Trout Mask Replica is the third studio album by Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, released in June, 1969. The album was produced by Frank Zappa, a friend and former schoolmate of Beefheart, and was originally released on Zappa's Straight Records imprint. Combining blues, avant-garde, free jazz and other disparate genres of American music, Trout Mask Replica is regarded as an important work of experimental music and a major influence in alternative rock. A widely recognized and acclaimed composition, Trout Mask Replica appears at number fifty-eight on Rolling Stone's "500 Greatest Albums of All Time".
Background
The band had a history of uncertain relationships with their recording labels. A&M released the group's first single, a cover of Bo Diddley's "Diddy Wah Diddy", but dropped the contract after their first two singles failed to produce hits. They were then signed to Buddah Records for their (and the label's) first album, 1967's Safe as Milk. Soon afterward Buddah began specializing in "bubblegum pop," a style in which Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band clearly had no place, and the group again found themselves without a record label. Around this time Van Vliet's high school friend Frank Zappa started his own pair of record labels, Bizarre and Straight. In mid-1968 Zappa offered Van Vliet the opportunity to record an album with complete artistic freedom. The result was Trout Mask Replica.
Van Vliet had begun assigning nicknames to his band members, so Harkleroad was credited as "Zoot Horn Rollo," John French as "Drumbo," Jeff Cotton as "Antennae Jimmy Semens," Boston as "Rockette Morton," and Hayden "The Mascara Snake."
Van Vliet wanted the whole band to "live" the Trout Mask Replica album. The group rehearsed Van Vliet's difficult compositions for eight months, living communally in a small rented house in the Woodland Hills suburb of Los Angeles. Van Vliet's approach for implementing his musical vision was to establish complete artistic and emotional domination of his musicians. At various times one or another of the group members was 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.[1] Drummer John French described the situation as "cultlike"[2] and a visiting friend said "the environment in that house was positively Manson-esque."[3] Their material circumstances also were dire. With no income other than welfare and contributions from relatives the group survived on a bare subsistence diet, and were even arrested for shoplifting food (with Zappa bailing them out). A friend of Van Vliet's who visited the house described their appearance as "cadaverous" and that "they all looked in poor health." Band members were restricted from leaving the house and practiced for 14 or more hours a day.
Composition and production
Composition
The compositions on Trout Mask Replica draw their inspiration primarily from blues and free jazz but also include elements of genres ranging from folk music to the current avant-garde of classical music to sea shanties and beyond. All this was blended into an iconoclastic whole of conflicting tempi, harsh slide guitar, extraordinarily complex drumming, and honking saxophone and bass clarinet. Van Vliet's vocals range from growling blues singing to frenzied falsetto to laconic, casual ramblings. His lyrics often seem impenetrably strange and nonsensical, but closer examination reveals complex poetic use of word play, metaphor and all manner of references: music history, American and international politics, the Holocaust, love and sexuality, Steve Reich, gospel music, conformity, and man's impact on his surroundings.
According to Van Vliet the songs on the album were written in a single eight-hour session, though band members have stated that he worked on the main set of compositions for roughly three weeks. At least three of the songs ("Moonlight on Vermont," "Veteran's Day Poppy" and "Sugar 'n Spikes") were recorded or demoed several months before the main body of material was written, and have at least distant resemblance to conventional song forms. Another three are unaccompanied vocal solos ("Well," "The Dust Blows Forward and the Dust Blows Back," and "Orange Claw Hammer"). The rest of the songs were composed and arranged in an unprecedented process of experimentation. One influence on the compositional process was a tape that Van Vliet's friend Gary Marker had played for him. Marker, an aspiring recording engineer, was learning how to splice audio tape. He practiced by combining sections of various recordings so that they would join smoothly and maintain a consistent beat despite being from different sources. The result was a series of passages that had no obvious relation to each other and yet maintained a continuous rhythmic pulse. When Van Vliet heard the tape he said excitedly, "That's what I want!"
Van Vliet used a piano - an instrument he had never played before - as his main compositional tool. Since he had no experience with the piano and no conventional musical knowledge at all, he was able to experiment with no preconceived ideas of musical form or structure. Beefheart sat at the piano until he found a rhythmic or melodic pattern that he liked, and drummer John French then transcribed the pattern into musical notation. French then pieced these fragments together into compositions, reminiscent of the splicing together of disparate source material on Marker's tape. French then assigned parts to each instrument, with Van Vliet having final say over the ultimate shape of the product. Band member Bill Harkleroad has remarked on "how haphazardly the individual parts were done, worked on very surgically, stuck together, and then sculpted afterwards." Once completed each song was played in exactly the same way every time, eschewing the improvisation that typifies most popular music in favor of an approach more like a formal, classical composition. Guitarist Fred Frith noted that during this process "forces that usually emerge in improvisation are harnessed and made constant, repeatable."[4]
Several of the compositions include brief passages from other songs. Some were childhood reminiscences, such as Gene Autry's recording "Rancho Grande" from which one of the guitar lines in "Veterans Day Poppy" was adapted, or the "Shortnin' Bread" melody used in "Pachuco Cadaver." Others were more contemporary, such as the quote "come out to show dem (them)" from Steve Reich's "Come Out" used in "Moonlight On Vermont", or a melodic fragment from the Miles Davis recording of Concierto de Aranjuez used as the basis for the bridge of "Sugar 'N Spikes." The ending of "Moonlight on Vermont" also includes the refrain from the spiritual "Old-Time Religion."
Recording
"Moonlight on Vermont" and "Veterans Day Poppy" were recorded at Sunset Sound Recorders in August 1968, about seven months before the rest of the songs were recorded. These songs featured a lineup of Van Vliet, Bill Harkleroad and Jeff Cotton on guitar, John French on drums, and Van Vliet's friend Gary Marker serving temporarily on bass. About a month later Mark Boston joined the band as full-time bassist. The lineup of Van Vliet, Harkleroad, Cotton, French and Boston recorded the rest of the tracks, with Van Vliet's cousin Victor Hayden occasionally guesting on bass clarinet.
Zappa originally proposed to record the album as an "ethnic field recording" in the house where they 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. One of the tracks recorded by Zappa and Kunc at the house, "Hair Pie: Bake 1", appeared on the finished album. Three other tracks appearing on the album were recorded on a cassette recorder at the house, the a cappella poems "The Dust Blows Forward and The Dust Blows Back" and "Orange Claw Hammer," and the improvised blues "China Pig" with former Magic Band member Doug Moon accompanying Van Vliet on guitar.
When they entered the studio the band knocked out all of the instrumental tracks in a single six-hour recording session.[5] 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.[6] 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?"[7]
Van Vliet used the ensuing publicity, particularly with a 1970 Rolling Stone interview with Langdon Winner, to promulgate a number of myths which have subsequently been quoted as fact. Winner's article stated, for instance, that neither Van Vliet nor the members of the Magic Band ever took drugs, but guitarist Bill Harkleroad, and drummer John French later discredited this. Van Vliet also claimed to have taught both Harkleroad and bassist Mark Boston from scratch; in fact the pair were already accomplished musicians before joining the band.[6]
Legacy
The famous BBC disc jockey John Peel said of the album: "If there has been anything in the history of popular music which could be described as a work of art in a way that people who are involved in other areas of art would understand, then Trout Mask Replica is probably that work."[8] Peel's playing of the record on late-night radio in Britain was largely responsible for its reaching 21 in the UK charts.
Critic Steve Huey writes that the album's influence "was felt more in spirit than in direct copycatting, as a catalyst rather than a literal musical starting point. However, its inspiring reimagining of what was possible in a rock context laid the groundwork for countless experiments in rock surrealism to follow, especially during the punk/new wave era."[9] Matt Groening has written that his first reaction to Trout Mask Replica was that it was "the worst thing [he]'d ever heard", but now lists the album as one of his favorites.[10] In his 1995 book, "The Alternative Music Almanac", Alan Cross placed the album in the #2 spot on the list of '10 Classic Alternative Albums'. In 1995, Mojo put the album 28th on their "The 100 Greatest Albums Ever Made" list [1] and 51st on their "The 100 Records That Changed the World" list [2].
Track listing
All songs written by Van Vliet.
- Side one
- "Frownland" – 1:41
- "The Dust Blows Forward 'n the Dust Blows Back" – 1:53
- "Dachau Blues" – 2:21
- "Ella Guru" – 2:26
- "Hair Pie: Bake 1" – 4:58
- "Moonlight on Vermont" – 3:59
- Side two
- "Pachuco Cadaver" – 4:40
- "Bills Corpse" – 1:48
- "Sweet Sweet Bulbs" – 2:21
- "Neon Meate Dream of a Octafish" – 2:25
- "China Pig" – 4:02
- "My Human Gets Me Blues" – 2:46
- "Dali's Car" – 1:26
- Side three
- "Hair Pie: Bake 2" – 2:23
- "Pena" – 2:33
- "Well" – 2:07
- "When Big Joan Sets Up" – 5:18
- "Fallin' Ditch" – 2:08
- "Sugar 'n Spikes" – 2:30
- "Ant Man Bee" – 3:57
- Side four
- "Orange Claw Hammer" – 3:34
- "Wild Life" – 3:09
- "She's Too Much for My Mirror" – 1:40
- "Hobo Chang Ba" – 2:02
- "The Blimp (mousetrapreplica)" – 2:04
- "Steal Softly thru Snow" – 2:18
- "Old Fart at Play" – 1:51
- "Veteran's Day Poppy" – 4:31
Personnel
- Musicians
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- The Magic Band
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- Additional musicians
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References
- ^ http://vpinterviews.blogspot.com/2005/04/magic-band.html
- ^ "Burundo Drumbi! - John French's Series of Q&As, 2000/1". The Captain Beefheart Radar Station. http://www.beefheart.com/datharp/drumbo/paullewis.htm. Retrieved 2007-12-09.
- ^ Barnes, Mike. Captain Beefheart. Quartet Books, ISBN 0704380739.
- ^ Fred Frith, 1974, New Musical Express (exact date unknown), as quoted in Barnes.
- ^ Miles, Barry (2005). Zappa: A Biography. pp. 182–183. Grove Press
- ^ a b Chusid, Irwin (2000). Songs in the Key of Z: The Curious Universe of Outsider Music, pp. 129–140. London: Cherry Red Books. ISBN 1-901447-11-1
- ^ From Zig Zag magazine, No. 8, 1969 (as cited by M. Barnes in Captain Beefheart)
- ^ Barnes, Mike (February 1999). "Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band: Trout Mask Replica". Perfect Sound Forever. http://www.furious.com/Perfect/beefheart/troutmaskreplica3.html. Retrieved 2007-12-09.
- ^ "Trout Mask Replica > Review". AMG. http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:m9x8b5f4tsqs~T1. Retrieved 2008-08-25.
- ^ Groening, Matt (December 1993). "Plastic Factory". Mojo.
External links
