “In My Time of Dying”), Eric Clapton (“Motherless Children”), and Ry Cooder (Paris, Texas), the actual spirit of Blind Willie Johnson, for me, is clearest in Captain Beefheart. Although Beefheart is not on the same spiritual crusade as Johnson, he, too, strips the human voice of all natural affectation to reach for its bottom end, its very core. There’s no room for influence in both Blind Willie and Beefheart. Everything is pared down to the essence of their voices, their pure freedom in stating exactly who they are—to testify. That’s what happens on “Moonlight on Vermont,” the first recorded track that would ultimately appear on Trout Mask Replica.

  While the original plan at Sunset Sound that fall was to rerecord Strictly Personal, Beefheart began to push toward laying down some new tracks. The lineup now featured Jeff Cotton and Bill Harkleroad on guitars, Gary Marker on bass, and John French on drums. The first new song, “Moonlight on Vermont,” had its origins in the 1943 song “Moonlight in Vermont,” which was a quaintly romantic ballad by John Blackburn and Karl Suessdorf. Many singers, including Margaret Whiting, Ray Charles, and Johnny Mathis, rendered its pastoral lyricism (“Pennies in a stream / Falling leaves a sycamore / Moonlight in Vermont”) into hit songs over the years. Perhaps the most famous being Frank Sinatra on his 1958 album, Come Fly with Me. Given Beefheart’s strong advocacy of nature, “Moonlight in Vermont” became the perfect template for a far more intense exotic tale. But he tells the story of “Moonlight in Vermont” by way of Howlin’ Wolf’s “Moanin’ at Midnight.”

  Unlike Blackburn and Suessdorf, Beefheart has a far different reading of the stormy power of nature. In “Moonlight in Vermont,” set in an American state about as white as the winter snow, nature is a calmly seductive force out of a William Wordsworth poem (“Ev’ning summer breeze / Warbling of a meadowlark / Moonlight in Vermont”). Beefheart brings the religious fervour of Blind Willie Johnson into creating a far more erotic parable of lust and the sensual power of the phases of the moon. The song begins with the Vermont moonlight casting a strange spell on the prosaic Mrs. Wooten, and her son, Little Nitty, who gets an erection (“Even lifebuoy floatin’ / With his lil’ pistol showin’ / ’N his little pistol totin’”). “Moonlight on Vermont” doesn’t view nature as a harmonizing force—it incites. As Beefheart explains in the chorus, “That goes t’ show you what uh moon can do!”

  “Human beings are not nature’s favorites,” Camille Paglia writes in Sexual Personae, her powerfully insightful study of sex and nature. “We are merely one of a multitude of species upon which nature indiscriminately exerts its force. Nature has a master agenda we can only dimly know.” It is the mystery of that master agenda that takes the holiness out of Blind Willie Johnson’s biblical tales. Revelation wasn’t a Sunday School story for Johnson, it was a powerful and puzzling transformation that could shake foundations. Nature deals a Dionysian card in Beefheart’s song, where now there’s “no more bridge from Tuesday t’ Friday / Everybody’s gone high society.” The pun on Cole Porter’s “High Society,” on the favoured station of the social classes, is also a contemporary definition of a 60s pagan society clouded in marijuana smoke.

  The moon inspires the luckless white elephant to escape from the zoo, its proverbial prison, finding peanuts now littering the curb. (In the booklet accompanying the Mothers’ Uncle Meat album, Zappa includes a drawing of a toy giraffe happily listening to “Moonlight on Vermont” on the radio, just as a doll’s foot is about to sexually penetrate it from behind.) In the song, it’s the moon that brings on an eruption, the celebration of life’s broad diversity. Ultimately, it gets Beefheart invoking “Ol’ Time Religion.” “It was good for Aphrodite / She’s a mighty righteous sighty / and her Priestess wears no nightie / And that’s good enough for me,” wails Beefheart as he links the primal power of God, beauty, and sex. “If Picasso wanted to paint like a child, Van Vliet wants to paint like an animal,” Michel Delville and Andrew Norris wrote in Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and the Secret History of Maximalism. In fact, Beefheart delivers the child to its animal nature and celebrates it in “Moonlight on Vermont.”

  In telling his wild tale, Beefheart naturally falls back on the blues. It opens
with an infernal kick from John French’s drums that’s answered by the powerhouse intensity of Harkleroad’s guitar (“a screeching Telecaster part played way up the neck with a capo through this Showman amp that was as big as a hotel,” Harkleroad recalled). What we get to hear blows fire: an abstract gospel blues with an added touch inspired by avant-garde composer Steve Reich’s “Come Out.” In “Come Out,” Reich had sampled, within his score, an evangelist’s fire and brimstone sermon. According to Pamela Des Barres of the GTO’s, the members of the groupie band came around to Beefheart’s house to smoke some weed and get any eyeful of John French. While there, Beefheart played Reich’s opus for them and they became so mesmerized that they let the record continue to skip over the repeated phrase—“come out to show them.”

  “Moonlight on Vermont” contains a foreboding sound that can wake the dead—as it did for one fan of Trout Mask Replica, writing on amazon.com. He encountered the song’s force quite unconsciously when he left his multiple CD player on as he fell asleep—with Trout Mask on deck. When it began to play, his sleep was rudely interrupted by the urgency of “Moonlight on Vermont.” “Upon waking, my first thought was ‘my God there’s a war going on,’” he wrote. “I scrambled for the light and for the remote, but after finding the remote, I couldn’t turn it off because I was captivated. While [it sounded] chaotic, it seemed to make sense.” That was the true incongruity of this song: a chaos out of Armageddon that eventually comes to make sense.