CAPTAIN BEEFHEART & HIS MAGIC BAND - TROUT MASK REPLICA @ 55

 

Released on June 16th, 1969, Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band's third album, Trout Mask Replica, turns 55 years old today. Whether you truly love the album, name drop it for coolness brownie points, or consider it an unlistenable monstrosity, its mere mention is bound to stir up controversy and everything from profound admiration to disdainful outrage.

Beefheart and Band had a historically rocky relationship with record labels, resulting in a tremendous amount of confusion and disappointment for their first releases. First they were dropped by A&M after their first couple of singles failed to chart, then their label for their debut LP took a hard turn into bubblegum pop, leaving Beefheart on the outskirts again. Then sessions for what would eventually materialize as Strictly Personal and Mirror Man resulted in a backlog of recordings the band weren't sure would ever even see the light of day. Enter friend of Beefheart, Frank Zappa (who gave Beefheart his name), with an offer to release an album on his newly established imprint, Straight Records, and the promise of complete creative autonomy.

With that offer in hand, Beefheart and Band set up shop in a small, somewhat rundown rented house in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles. There, they set about the task of interpreting band leader Don Van Vliet's vision, with drummer, John "Drumbo" French, acting as principal translator of his compositions, which were often communicated through piano and vocal recitations. Van Vliet had never played piano before as his main composition tool, so given he had no experience with the instrument and no conventional musical knowledge at all, he was able to experiment with few preconceived ideas of musical form or structure. Van Vliet sat at the piano until he found a rhythmic or melodic pattern that he liked. John French then transcribed this pattern, typically only a measure or two long, into musical notation. After Van Vliet was finished, French would piece these fragments together into compositions, reminiscent of the splicing together of disparate source material on Marker's tape.

During the band's residency in the house, Van Vliet became a musical and emotional tyrant, creating something akin to a small cult, restricting the activities of the musicians and demanding adherence to his instructions to the letter. At various times, one or another of the band members were put "in the barrel", with Van Vliet berating him continually, sometimes for days, until the musician collapsed in tears or in total submission to Van Vliet. According to John French and Bill Harkleroad, these sessions often included physical violence. Their material circumstances also were dire. With no income other than welfare and contributions from relatives, the band survived on a bare subsistence diet. French recounted living on no more than a small cup of soybeans a day for a month, and at one point, band members were arrested for shoplifting food (whereupon Zappa bailed them out). A visitor described their appearance as "cadaverous" and said that "they all looked in poor health". Band members were restricted from leaving the house and practised for fourteen or more hours a day. This went on for eight long months before Van Vliet deemed that they were ready to go into a recording studio.

Zappa originally proposed to record the album as an "ethnic field recording" in the house where the band lived. Working with Zappa and engineer Dick Kunc, the band recorded some provisional backing tracks at the Woodland Hills house, with sound separation obtained simply by having different instruments in different rooms. Zappa thought these provisional recordings turned out well, but Van Vliet became suspicious that Zappa was trying to record the album on the cheap and insisted on using a professional studio. Zappa would say of Van Vliet's approach that it was "impossible to tell him why things should be such and such a way. It seemed to me that if he was going to create a unique object, that the best thing for me to do was to keep my mouth shut as much as possible and just let him do whatever he wanted to do whether I thought it was wrong or not." Van Vliet once told drummer John French that he had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and he would see nonexistent conspiracies, which in hindsight, may have explained some of this behaviour.

Once it was time to head to the studio, the band had ingrained the arrangements and their parts so deeply through their endless rehearsals, the recording process was able to proceed extremely rapidly, with songs frequently requiring only one take. In one session, the band completed twenty instrumental tracks in a single six-hour recording marathon. Van Vliet spent the next few days overdubbing the vocals. Instead of singing while monitoring the instrumental tracks over headphones, he heard only the slight sound leakage through the studio window. As a result, the vocals are only vaguely in sync with the instrumental backing; when asked later about synchronization, he remarked, "That's what they do before a commando raid, isn't it?"

From a commercial perspective, the album stood well outside the bounds of what was considered "popular music", and though it held shards of blues, jazz and rock, those reference points were all shattered and smashed, and the pieces were glued back together in angular, disjointed collages of rhythms, notes and non-sequitur vocal phrases. It was a kind of alchemy where listeners were often repelled by the record on first listen, then agonizingly drawn into its clutches until it became impossible to disregard it. Simpson's creator, Matt Groening, has famously recounted his experience with the album in exactly such a manner, describing his total disdain upon initial exposure, followed by an infectious obsession with it after subsequent listens. Yet it doesn't actually constitute something that was ahead of its time. That time has never come and it continues to stand outside of any time or referential context. It is simply singular in its idiosyncrasies and originality. It occupies its own world and refuses to integrate with any other.