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.
