Home » Jazz Articles » Extended Analysis » Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band: Trout Mask Replica
Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band: Trout Mask Replica
"No Instruction Sheet": Trout Mask Replica's Unfathomable Origin Story
If you were a teenager who liked freaky stuff, on a June day in 1969 you could bicycle down to your local record store and buy a brand-new, shrink-wrapped album with a man covering his entire face with an actual fish head on the cover. A double-LP set, it cost your whole month's paper route money, but there was something about the guys on the back-cover photo, who looked like refugees from a down-at-the-heels science fiction carnival, with hair longer than your dad would ever let you grow, that made you willing to go for broke. Rolling Stone's review had called this very album "the most unusual and challenging musical experience you'll have this year," throwing out names of musicians of whom you'd never heard, including
Don Cherry
trumpet1936 - 1995
Ed Blackwell
drums1929 - 1992
Albert Ayler
saxophone, tenor1936 - 1970
Cecil Taylor
piano1929 - 2018
Dave Brubeck
piano1920 - 2012
Captain Beefheart
vocals1941 - 2010
On the first track, two guitarists, one bassist, and a drummer played a sort of clanging, rhythmic tune, with the guitars slightly out of sync until, seven seconds in, an angry-sounding, gravelly-voiced man started yelling a microphone, "My smile is stuck"—but it sure didn't sound like he was smiling. Then, a few seconds later, the musicians gave up trying to keep time with each other and each went whirling away like four separate music boxes that had gotten caught in a lawn mower, but still played. They sounded like the "black jagged shadows" this (was it?) Captain Beefheart evoked irately. Good thing there was a lyric sheet, so you could tell that, despite Beefheart and His Magic Band's apparent aversion to melody, he was singing a basically corny set of 1969 clichés about brotherhood:
Take my hand 'n come with me
It's not too late for you
If it's not too late for me
To find my homeland
Thing was, no way did you want to take this singer, this hollerer's, hand. The whole group emanated brittle metallic unhingedness. Until now, the craziest song you'd heard was
The Beatles
band / ensemble / orchestraRolling Stone's rave review had been penned by none other than a twenty-one year-old Lester Bangs. Although Bangs rightfully asserted, in 1980, that Trout Mask Replica "was not even 'ahead' of its time in 1969. Then and now, it stands outside time, trends, fads, hypes, the rise and fall of whole genres," the album nonetheless bears some traces of its late '60s origins. These traces include the gatefold's psychedelic hues; a man's voice saying, out of nowhere, apropos of nothing, "Ha, ha, that's right, just DIG it," in one song; a few of the era's ubiquitous paens to woman-as-earth-goddess— "When she walks flowers surround her / Let their nectar come in to the air around her"—that must have driven at least some actual women bonkers. But the strongest trace of 1969 lies in the album's having been—"made" doesn't seem strong enough —try summoned from the depths—at all, let alone under the imprimatur of a major record label, Warner Bros. Records.
Actually, the album came out on Straight, a record label run by
Frank Zappa
guitar, electric1940 - 1993
Don Van Vliet
vocalsCaptain Beefheart
vocals1941 - 2010
Zappa doesn't seem to have gotten, or asked for, much money, if any, from his corporate sponsors to fund Trout Mask Replica's months- long gestation. By all accounts, the band and its leader, living in a state of cult-like semi-penury in a house in the L.A. suburb of Woodland Hills, subsisted on checks from Van Vliet's mother and contributions from guitarist Bill Harkleroad (Zoot Horn Rollo)'s college fund. At one point, Zappa bailed out members of the band after they'd been busted for shoplifting food. The band's comparative pennilessness makes the resulting two-disc collision of Modernist classical music, "New Thing" jazz, blues (holler, acoustic, and electric), spoken word art, and other genres I may not have divined despite hundreds of listens, all the more unlikely. I've complimented the late Zappa on his business sense, but I'm sure he knew how fundamentally uncommercial, or even anti-commercial, an album Trout Mask was—because he'd produced it. The four-piece band of young, though experienced, musicians play songs that throw rock convention out the window for musical structures that had more in common with Igor Stravinsky's Modernist-era oeuvre than with, say, then-contemporaries
Ten Years After
band / ensemble / orchestrab.1966
Everyone who...experiences Trout Mask Replica recognizes it as a high-impact collision of musical styles and approaches, but different listeners tend to fixate on different aspects of the album's sound. In 1980, Bangs conceived of Trout Mask in terms of what was, by then, already a bygone epoch in jazz history: "Beefheart and his unearthly looking cabal of spazmo henchmen seemed effortlessly to cook up the so-far still definitive statement on the possibilities for some common ground...on which raunch rock, slide-slinging Delta blues, and post-Coltrane/Shepp/Ayler free jazz might consecrate a shakedown together." Statements like this sound great, but despite Beefheart and His Magic Band's mastery of the Delta blues, there's only one blues song with instrumental backing, "China Pig," on the album. Trout Mask's instrumental tracks incorporate blues elements, just as they, for a few seconds, quote note-for-note from a song on non-free-jazzer
Miles Davis
trumpet1926 - 1991
I can only imagine the ghosts of Bangs and Van Vliet chuckling in ghoulish antiphony when Trout Mask Replica was selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress in 2011 among the twenty-five works named annually as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." Like Bangs, the government musicologists tasked with writing the album up see Trout Mask as a mélange-meltdown of a record: "This unclassifiable melding of country, blues, folk and free jazz filtered through Captain Beefheart's feverishly inventive imagination remains without precedent in its striking sonic and lyrical originality." Neither of these elements for Van Vliet's Blender mentions Modernist classical music. Nor is the work of
Steve Reich
composer / conductorb.1936
Thanks to drummer and uncredited co-arranger
John French
drums
Joe Henderson
saxophone1937 - 2001
Charles Lloyd
saxophoneb.1938
John Handy
saxophoneb.1933
Miles Davis
trumpet1926 - 1991
John Lee Hooker
guitar1917 - 2001
Muddy Waters
guitar1915 - 1983
Howlin' Wolf
vocals1910 - 1976
Son House
guitar, slide1902 - 1988
Lightnin' Hopkins
guitar1912 - 1982
Lightnin' Slim
guitar, electric1913 - 1974
Wes Montgomery
guitar1923 - 1968
Gabor Szabo
guitar1936 - 1982
Eric Dolphy
woodwinds1928 - 1964
John Coltrane
saxophone1926 - 1967
Ornette Coleman
saxophone, alto1930 - 2015
Archie Shepp
saxophone, tenorb.1937
Horace Silver
piano1928 - 2014
Son House
guitar, slide1902 - 1988
Bob Dylan
guitar and vocalsb.1941
The Rolling Stones
band / ensemble / orchestrab.1962
The Beatles
band / ensemble / orchestraHaving spent more time than I care to admit immersed the history of Trout Mask Replica's gestation and recording—with the help of composer and Professor of Music at the Syracuse University Strasbourg Center Samuel Andreyev's recent, in-depth interviews with the Magic Band—I think it helps to map out the album's temporal stages rather than to conceive of Trout Mask Replica as a madman's goulash of styles dropped in the pot together at once. I'm also less interested the question of the album's relation to jazz per se than I was when I started. In a way, Van Vliet's approach to saxophone is a red herring for those fascinated by jazz and Trout Mask Replica, whose songs' composition and arrangement (the latter task shared with the Magic Band), the on-the-spot creation of its lyrics, and his vocal delivery of those lyrics in the studio, were all, to some extent, improvisatory. The album features many different kinds of improvisation, but they happen on different time-frames: the songs came together through a highly idiosyncratic, but essentially improvisatory, process; but once the band had those songs down, the musicians rehearsed them so incessantly, over a period of months, that they became the world's only experts at playing them. Beefheart's horn playing and vocal delivery, on the other hand, were improvised on the spot in the recording studio.
In a way, Trout Mask Replica combines two related-but-distinct related albums—one rigidly formal, if not rote (the Magic Band) and the other howling-at-the-moon style uncontrolled (Van Vliet). In March, 1969, the album was recorded over two different sessions at Whitney Studios in Glendale: the Magic Band's instrumental parts first, and, a few days later, Van Vliet's vocals and horn parts. ("Moonlight on Vermont" and "Veteran's Day Poppy" had already recorded in 1968 Sunset Sound Recorders.) It's passed into Beefheart lore that, during his recording session, Van Vliet recorded his vocal and saxophone parts without headphones, and so, apparently with little regard for the Magic Band's exhaustively and obsessively rehearsed musical tracks. However, French downplays this detail's significance: "Oh, [Van Vliet] was in synch quite often, I thought.... The studio wasn't very good, so the leakage was probably sufficient" for Van Vliet to hear the instrumental tracks without the aid of headphones.
The two albums, or two halves of one album, don't always fit together easily. I don't think Trout Mask Replica sounds like noise, but I sympathize with those who do, at least on the first few listens. As bassist
Mark Boston
bass, electricAs critic Robert Palmer points out, Trout Mask Replica's songs are characterized by "[u]nequal phrase lengths, shifting meters, and rhythms that change radically every few lines [to] keep the unwary listener perpetually off balance." The best explanation I've seen of how a Trout Mask song functions appears on Andreyev's online tutorial on "Frownland." Andreyev maps out how each song contains many mini-songs—he calls them "blocks," but other most of the musicians use the term "riffs"—which change at intervals of roughly twenty to thirty seconds. (Andreyev and his Magic Band interviewees don't always share the same vocabulary: for Andreyev, "blocks" refers to "entire complexes of riffs played together.") Each shift block to block may be accompanied by a change of key, tempo, or other musical element; but to complicate things further, within each new musical block the musicians may be playing at different tempos, et al. For instance, Andreyev points out that in the beginning of "Frownland," "guitar 1, bass, and drums all play a 7-beat phrase"; while the second guitar "plays a 5-beat phrase in a different tempo." It's no wonder our fictional teenage listener was thrown off by the album's opening.
The shifts of mood and genre from song to song on side one function as a macro version of the shifts within most of the album's songs. Langdon Winner actually counted out the shifts between blocks or riffs in one song: "In the two and a half minutes of the instrumental 'Hair Pie: Bake 2,' for instance, there are no fewer than fourteen separate beats and melodies quickly introduced, briefly run, and abruptly junked. Throughout the whole album, just when you think you've begun to groove on something, just when your toe starts tapping, it's vanished and something else has taken its place." How did Van Vliet and the Magic Band arrive at such an innovative or, depending on your sensibility, utterly unhinged sound? French opines, "Actually, I find little on Trout Mask that sounds like a 'blues part.' I find an overall abstract relationship to blues in much of the music, due to Don's influences in youth, but I also find bits of jazz influence, and even classical influences all thrown together."
The music itself demonstrates that Van Vliet moved away from identifying himself as a bluesman and began to identify himself with originators of twentieth-century avant-garde classical music and avant-garde jazz. Guitarist Jeff Cotton (Antennae Jimmy Semens) remembers Van Vliet playing German electronic composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, a precursor to Reich, for the band. As with Reich, I don't think Stockhausen influenced Van Vliet in the strict sense; but latter's music may have freed Beefheart up to find different models for his music than rock or even his beloved Delta blues allowed and provided him with the model of an avant-garde composer. He didn't abandon Delta blues, whose elastic sense of rhythm served his compositional purposes, in a musical sense, but I believe he looked beyond the blues—and definitely beyond late '60s rock—for twentieth-century composers to serve as models for his new music.
One of these models included Stravinsky, to whom, French remembers, Van Vliet compared himself. (If you can't stomach the comparison, just skip this paragraph.) Assuming Van Vliet actually listened to Stravinsky's Modernist-era compositions and didn't just seek to emulate The Rite of Spring's succès de scandale, the latter composer had much to offer the former on a musical level. I learned from Andreyev that Stravinsky eschewed the traditional notion of development in classical music, where the piece takes a listener on a kind of voyage, and each musical motif flows out the one before, and latter motifs return to earlier ones. Stravinsky rejected this kind of development for compositions that are stitched together musically. The model is less that of a (temporal) voyage than a (visual) mosaic. In his Modernist compositions, no one idea carries through to the end; the whole thrust of his pieces is anti-organic. If you've read my earlier description of Van Vliet's Trout Mask songs as stringing discrete, often unrelated riffs together, this sketch of Stravinsky's principles as a composer hints at why the former might have compared himself to the latter, albeit in a megalomaniac gesture.
Although I haven't found any evidence that a recording of Stravinsky's "Les Noces" (1923), a ballet and orchestral work for percussion, pianists, chorus, and vocal soloists, to which Andreyev referred me, was lying around the so-called "Trout Mask House" in Woodland Hills, California, after listening to the piece I understood better why Van Vliet would cast himself as a sixties Stravinsky. In "Les Noces," the modernist composer stays just this side of cacophony: no sooner does Stravinsky introduce a musical through-line then he disrupts it. Listen to the Pokrovsky Ensemble's 1994 recording of this piece and you'll find some of the most Trout Mask-y sounding music this side of
Archie Shepp
saxophone, tenorb.1937
Another, more then-recent composer and jazz musician who I'm certain served as a model for Van Vliet was
Eric Dolphy
woodwinds1928 - 1964
Freddie Hubbard
trumpet1938 - 2008
Tony Williams
drums1945 - 1997
Richard Davis
bass, acoustic1930 - 2023
Bobby Hutcherson
vibraphone1941 - 2016
This description of Dolphy's compositional style sounds not only like a less formal version of Stravinsky's Modernism, it also bears a similarity to the plethora of beats and melodies tried out and discarded, non-sequitur style, in Van Vliet's songs. To be sure, Dolphy was a far, far more accomplished and well- trained composer and player than Van Vliet, but since there are precious few contemporary models for Trout Mask Replica's instrumental sections, I'm going willing to draw a pretty straight line between Out to Lunch and Beefheart. Of course, the obvious difference between Stravinsky's compositions and Dolphy's is that the former were composed using musical notation that enables musicians to play his Modernist work almost a century later; whereas Out to Lunch's compositions, even if Dolphy brought charts to the session, evolved right there in the studio by means of improvisation. The album's liner notes reveal that Dolphy "wanted a free date to begin with." Van Vliet didn't give the Magic Band the freedom that Dolphy gave Williams and the rest of his collaborators, but something of Out to Lunch's non-sequitur composition style makes it into the former's songs for Trout Mask Replica.
To try out these new models in Modernist classical music, electronic music, and progressive jazz, Van Vliet needed a band pliant enough not to question his increasingly unconventional musical worldview—or any other aspect of his authority. Van Vliet began to establish that control in 1968 by kicking two long-time members of His Magic Band, Jerry Handley and Alex St. Clair, or letting them quit. Both were closer to Van Vliet's age and needed to make a living by playing with a touring band, while Van Vliet had no interest in playing live. Instead, he moved into 4295 Ensenada Drive, Woodland Hills, in the San Fernando Valley, with the two remaining, younger band members, drummer French and guitarist Cotton, to work on his double-album for Straight. Soon, he recruited two other younger players, guitarist Harkleroad, then ensconced in an acid cult, and bassist Boston. As it happened, this particular group of musicians had grown up together in the small musical world of Lancaster County and played together in high school in various mid-to late-60s bands, including Blues in a Bottle. Van Vliet "picked the best musicians he could find from the desert," Cotton asserts half a century later. (Van Vliet's cousin,
Victor Hayden
clarinet, bassAs Cotton remembers, "Once he got rid of [Handley and St. Clair], anything was fair game. He had a bunch of young kids"—implying that Van Vliet had assembled a group it would easier to manipulate. One of the youngest band members, Harkleroad, remembers grooving out to Safe as Milk as a teenager when it came out, so that being asked to join the band may have fulfilled a teenager's musical hero-worship fantasies. He was still just barely out of teens though: when Van Vliet introduced the band to Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art—a very Beefheart-like way to preparing them to play his music—Harkleroad remembers, "These [artists' names] were all new...to me, the only [names] I knew were baseball players like Sandy Koufax." I imagine that Harkleroad and some other members of newly-constituted Magic Band would probably have been happy to play freaky-but-accessible psychedelic blues rock and to get out of the Woodland House to play gigs, meet some fans. They probably could have made some money, especially on the U.K. circuit. But Van Vliet didn't want to tour—\he even turned down the chance to play Woodstock—and he wanted to make a record totally different from Safe as Milk.
In order to create a sound as far from blues-rock as he could get, even with the two guitars, bass, and drums line-up, Van Vliet emerges, after even a cursory amount of research, as a wildly insecure, power-tripping, saxophone-strangling, credit-hogging, check-from-your-mother-cashing prodigy and/or cult leader. He compared himself, as we've already learned, to Stravinsky; decades later, Cotton compared him to Charles Manson in his mode of exercising control over the band. (No one knows seems to know what Van Vliet and Manson talked about when they met briefly, in the summer of 1968, at the Fountain of the World compound in Simi Valley.) Both comparisons have real validity and point to contradiction as the album's generative impulse. According to Winner, who penned the single most insightful sentence about Trout Mask Replica: "At the center of all the delightfully unrestrained playfulness is an awesome, if not downright dangerous, degree of control (my italics)."
This contradiction absolutely defines the album. The playfulness, as we've seen, was reserved for his own horn solos and lyrics; while the Magic Band had to learn their parts note-for-note. In his memoir of the Beefheart years, French recalls, "Almost everything recorded by [Van Vliet] was intuitively performed, whereas [the Magic Band] could seldom do anything intuitively, because it took a constant intellectual process just to keep from getting lost in the complexity, much less being able to play anything with spontaneity" (italics French's). How did Van Vliet manage to get some of the most avant-garde music ever heard in rock out of his head and into playable parts for his band, all without reading music or playing the instruments on which he "composed" the songs?
In fact, though he was loathe to admit it, Van Vliet was a self-taught musician whose insecurity about his ignorance of technical terminology caused him to lash out at his musicians for asking each other, say, what key a song was in. He couldn't "write" a song in a traditional sense, let alone twenty-eight of them in a day, which is how he later claimed to Rolling Stone that he had composed Trout Mask Replica. Van Vliet's deep dark secret was his need for an arranger and musical director, someone who would cobble together the proto-musical fragments he came up with into actual compositions, and then teach those compositions to the band. He needed a
Billy Strayhorn
piano1915 - 1967
Duke Ellington
piano1899 - 1974
Ry Cooder
guitarb.1947
Cotton himself acted as eager amanuensis on Trout Mask Replica, as Van Vliet dictated his lyrics to the former apparently off to the top of his head, in his own version of what " data-original-title="" title="">Allen Ginsberg called Jack Kerouac's "spontaneous bop prosody," and then revised the lyrics aurally by having Cotton read them back to him twenty, fifty times—enough to drive the rest of the band crazy. On Trout Mask Replica, Cotton recites "Pena" in a demented cartoon character voice, with passages such as "Smoke billowing up from between her legs / Made me vomit beautifully," while Van Vliet and Hayden makes inchoate noises behind him. For those with the patience to read that far, I'll return to the improvisatory nature of the album's lyrics near the end of this essay.
The day-to-day, recursive, seemingly endless process by which the album came together, part by part by part, may have been part of Van Vliet's possessiveness of his own creation—even if he needed his musicians to bring those creations into being. Decades later, Harkleroad speculated, "to have to told us directly what to play would have given us way too much control over the music. So he kept control by waiting until it sounded like something he liked, rather than something he intended" (my italics). This process sounds, in fact, like the reverse-process of most composers, who start, one assumes, with an intention of some kind and work toward a finished product that pleases them. There's almost a purpose-built inefficiency in Van Vliet's process, especially when you consider that an album invents its own idiom as it goes along, Out to Lunch, was recorded in a day, with perhaps one previous day given to rehearsal.
On the other hand, the process of composing Trout Mask Replica took months. As French writes in his memoir, "Don was constantly writing, so there was seldom time to assimilate and process what he did efficiently. What's more, trying to learn all his ideas from whistled, sung, and sometimes clumsily played guitar parts took more time than it should. Don was a natural percussionist with a great sense of time, and piano is considered a percussion instrument. It all made sense." So one day, movers showed up with a piano covered with mirrors on the front, and, with some maneuvering, got the instrument into Ensenada Drive. In each of the Magic Band members' accounts, Van Vliet sat with French at the piano, an instrument Van Vliet, I repeat, did not know how to play, and produced—what to call them—emanations? effusions? fragments? French, who spent untold hours with Van Vliet at the piano, calls them "amateurish poundings."
Harkleroad calls Van Vliet's process "musical sculpting." Without knowing it, Van Vliet's percussive composition style actually aligned with jazz pianist
Mal Waldron
piano1925 - 2002
Apparently, Van Vliet was inspired Zappa's practice of writing sheet music and having Ian Underwood play it back to him on the piano, although Van Vliet reversed the process. French sat with Van Vliet at the piano and transcribed the parts the latter wanted him to get on paper. From Boston's point of view, the process looked like this:
Don would sit there and ramble away at the piano for hours, just playing. He didn't really know what he was doing, but every once in a while he'd get an interesting pattern and he'd say, "John, write this down," and play the same for a little bit. But then, he could never go back and play it again later. He'd play it long enough for John to write it down. Don would say, "That's the guitar part," and then he's say, "That's a bass part." That's how a lot of that stuff came together.
It must have been stressful for French to transcribe "parts" whose composer could only repeat them a limited number of times. In a post to the Beefheart fan website, the Radar Station, French elaborates on the process by which he and his bandmates helped create the songs they played:
We did not "write" the music. The main source, the basis of all the material was always Van Vliet.... However, the arrangement, the composition, the manner in which parts went together and the determination of whether a part was playable or needed to be modified was almost always decided by band members. Once Don gave us what he considered "music" for a piece, it still had to be put together. It came to us unassembled, with no instruction sheet. That's why I am saying there is a lot of "us" in those songs. .
When asked what kept the Magic Band going through what must have been frustrating musical circumstances, Boston replied, "Determination." I don't think it's coincidental that French puts "music" in quotation marks: evidently what Van Vliet was doing on the piano was closer to playing percussion than melody, and French not only had to note those percussive phrases using an eccentric form of musical notation, and turn that "music" into music (no quotation marks), and the process of teaching that music to the Magic Band and for them to assemble it must have required intense determination, to which the sixteen-plus-hour rehearsals attest. Because they lacked an "instruction sheet," the band's determination required an improvisatory method: how else would they put the pieces together?
I pestered French to take me through the steps of what he actually did as "transcriber" and I quote him at length here because his memories provide the closest we'll ever get to a blow-by-blow description of how the album's songs came together. French's memories reinforce what I've been calling both Van Vliet and the Magic Band's improvisatory compositional methods:
The first piece I actually acted as transcriber was "Steal Softly Thru Snow," and after the first three sections, Don basically handed me the reins when I asked "How does the rest of this go together?" He said, "You know what to do."
The word "know" is the key word, because I didn't "know" what to do, but I decided to "try"—that is, give it a go and trust my instincts. I've never actually looked at the original transcription of "Steal Softly" (which is the only one I have) and tried to make a record of the decisions I made in terms of what might be called an "arrangement," but I do recall at one point going to the next section of what he'd written and thinking, "This doesn't seem to be the best part to be 'next' in the arrangement."
I would then seek out what seemed to be the next logical section. Sometimes, I'd take a single piano riff and have everyone play the same part---i.e. [lyrics] "The black paper..." section of "Steal Softly." Other times, I would take different parts and put them together, as in [the lyrics] "Rain Grows Rain Bows..." and you can hear that each person is playing something that was played independently by Don, but seems to work together well. These were the kinds of decisions I made.
I'm struck here by how much autonomy Van Vliet gave French to assemble the different parts of this song for the players. In the end, however, French focuses less on what he'd surely be entitled to call his arrangement than on his ability put together parts that were "played independently by Don." That is to say, he gives Van Vliet the credit for composing the songs. The improvisation came when French, to use his terminology, assembled these disparate parts. These musical parts grate up against each other as often as they complement each other.
Van Vliet and His Magic Band, to the extent to which they internalized his aesthetic, weren't interested in popular songwriting in any traditional sense. Instead, to quote Morton on Dolphy, the Magic Band-musical group-mind put together parts that were "not quite non sequiturs but not quite obviously connected either." What happened when French brought those parts, with their idiosyncratic musical notation, to the other three band members? Apparently, he would teach each band member his own part for the song by ear, even though they could all read music, and then each would rehearse on his own. When they finally started to rehearse a particular song as a group, Harkleroad recalls being surprised at how much his band members' parts differed from his own: "That's your part?" He remembers "fighting through the two other rhythms," Cotton's guitar and Boston's bass, to make the song come together.
The notion of "fighting through...rhythms" instead of playing melodies suggests that Van Vliet's compositions had rhythm as their primary building block. Harkleroad remembers that, during the rehearsals, when Van Vliet's "music" became music, "everything was built from a rhythmic sense. Certainly it was that rhythmic element which has remained the biggest musical influence I have assimilated from that time [Trout Mask rehearsals.] My feeling was that the actual notes were interchangeable—it really wouldn't have mattered a whole lot as long as they created the same effect." The "effect" would have been the bandleader's imprimatur—on the occasional times when he rehearsed with the group, and we've already established Van Vliet's lack of comfort with scales, notes, keys, melody, some of the key elements of traditional Western songwriting. Or, as French suggests, Van Vliet's "limitation of not grasping the concept of key signatures when it came to piano caused him to emphasize rhythm more in his compositions.... Most of the [Trout Mask] stuff that he wrote without the aid of a piano ('Sugar n' Spikes,' 'Veterans Day Poppy,' [and] 'Moonlight on Vermont') has a recognizable key, so he instinctively knew when he created using his voice, whistling, and singing parts. But, on the piano, that instinct may well have been lost in the creative process. That being said, yes, Trout Mask Replica is a rhythm-driven album in a sense." In his memoir, French recalls the specifically rhythmic influences on his playing at the time: "There was Delta blues influence, East Indian tabla, jazz (
Elvin Jones
drums1927 - 2004
Jack DeJohnette
drumsb.1942
Influenced by former Magic Band member Alex Snouffer, the guitarists used much heavier-gauge strings than would have been typical for rock music at the time; and Van Vliet had them use metal picks and commanded that they play percussively, often in aggressive right-hand technique. (I'm less clear on what he wanted Mark Boston's bass parts to sound like, but it's obvious to anyone to plays the album that Boston is playing his instrument non- traditionally.) This emphasis on the percussive element of composition puts Van Vliet in line with
Ornette Coleman
saxophone, alto1930 - 2015
On a somewhat, but not entirely different, end of the spectrum 1950s and '60s American music lies
James Brown
vocals1933 - 2006
On "Ant Man Bee," for instance, you can hear the guitarists just laying into their strings playing very regimented, what sound to this ear like interlocking, rhythm guitar parts—with an emphasis on rhythm. At same time, Van Vliet's voice, in one of his best vocal performances on the album, takes the real lead, starting with an almost maniacal toughness, "White ants runnin' / Black ants crawlin'"; and then transitions into a profound plaintiveness or even out-and-out petulance: "Why do yuh have t' do this / You've got t' let us free." Van Vliet couldn't play the piano; but what he could "play" is his own voice, and in the end its hard to tell whether the album's emphasis on rhythm comes out of a genuine primitivism related to Van Vliet's lack of ability to play the instrument of composition, or whether he chose to compose on an instrument he on which he literally pounded to discover his songs and thereby to align his music with rhythm-driven genres such as jazz and rhythm-and-blues.
By the time the musicians had learned their parts, according to French, "the whole group was playing intertwining rhythms." French doesn't use the term polyrhythmic, but he could have, and the term certainly applies to texture of Trout Mask's songs. Having the guitarists take over so much of the songs' rhythmic aspect freed French, and possibly Boston, to play more melodically than they would on straightforward blues rock. "My favorite times," remembers French, "were writing out nearly impossible patterns and playing them. This isn't time-keeping drumming for the most part, it is more on the scale of melodic." The movement, in these last two paragraphs, from characterizing guitars as rhythm instruments and the drums as closer to a melody instrument show just how non-standard Van Vliet's compositions, with the help of the band to realize them, ultimately were. I return to Stravinsky's Modernist "Les Noces" as a precursor, because, in performance, the composition's piano, drums, and voices, have a percussive quality practically leaps out of the speakers.
In their occasional forays around Los Angeles in 1969, Van Vliet (who no doubt chose the destinations) and the band didn't attend classical music concerts, where they may not have been able to get in the door; but neither did they take part in the huge, youth-oriented rock scene. Almost every famous rock act on the national and international scenes must have played L.A. in 1969. Judging by the number of albums with '69 in their title (
Aretha Franklin
vocals1942 - 2018
In addition to attending the Dali exhibit, the group went to quite a few live jazz shows at such storied, now-defunct venues Shelley's Manne Hole and The Lighthouse, by artists that included Ornette Coleman, The Crusaders (then called the Jazz Crusaders),
Gabor Szabo
guitar1936 - 1982
Rahsaan Roland Kirk
woodwinds1935 - 1977
Yusef Lateef
woodwinds1920 - 2013
Chuck Rainey
bass, electricb.1940
Bernard Purdie
drumsb.1939
One can only speculate about what kind of impact these jazz shows made on Van Vliet and the Magic Band. Van Vliet probably identified himself with jazz innovators such as Coleman. Whatever band he was playing with, Coleman emphasized dissonance and texture over tunefulness, in a way that probably gave Van Vliet permission, or re-informed the permission he'd already given himself, not to compromise on Trout Mask. I suspect the line-up Coleman brought to L.A. included
Dewey Redman
saxophone, tenorb.1931
Charlie Haden
bass, acoustic1937 - 2014
Denardo Coleman
drumsb.1956
John French wasn't so wild about Coleman; rather, he liked the Jazz Crusaders' performance most of all. However, French's memories of watching specific musicians show just how close the Trout Mask House crew got to some of the era's great players. Anyone interested in the impact of '60s jazz on Mask Replica should start with French's very detailed memories of the live shows the Magic Band and its leader saw:
Don would see a drummer do something, and say, "You should try that," but most of the time I just was affected by the amount of study that went into being able to play that well. We both were really impressed by Yusef Lateef's drummer,
Roy Brooks
drumsb.1938
In this memory, Van Vliet, the artist of immediacy, fixates on Brooks's sound, while French, the drummer and de-facto arranger tasked with giving shape to his leader's piano-ramblings, focuses on the labor behind Brooks's mastery. Evidently, French sat close enough to Rahsaan Roland Kirk to see
that he seemed to have some way to lock his keys when he was play two or three horns. He had this sort of cane on casters that was for all his paraphernalia, such as his "nose flute" which looked like a child's song flute with the mouth pieces rounded or whittled. Everything on that cane was wrapped with common masking tape, and it looked horrendous and completely captivating all at the same time.
Kirk's horn playing was virtuosic, while Van Vliet's was "horrendous and completely captivating"—and some listeners would stop at "horrendous." Certainly the inclusion of the following sentence in Trout Mask's musical credits, "Captain Beefheart plays tenor and soprano sax simultaneously on 'Ant Man Bee,'" is tantamount to an admission of having been influenced by Kirk—and for Van Vliet, who liked to consider himself sui generis in every possible way, that note explicitly —and uncharacteristically—tips his hat to Kirk, the master.
By shifting to a discussion Van Vliet as saxophonist and poet-singer, I'm also shifting toward the day he recorded his overdubs, after a previous recording session—during which Zappa gave the Magic Band what its players consider, even decades later, to have been scandalously little time to lay down their instrumental parts. Nevertheless, because Trout Mask House was saturated with authoritarianism, fear, and compliance—enforced by Van Vliet's dreaded "band talks"—the band members were able to knock out two nearly-identical takes of the all of the album's music—excluding such vérité tracks as "Hair Pie, Bake 1" or Van Vliet's a-cappela tracks, such as "Orange Claw Hammer"—in something like four hours.
Van Vliet, who almost never rehearsed his vocals or horn parts with the band, was particularly tuned in to contemporary jazz when brewed up Trout Mask Replica; whereas the blues element goes back to his earliest work. Certainly, Van Vliet's discordant, skreaking-and-skronking alto and saxophone solos are the album's most obviously jazz-like element, and they are probably what most listeners think of when they hear "Beefheart and jazz." All of the 1960s-era "New Thing" saxophone players, to quote from Iain Anderson's book on the movement, "employed an array of highly distorted tonal mannerisms such as shrieks, growls, and other noise elements in the high and low registers to increase the dramatic and emotional tension" and whose "unbridled dissonance and unpredictable leaps and turns" challenged many listeners' ears in the early to mid-60s. Even now, your local Starbucks isn't likely to play Coltrane's Live in Seattle while you wait for your chai latte.
Anderson's descriptors, and particularly his emphasis on "noise elements," also describe Van Vliet's saxophone playing—or they describe his aspirations as a player since, unlike the above named musicians, he did not have tradition, in the broadest sense, to fall back on. Dolphy could play, as Miles Davis famously groused, like someone was stepping on his foot; but Dolphy, on bass clarinet, and bassist Richard Davis could offer up a reverential take of
Duke Ellington
piano1899 - 1974
By "chops," I refer specifically to his saxophone playing, because if you count his blues harp skills and his control over his own croaker of a voice, Van Vliet had a lot to offer, musically. By the time he and the Magic Band recorded Trout Mask, however, Van Vliet was still a neophyte on the saxophone. Van Vliet had received his first horn, as soprano saxophone, as a gift from French and Cotton in 1968 before the band's European tour. Cotton also gave Van Vliet two saxophone lessons, and emphasizes that those were all the lessons Van Vliet got. Maybe two lessons were all Van Vliet needed to unleash his passions on the world. Van Vliet was not a highly trained musician who made a conscious choice to swerve into "unbridled dissonance." His barely-bridled playing was a form of highly expressive, often frenetic breathing into his horn, or as he liked to call it, his "breather apparatus." As Harkleroad says—in what I'm not sure is a compliment—Van Vliet "could push a lot of air through" his saxophones.
On days when I enjoy Van Vliet's soloing on Trout Mask Replica, I want to rename the album Joy of a Toy, after the
Ornette Coleman
saxophone, alto1930 - 2015
Bangs articulates a philosophy which I suspect, Van Vliet, who liked to sneer, "Scales are for fishes," shared: that the ability to play one's instrument in any conventional sense, actually gets in the way of expressing "attitude," or whatever name you give the musical equivalent of unmediated personality may be. Even Coleman—who really was punk before there was punk—tested the endurance of even his most hard-core defenders with what one reviewer calls his "idiosyncratic, untutored violin playing, which sparked derision when he picked up the instrument in the [mid] '60s." Certainly Coleman had more underlying musical knowledge that Van Vliet when he began playing violin, but he wanted to play instrument his own way—to express attitude, as it were, by scraping his bow across the strings with a tender abrasiveness all his own.
At other times, I agree with the club-goer who, after hearing Van Vliet play his saxophone live circa 1975, exclaimed to John French, "I didn't buy that psychedelic sax bullshit for one instant." During these less charitable moods, what bothers me about his playing is not its lack of almost any formal control, but its solipsistic, delusory megalomania. Van Vliet eschewed the very notions of influence and likeness, telling one interviewer, "I think I sound more like a whale or a dolphin than I do
John Coltrane
saxophone1926 - 1967
John Coltrane
saxophone1926 - 1967
Now, who knows how to interpret a fifty-year-old memory of a throwaway comment. However, if we trust French's caustic re-telling, Van Vliet is dead serious: he really thinks if he just trips out enough, he can short-circuit the hundreds of hours of practice Coltrane famously and punishingly put himself through through—before sets, after sets, even between sets, sometimes in a phone booth if he couldn't find any other alcove in which to practice —to attain the absolute mastery he sought and found. At this very time, in 1968-69, the Magic Band was practicing for sixteen hours straight to get Van Vliet's Trout Mask compositions exactly to his liking. In light of both Coltrane' legacy and Van Vliet's own, highly skilled band's dedication to his music, the comment, "Scales are for fishes," sounds almost derogatory, or at least petulant, as if scoffed by a kid who doesn't want to practice because he doesn't have to.
I may never resolve my feelings about Van Vliet's alto and tenor performances, if you can call them that. Certain they're not what keeps me coming back to the album. I do know that, for better or for worse, Van Vliet's particular kind of free music depends on his the very childlike nature of his creativity. He liked making new things more than he liked practicing what he'd already made. I did ask French what is, to me, the million-dollar question about the recording of Trout Mask Replica: why, if Van Vliet had power-tripped the Magic Band so mercilessly that they could play the album's songs on command, did he almost never rehearse with them? French's theory, decades later:
I think the plan with the group was to get us so tight that he could sort of "skate through" his performances.
Frank Sinatra
vocals1915 - 1998
This intense, almost overbearing creative fecundity makes Trout Mask Replica a high water mark of maximalist art that it remains more than a half-century later. His musical method of establishing melodies and rhythms, junking those, restarting, results in an extraordinary musical density that's matched only by the word-mélanges over which he sings, chants screams, rumbles, and at times almost gargles. (By the way, I did not expect French to compare Van Vliet to consummate studio pro Sinatra when I asked this question!)
Sometimes Van Vliet's apparently pathological aversion to preparation and rehearsal resulted in wipeouts recorded for posterity, as when, on his saxophone solo near the end of "Pachuco Cadaver," Van Vliet just loses the tempo and sounds like he's playing over a whole different song. At such a moment,
Frank Zappa
guitar, electric1940 - 1993
The out-of-sync performance on "Pachuco Cadaver" is very evident, but this is the trouble with avant-garde: you never really know whether or not the artist is doing it on purpose or not. I was in the control room when he overdubbed the sax, and when he came through the door, he looked right at me and asked, "Was that OK?" I said, "Seemed OK, but you should listen to it." I figured that he would either hear it and nix it, or decide that's what he wanted. He left it, but I have no idea to this day if it was intentional. Surely, he heard it was out-of-sync. Whether or not Van Vliet sax wipeout was "intentional," I would guess he simply couldn't be bothered to re-record it.
In the dialectic of playfulness and control that Winner identifies at the heart of the album, playfulness, in the form of a basically carefree attitude to what another musician would call a mistake, won out in "Pachuco Cadaver." The maximalism to which I referred is also apparent in the sheer number of words Van Vliet crams into most songs—and, apparently, he didn't have room for all of those words. For instance, at the end of "She's Too Much for My Mirror," he whines, on mic, "Shit I don't know how I'm gonna get that in there," while he apparently holds a piece of paper with more lyrics than he can get into the song. The papers on which Cotton hand-wrote, and then typed, Van Vliet's verbal effusions, have been lost in the sands of time; certainly they're not in any university archive. French reported to me, "Jeff says he typed a footlocker full of lyrics and stories." The pervasive sounds of someone—I assume Cotton— pounding away at a manual typewriter pervade the background of the hanging-out-at-Trout-Mask-House tracks on Grow Fins.
Just as French was drawn away from his drums for lengthy composition-sessions at the piano with Van Vliet, so did Cotton have to skimp on his guitar-playing in order to copy down and then declaim Van Vliet's on-the-spot lyrics. In an interview quoted in Mike Barnes's Beefheart biography, French remembers, "Jeff's role was to read the poetry, our role was to be excited by hearing it...dozens of times sometimes!" And sometimes the band members were excited. For instance, at the end of "Old Fart at Play"—a talk-song which, by the way, contain Bangs's favorite Trout Mask lyrics, "Momma was flattenin' lard / With her red enamel rollin' pin"—you can hear a voice that's clearly not Van Vliet's gush, " Oh man, that's so heavy." The voice is Cotton's, and evidently he meant his appreciation. Cotton's role involved copying down, typing, and reading Van Vliet's words ad nauseam— but not to helping Van Vliet shape those words. When I asked French if Van Vliet used the typescripts produced by Cotton as the basis for revision, he replied, "I don't recall much if any revision."
The LP of Trout Mask Replica I bought as a teenager in the late 1980s—having driven twenty miles to a used record shop cool enough to have a copy—did not contain a lyric sheet. So for decades I, along with many listeners, heard the album's words as they resonated in my own subjectivity. Compared to the lyrics of the pre-eminent literary singer-songwriters of his generation—
Bob Dylan
guitar and vocalsb.1941
Joni Mitchell
vocalsb.1943
Leonard Cohen
vocals1934 - 2016
You can call Van Vliet a poet of word-play with an emphasis on play—like a child smushing Play-Do around. His fascination with animals seems particularly child-like. Here is a partial list of animals in Trout Mask Replica's songs: trout, worms, bluejay, mice, gophers, doves, big black shiny bug, white ice horse, beetle, thick black felt birds, white elephant escaped from zoo, bees, goldfish, crow, chicken, old puff horse, eagle, jack rabbit, oriole, horse, favorite dog, old spotted hog, china pig, one yellow butterfly, tiny green phosphorus worms, wild goose, cat, rooster, duck, bears, white ants, black ants, yella ants, and brown ants. A particularly spooky passage in the a-cappella song "Well" envisions a dystopian hybrid of bird and metal:
Thick black felt birds uh flyin'
With capes of solid chrome
With feathers of solid chrome 'n beaks of solid bone'
'n bleach the air around them
White 'n cold well well
Van Vliet sing-chants this song from the very bottom of his register, and the resulting ominousness lends the song an air of unhinged, dirge-like prophecy.
Many Trout Mask songs, barely-coherent as they sound, may have their roots in Van Vliet's childbood. The very title of "Pachuco Cadaver" evokes a period in Los Angeles history, the Zoot Suit Era of the 1940s, and '50s, about which Van Vliet would have heard on the radio from L.A, out in the high desert, and, most importantly, as a boy—" pachuco" belongs to his childhood and early adolescent word-hoard. I love the song's words, but they look strange written down from the lyric sheet, because on Trout Mask Replica, Van Vliet intones, rather than sings them above the Magic Band's shuffle, his voice coming down so hard on the plosives, that "wears her PAST" sounds a little like "wears her PANTS"; but if there's no written record of the words, you don't have to choose:
When she wears her bolero then she begin t' dance
All the pachucos start withold'n hands
When she drives her Chevy Sissy's don't dare t' glance
Yellow jackets 'n red debbles buzzin' round 'er hair hive ho
She wears her past like uh present
Take her fancy in the past
Her sedan skims along the floorboard
Her two pipes hummin' carbon cum
Got her wheel out of uh B-29 Bomber brodey knob amber
Spanish fringe 'n talcum tazzles FOREVER AMBER
Those last two words, which give Van Vliet an opportunity to groove out on some vowels, come from his childhood, too. At six or seven, he would have seen posters and heard radio ads for one of the biggest prestige pictures of 1947, 20th-Century Fox's Forever Amber. I don't know if you can call "pachuco" and "FOREVER AMBER" allusions in the strict sense. When Dylan name-checks Bette Davis and Ezra Pound in "Desolation Row," he wants you know he's mixing high and low allusions to Western culture. On the other hand, Van Vliet's word-memories enter his verbal field for their sound more than anything. His lyrics "don't make sense" in the same way his beloved Abstract Impressionist painters' work reveled in pure gesture.
"Pachuco Cadaver" also lets one revisit the conundrum of whether Van Vliet both was or wasn't listening to the pre-recorded playback of the Magic Band when he recorded his vocals. The song starts out in a boogie-woogie groove that fits the words but doesn't necessarily provide a rhythm for them. Since Trout Mask songs don't stay predictable for long, by about the 2:20 mark, "Pachuco Cadaver" morphs into an up-tempo instrumental punctuated by an infectious, repetitive guitar riff in both channels. Now, somewhere in there, Van Vliet's lyrics shift too, from a kind of surrealist-
Bo Diddley
guitar1928 - 2008
Her lovin' makes me so happy
If I smiled I'd crack m' chin
Her eyes so peaceful thinks it's heaven she been
Her skin is smooth as the daisies
In the center where the sun shines in
Van Vliet's rhetorical transition doesn't quite coincide with the Magic Band's melodic and rhythmic shift— -but at the same time it does, right at around "Her lovin," where the guitarists start their joyful riff. Does Van Vliet just get lucky? If so, his luck runs out when, to return to our earlier "Pachuco Cadaver" story, he seems to get nervous and lose his timing during his sax solo.
In his commentary on this song, French writes, "it is obvious to me that we knew nothing about when to stop on this piece." Anyone who delves into the history of Trout Mask Replica won't know when to stop, either. There is always another rabbit hole down which to go when one tries to reconstruct those eight insular months on Ensenada Drive. What role did Zappa and recording engineer Dick Kunc really play in the album's composition and recording? Certainly their excessively dry mix of the album, which pleased none of the Magic Band members, suggests Zappa and Kunc were no more than interlopers, or—as they evidently saw themselves, as ethnographers—in the Trout Mask House. Zappa's Hot Rats, recorded in August '69 on a primitive 16-track console, was one of the first albums to put multiple mikes on the drum kit and then mix the drums across the stereo "picture." French's virtuosic drumming would have benefitted from such aural attention. Why did Zappa give Trout Mask Replica such a lo-fi mix? Why did Van Vliet, in a fit of sadism, physically kick his collaborator, John French, down the stairs and out of Trout Mask House and then—indignity of indignities—remove French's name from the album credits? (Third Man Records' reissue of Trout Mask Replica finally restores written credit to "DRUMS: Drumbo.")
Shortly after the album's release, Van Vliet undertook to convince credulous interviewers that he'd written entire album in one day and then taught the Magic Band to play their instruments in order to learn his music. Langdon Winner and Lester Bangs each bought these falsehoods hook, line, and sinker and repeatedly wrote them into Beehfheart lore through the 1980s. The assertion that the Magic Band learned to play guitar, bass, and drums at Van Vliet's feet, though cruelly specious and, possibly, injurious to the Magic Band members' subsequent musical careers, contains, despite Van Vliet's monomania, the germ of a semi-truth. Trout Mask Replica's essential conundrums still revolve around the musicians' transformation—under harsh duress but certainly with some level of pleasure and complicity—from first-rate blues-rockers in the late '60s mold into avant-gardists of the highest order. Certainly sixteen-hour rehearsals, malnutrition, sleep deprivation, hashish, and good old late '60s-style cult mind control didn't hurt. The particulars of those epic composition sessions-cum-rehearsals may—and perhaps should—remain lost to Time. Referring to the Magic Band, Cotton muses, "we all had to unlearn what we had learned in order to re-learn a new technique. So I appreciate that. I would never do it again—but I appreciate it."
Notes
This essay draws primarily on recent, unpublished interviews with the members of the Magic Band; otherwise there would be no reason for another essay on Trout Mask Replica. Samuel Andreyev's recent, yet-to be-transcribed, interviews with these four musicians are absolutely seminal and deserve to be part of a book on Trout Mask Replica. His interview with marimba player Art Tripp (Ed Marimba), who replaced Cotton in the Magic Band after Trout Mask Replica, went live just as I prepared this essay for press; I look forward to watching it. The interviews, as well as Andreyev's "Frownland" tutorial, are available online here. Any mis-transcriptions of the interviews are mine.In addition, Professor Andreyev gave this neophyte a tutorial Modernist Music 101 in an almost three-hour transatlantic call, during which we also touched on the making of Trout Mask Replica. Unlike Professor Andreyev, my layperson's knowledge of music is non-technical. Any errors in musical terminology are mine.
John "Drumbo" French generously allowed me to interview him via email in the spring of 2019. The pleasure was probably more mine than French's, since he has already been interviewed untold times about Trout Mask Replica; what's more, he's written an exhaustive memoir and essential reference book, Beefheart: Through the Eyes of Magic (Proper Music Publishing, 2010), with detailed commentary on almost every Beefheart song. My own interview with French will appear in its entirety on the Beefheart fan website, the Radar Station (www.beefheart.com) in the summer of 2020.
Quotations from Jeff Cotton and Mark Boston come from Andreyev's interviews with them. Quotations from Bill Harkleroad come either from Andreyev's two interviews with him or from his memoir, Lunar Notes: Zoot Horn Rollo's Captain Beefheart Experience (SAF Publishing, 1998), as noted. Quotations from French come, as noted, from Andreyev's interviews with him, my interview with him, French's memoir, French's contributions to the Radar Station, and, occasionally, from interviews quoted in Mike Barnes's: Captain Beefheart: The Biography (Revised Edition) (Omnibus Press, 2000).
Barnes's biography provides readers, to the extent possible, with a sense of daily life at Trout Mask House, has a useful song-by-song rundown of Trout Mask Replica, and discusses Van Vliet's misinformation campaign about the album. Kevin Courrier's 2007 book on Trout Mask Replica for Bloomsbury's 33? series gets into deep cultural inspirations for the album, most of which are beyond the scope of this essay but are nonetheless of great interest to Beefheart-hounds and other lovers-slash-scholars of twentieth-century avant-garde music and art. I'm not sure any one book—or essay!—can encompass the full socio-spiritual-psycho-musical phenomenon that is Trout Mask Replica. Certainly Barnes's biography, Courrier's book, and French and Harkleroad's memoirs make excellent starting-points. But the best way to learn about Trout Mask Replica will forever be: put the album on and TURN IT UP! ">
Track Listing
Frownland; The Dust Blows Forward 'N The Dust Blows Back; Dachau Blues; Ella Guru; Hair Pie: Bake 1; Moonlight On Vermont; Pachuco Cadaver; Bill's Corpse; Sweet Sweet Bulbs Neon Meate Dream Of A Octafish; China Pig; My Human Gets Me Blues; Dali's Car; Hair Pie: Bake 2; Pena; Well; When Big Joan Sets Up; Fallin' Ditch; Sugar 'N Spikes; Ant Man Bee; Orange Claw Hammer; Wild Life; She's Too Much For My Mirror; Hobo Chang Ba; The Blimp (Mousetrapreplica); Steal Softly Thru Snow; Old Fart At Play; Veteran's Day Poppy
Personnel
Captain Beefheart
vocalsDon Van Vliet
vocalsJeff Cotton
guitar, electric
Bill Harkleroad
guitar, electricMark Boston
bass, electricJohn French
drumsVictor Hayden
clarinet, bassDoug Moon
guitar, acousticAdditional Instrumentation
Don Van Vliet (Captain Beefheart), vocals, soprano and alto saxophone, musette, simran horn; Bill Harkleroad (Zoot Horn Rollo), guitar, "glass finger guitar," flute on "Hobo Chang Ba"; Jeff Cotton (Antennae Jimmy Semens), guitar, "steel appendage guitar," lead vocals on "Pena" and "The Blimp," flesh horn on "Ella Guru"; Victor Morton (The Mascara Snake), bass clarinet and backing vocal on "Ella Guru" and "Pena"; Mark Boston (Rockette Morton), bass, narration on "Dachau Blues" and "Fallin' Ditch"; John French (Drumbo), drums, percussion, and co-arrangement (uncredited); Frank Zappa, speaking voice from control booth on "Pena" and "The Blimp" (uncredited); Richard "Dick" Kunc, speaking voice on "She's Too Much for My Mirror" (uncredited); The Mothers of Invention, backing track on "The Blimp" (uncredited). Frank Zappa: Producer.
Album information
Title: Trout Mask Replica | Year Released: 1969 | Record Label: Warner Bros.
Tags
Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band
Extended Analysis
Eric Gudas
Trout Mask Replica
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Rahsaan Roland Kirk
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