Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica

by Courrier, Kevin

  On “Neon Meate Dream of a Octafish,” he shifts into a scene of wild wet sex unfolding passionately. The subject of the song, in fact, becomes inseparable from the frenzy of poetic verse that Beefheart unravels:

  neon meate dream of a octafish

  artificial rose petals

  in flesh petals and pots

  in fact in feast

  in tubes

  tubs

  bulbs

  in jest incest injust in feast incest

  in specks

  in speckled spreckled

  speckled

  speculation

  As part of his transformation into a different fish, the very trout mask of the cover art, he transforms his own being into a living language that takes pleasure in its own sensual sound. Sex and language in this song become intertwined. “Van Vliet alludes to the Imagist concept of being very precise in descriptions, and the Surrealist concept of juxtaposing opposites to generate new forms,” Mike Barnes writes. “The song is a journey through a luxuriant forest of language which Van Vliet recites in pinched, breathless tones, onomatopoeically evoking the slippery wetness of sex.”

  When Talking Heads recorded Hugo Ball’s 1916 Dadaist sound poem “I Zimbra” for their 1979 Fear of Music album, they simply created a facsimile of the verse, presenting it as a monotonous sing-along chorus in a bed of dance-pop African rhythms. In “Neon Meate Dream of a Octafish” Beefheart doesn’t appropriate Ball, as the Talking Heads do, he creates his very own incantation in the spirit of Ball. The sensuality in Beefheart’s Dadaist free-association, like Ball, gets drawn from the sound of the words themselves. In Beefheart’s case, they take on as densely a musical texture as the music supporting him. The lyrics are, as Zappologist Sean Bonney accurately describes in his essay, “Trout Mask Replica: A Dagger in the Head of Mojo Man,” words “[that] are experienced as material entities that themselves change into one another, just as plants grow from their bulbs in the song, and transform into fists and flesh and body fluids.” Unlike traditional love songs that feature suitors seeking partners in life and in bed, Beefheart goes inside the giddy sensations of mating. “His songs were commonly characterised by a determined avoidance of cliches in both the musical structure and lyrical content—instead of bragging about his prowess as a lover and his ability to conquer sexually, Beefheart’s words would become lost in the frenzy and enjoyment of a sexual encounter,” Graham Johnston writes in his essay, “Clicks and Klangs: Gender and the Avant-Garde.” In expressing that frenzy, Beefheart plays the simran horn, creating the hollow ambience of an air tunnel. Later, Beefheart solos on a miniature bagpipe called a musette, which Bonney describes as sounding like “the offspring of a half-asphyxiated Hammond organ with a North African pan pipe.”

  Where “Neon Meate Dream of a Octafish” plunges into an erotic soundscape of the future, “China Pig” revisits the past. It might even be a throwback to earlier Beefheart. “China Pig” is a standard blues arrangement recorded on the cassette machine during the house sessions. In the spirit of the past, it features the return of the prodigal son, Doug Moon, on guitar. “‘China Pig’ came about just totally off the cuff,” Harkleroad recalled. “[Doug Moon] came down for a visit and was playing this straightahead blues thing and Don really reacted to it in a positive way—almost turning around to us and saying, ‘Well, why don’t you guys play this way?’ We felt like saying, ‘Well we used to, but it’s hard to remember how, since it’s been nine months of twelve-hour days trying to do these other things.’” The irony of Doug Moon’s participation on Trout Mask, after being dismissed for not being adventurous enough, wasn’t lost on many present that day. The song begins as a run-through of Mississippi John Hurt’s “Candy Man,” but it quickly evolves into a blues song about the singer’s ambivalence toward breaking his porcelain piggy bank.

  “Do one of those u-chunk-u-chunk, slow one …,” Don urges Moon, who begins launching into a slow blues in A7. Just as he did in the days of Studio Z with Zappa, Beefheart performed “China Pig” in one room while Moon dutifully picked out the chords in another. The sound they create is pretty much bootleg quality, containing some of the atmosphere of an old Charley Patton record. If it wasn’t for the brief speeding up of the cassette tape toward the end, caused when someone attempted to shut off the recording prematurely, this might have been a song unearthed from the 30s. By leaving the tape glitch in, however, Beefheart and Zappa deliberately make us conscious of the recording process as part of the actual song.

  “My Human Gets Me Blues” is a nice piece of rock bebop about sexual confusion that demonstrates just how dexterous the group had become in their marathon rehearsals. “That was a song that all of us were pretty excited about,” Harkleroad eagerly remarked. “It unified the band more than a lot of other tunes.” Beefheart’s reading is so assured that you can hear his delight in breaking down the English language into delicious morsels of vowels and consonants (“With yer jaw hangin’ slack ’n yer hair’s curlin’ / Like an ole navy fork stickin’ in the sunset”). “[Beefheart] refused to use civilized English in a linear, logical way and learned the entire language as a vast and amusing game,” Langdon Winner writes. “A barrage of puns, rhymes, illogicalities, absurd definitions, and unending word play fills the dialogue with a wonderful confusion.”

  “Dali’s Car” is a complex instrumental ballad, the first song composed explicitly for Trout Mask. It was inspired by a visit the group took to a Salvador Dalí exhibit at the LA County Art Museum during their early rehearsals. Composed by candlelight, when the power had gone out in the street, it was a pivotal song for John French, who couldn’t relinquish Dalí’s pervasive imagery. “This [visit] changed my concept of the drums,” French recalled. “I was impressed not only with Dalí’s photographic technique, but with his ability to superimpose images within other images, as though seeing in more than three dimensions.” What makes “Dali’s Car” so distinct is that it has dimensions built into its guitar chords. Once French taught it to the group, it became a compellingly discordant lullaby. “‘Dali’s Car’ was a duet with Jeff [Cotton] and myself,” Harkleroad explained. “It was this dissonant thing that was rhythmically very tight … we could play it in our sleep all night long exactly like that everytime!”

  “Hair Pie: Bake 2” is the studio version (minus Beefheart and Hayden’s horn duet from the house session) of the original song. Once again, the instrumental track perfectly confounds our expectations, or perhaps, our desire for a rhythmic sequence that harmonizes. Instead, as Langdon Winner would point out, Beefheart “delights in jamming these expectations. His songs begin a rhythmic pattern, let it run for a couple of measures, and then break it off only to strike up something completely different.” In “Hair Pie: Bake 2, according to Winner, there are no fewer than fourteen separate beats and melodies that are quickly introduced, briefly played, and then abruptly dropped.

  As “Hair Pie: Bake 2” hastily concludes, some laughter from Beefheart erupts. Once more, we are thrust into a burlesque routine involving Beefheart’s love of the phrase “fast ’n bulbous.” As Zappa conducts, Victor Hayden and Beefheart trade quips as if spontaneously constructing a poem. Hayden happily shouts the phrase, “fast ’n bulbous!” After which, Beefheart jumps in with, “That’s right, the Mascara Snake, fast ’n bulbous!” lewdly caressing the word “bulbous.” To which Hayden replies proudly, “Bulbous also tapered.” Too quick, apparently, for Beefheart, and missing a line. He states impatiently, “You’re supposed to wait until I say, ‘Also, a tin teardrop.’” Hayden either can’t believe what he’s doing here, or he’s surprised that he simply forgot the line. “Oh … Christ,” he mutters disbelievingly. “Again, beginning!” conductor Zappa cries as if the string section momentarily fucked up a crucial bar of music. The second time through, though, they get it. Spot on. On the beat. “That’s right,” Beefheart says approvingly.

  Some may see the routine as more of Zappa’s juvenile preoccupations, without recognizing that (lik
e Beefheart) he enjoyed interpreting human speech in musical terms. While both men explored that phenomenon in different ways, Zappa often cut disparate pieces of dialogue and music together to create texture and tempo in a musical composition—heard particularily on Lumpy Gravy. With Uncle Meat, and especially Weasels Ripped My Flesh, Zappa created one huge collage out of a series of disparate songs and recitations. In conceptual terms, Zappa similarily shaped Trout Mask as a way to continually contrast the atonal textures in Beefheart’s music. “Dissonance when it’s unresolved is like having a headache,” Zappa once explained to journalist Bob Marshall. “So, the most interesting music, as far as I’m concerned, is music in which dissonance is created, sustained for the proper amount of time, and resolved.”

  When the song “Pena” follows the blithe silliness of the “fast ’n bulbous” interlude, Zappa’s process of resolving dissonance gets reversed. “Pena” may be the harshest tune on the record. One reason for that is that it’s sung by Mark Boston, in his hysterically shrieking soprano voice. The other reason may be the unsettling nature of the song itself. The singer witnesses a girl sitting herself upon a burning waffle iron while sunning herself. The accident causes him to vomit “beautifully,” whereby he provides a band-aid to her burned area. Growing tired and sore from sitting, she promptly gets up and stubs her toe. While recovering, she lets a yellow butterfly out of a blue felt box. The insect resembles in size and shape the white pulps in her sores. The stark delirium of Cotton’s voice disclosing this surreal event creates an unbearable tension that you can’t escape from.

  “Well” is an abstract existential poem that’s told as a traditional blues holler. The blues holler was discovered in the Southern Delta of the early part of the twentieth century, where itinerant black muleskinners worked in the levee. While feeling the pangs of homesickness, they conversely felt the joys of freely roaming from job to job. Even if they worked under the lousiest conditions, under the worst boss, they would act out their anger by singing humorous and racy tall tales. This musical form would eventually be extended to chain gang workers in the penitentiary. Alan Lomax, along with his father, John A. Lomax, did many field recordings of these blues hollers. He describes their distinctive musical rhythms in a manner that might have appealed to Beefheart. “They are solos, slow in tempo, free in rhythm … composed of long, gliding, ornamented, and melismatic phrases, given a melancholy character by minor intervals as well as by blued or bent tones,” Lomax explains. Those long, gliding melismatic phrases, free in rhythm, are exactly what Beefheart achieves in “Well”:

  My mind cracked like custard

  Ran red until it sealed

  Turn t’ wooden ’n rolled like uh wheel well well

  Unlike “China Pig,” which invoked the ambience of an old 78 recording, “Well” is an a cappella recording done in the studio with a modernist sound. Beefheart’s booming Ahab voice, enhanced by added reverb, rails against the echoes of his own defiant chants.

  “When Big Joan Sets Up” is a fiercely energetic track about a large woman who can’t go outside for fear of being humiliated by others. This stunningly intricate hybrid of blues and free jazz bursts into a colorfully expressionistic portrait of sexual disorientation. Beefheart’s voice continually shifts dramatically in the song from pure swing into rhythmless pockets featuring his wildly frenetic sax stylings. “His voice never merely interprets a tune,” Roberto Ohrt rightly points out. “It gives reality to the most important part of his music, one that is impossible to record in music notation.” “When Big Joan Sets Up” is the closest Beefheart comes on Trout Mask in approximating the influence painting has had on his musical compositions.

  After another comic routine, where Mark Boston as Rockette Morton informs us that he runs “on beans—laser beans,” the song “Fallin’ Ditch” follows. It is Beefheart’s answer to Blind Lemon Jefferson’s 1927 “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean.” Jefferson was an East Texas blues singer, born in 1897, with a reed-thin voice and a stunning virtuoso guitar style. Beefheart often covered Jefferson’s ominous “Black Snake Moan,” but “Fallin’ Ditch” is his tribute to Jefferson’s startling defiance of Death. Like Jefferson, he offers Death a nimble taunt:

  Who’s afraid of the spirit with the bluesferbones

  Who’s afraid of the fallin’ ditch

  Fallin’ ditch ain’t gonna get my bones

  Beefheart’s voice is loud and truculent, riding on the acceleration of John French’s percussion, wildly jerking against the guitar lines that pull at him like thick ropes dragging him into the ground.

  “Sugar ’N Spikes,” like “Moonlight on Vermont,” was demoed before Bill Harkleroad joined the band. “[T]he parts were really stretching out from the blues,” Harkleroad explained. “It was like a blues band only with an orchestrated classical feel to it.” Part of that classical feel comes right out of one of the melodic lines that Mike Barnes credits to Miles Davis’s “Concierto de Aranjuez,” heard on Sketches of Spain (1960). Among their diet of blues and R&B, Zappa and Beefheart also listened intently to this album. “Ant Man Bee,” a funky track about the ambiguous relationship between man and nature, has one of the simplest arrangements on the record. “The beat on ‘Ant Man Bee’ was just him sitting down one day [at the drums],” John French recalled. “On Trout Mask, where at a later point we didn’t have time for me to write down all the drum parts, he just sat down and played an idea of what he wanted.” Bill Harkleroad heard something closer to the pan-African sound he discovered later on John Coltrane records. “I’d listened to Coltrane’s Africa/Brass but just never, ever got that feeling,” Harkleroad explained. “John French put that African feel across because of the way he played drums.… He was really ahead of his time.” Captain Beefheart summed up the song’s meaning to Langdon Winner, “If you give [the ants] sugar, they won’t have to eat the poison.”

  During the sessions for Uncle Meat, Frank Zappa recorded a lovely honky-tonk instrumental version of a traditional sea chanty called “Handsome Cabin Boy.” “[It’s] a song about the bogus certification of sailors,” Zappa explained. “A girl goes on a boat dressed as a boy and gets pregnant. The lyrics are all about who done it.” Zappa had heard the song on the record Blow Boys Blow, a collection of rowdy and profane sea ballads, interpreted by Ewan MacColl and A. L. Lloyd. The collaboration of these two folk legends, in the early sixties, was an attempt to, as they put it in the album’s liner notes, create the fidelity of the original songs while bringing deeper shadings to the dramatic material within them. “The stereotype of the roaring brutal sea-dog is present in nearly all the songs in this album, but the careful listener will perceive, beyond the toughness and the irony, a deep unease, an ache, a longing for something better,” they wrote. After listening repeatedly to the record, he loaned it to Beefheart. Or, at least, that’s how the story goes. “He gave it to me!” Beefheart railed in protest, still miffed years later in 1994. Whatever the truth, the song “Orange Claw Hammer,” which opens the final side of Trout Mask Replica, has both the toughness and the ache that Lloyd and MacColl sought on their album.

  The recitation, which took two hours to record on the cassette machine, is the most sustained and satisfying dramatic reading on the record. There is an unyielding tension here, as if we’re hearing a song in the process of creating itself. Bob Dylan once accomplished this feat on “I’m Not There,” an unreleased song featured on a bootleg collection of his complete 1967 basement tapes with the Band. Dylan’s track, a love song about failed commitment, has him singing lyrics that seem to be invented on the spot. The effect doesn’t so much complete his thoughts as it reveals something about how language begins to define itself as thought. On “Orange Claw Hammer,” Beefheart tells his own story of failed commitment, of familial despair, where the singer appears to be seeking words that his feelings have yet to register. A father, who has been living at sea, finally confronts his long-lost daughter years later. But the tale is told through a spree of quick pulsating images that un
nerve the singer as the story unfolds. In this illusively told tale, powerfully provocative images continuously stab into the mortal fears of this peg-legged sailor:

  Uh beautiful sagebrush jack rabbit

  ’n an oriole sang like an orange

  His breast full uh worms

  ’n his tail clawed the evenin’ like uh hammer

  Once again, with the clicking of the tape recorder’s pause button punctuating each line, Beefheart lets the story tell itself rather than trying to impose a narrative onto it. “The song works not for what it says to us but for the way it joggles out an inherited store of fantasies about drifters, seaports, pirates, and the separation of fathers and children,” Langdon Winner writes in “Stranded.” “Orange Claw Hammer” evokes the pathos in the painful reunion of father and daughter without pulling heartstrings to achieve it. In 1976, while on tour with Zappa’s band, he and Beefheart sat in a radio station and performed a plaintive version of “Orange Claw Hammer.” Beefheart confidently sang the song, rather than letting it sing him. Meanwhile, Zappa’s acoustic guitar, which accompanied Beefheart’s performance, always kept the narrative hurtling forward (the way Ralph Rinzler’s and Steve Benbow’s guitars do on the songs featured on Blow Boys Blow). In this rare happy moment between them, Zappa provided a cozy bed for Beefheart’s unrequited longing.

  “People are just too far out—far away from nature,” Beefheart said in Rolling Stone. “Wild Life” tells us just how far. It’s the perhaps the most prescient of Beefheart’s songs on Trout Mask Replica, since he would eventually abandon the music business and retreat to a trailer far removed from urban centres altogether. “Wild Life,” though, is hardly the most lyrically imaginative track (“Wild life along with my wife / I’m goin’ up on the mountain fo’ the rest uh m’ life”), but outside of “When Big Joan Sets Up” and the conclusion of “Ant Man Bee,” it does have some of Beefheart’s finest horn solos. On “Wild Life,” he even tries to imitate his own speech patterns. “[I]t was the best horn playing Don did,” Harkleroad asserted. “Of course, he didn’t know what he was doing, but he got pretty good at squeezing out a great tone.” It was such a good tone that in 1982, Magic Band guitarist Gary Lucas transcribed the sax solo for his guitar melody on “The Host the Ghost Most Holy-O” included on Ice Cream for Crow.