Three Decades Inside The Mask
This highly recommended article was written by Byron Coley and appeared in a much shortened version in the December 1999 edition of Spin entitled 'The Strangest Album Ever Sold - The Making Of Trout Mask Replica'.
This longer version was very kindly sent to me by the author and has not appeared anywhere else.
"I took [Trout Mask Replica] home and put it on. It was the worst dreck I’d ever heard in my life. I thought, ‘They’re not even trying! They’re just playing randomly.’ Then I thought, ‘Well, Frank Zappa produced it, maybe I better give it another play.’ So I played it again and I thought, ‘It sounds horrible, but they mean it to sound this way.’ About the third or fourth time it started to grow on me. The fifth or sixth time I loved it. The seventh or eighth time I thought it was the greatest album ever made and I still do."
--Matt Groening from the BBC documentary, The Artist Formerly Known as Capt. Beefheart
As is so often the case, Mr. Groening had his finger on the pulse when he said these words. Trout Mask Replica, the 1969 double album by Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, is one of history’s most insanely vexing pieces of vinyl. Released at a time when weirdness-for-the-sake-of-weirdness was a tenet grasped tightly by every suburban oddball, it was an exquisite, expensive package that seemed to promise as much un-normality as a body could stand. The front cover showed a photograph of a guy, in some sort of modified pilgrim hat with a fish’s head growing out of his face. The back cover had a photograph of the strangest looking assortment of people you could imagine. Even in the context of the times, this group looked incredible. It wasn’t just that they were wearing dresses or strange glasses, or even that the guy in the top hat was holding a stripped-down lamp like it was some sort of raygun. They seemed to be the physical embodiment of a philosophy whose precepts lay beyond mortal ken. They had a visual energy so non-benign -- so unglamorously strange -- that it held the promise of weirdom of a whole new genus.
The music on Trout Mask more than fulfilled its visual potential. To me, it sounded like absolute noise. Apart from a few selections that hewed to recognisable song structure, the stuff came off like a vast musique concrete piece, spliced together from tapes made by apes let loose in a recording studio. At a time when Zappa’s heisted jazz and classical licks were considered radical, the music on Trout Mask seemed positively impossible. In his wonderful essay about the record in Greil Marcus’ Stranded anthology, Dr. Langdon Winner counts 14 tempo and melody changes inside of a single two-and-a-half minute song. Even by the cut-and-paste standards of contemporary avant-pop, that is a mesmerisingly chaotic standard. These untaggable shifts and the air-rushing skronk of the sax and bass clarinet that squinked into the mix gave the impression that it was all done in the non-time of free jazz, but that was an illusion. And atop the collapsed rhythms, nettlesome guitars and spasmodically hammered bass were the vocals.
God only knew what the words were about, but the voice that sang them incorporated everything from sea chantey rope-tricks to subsonic Howlin’ Wolf rumbles, while the music’s structure bumped and quivered like a drunk falling down the stairway at the Empire State Building. In 1978, Don Van Vliet, the guy responsible for much of this stuff told me, "People like music to be in tune because they’ve heard it in tune all the time. I tried to break out of that on Trout Mask Replica. I really tried to break that down. I made it all out of focus." Indeed he did.
Today Don Van Vliet is a highly regarded visual artist. His work is represented by Koln’s prestigious Gallery Michael Werner. He has broken teacups and cut the tips off of fat cigars with Julian Schnabel. His paintings have been the subject of museum shows and essays. He is known as a reclusive, nature-worshipping master of the Abstract Expressionist palette. But it has not always been thus.
Thirty years ago, using the sobriquet Captain Beefheart, in collaboration with a handful of starving young hippies known as the Magic Band, Don created Trout Mask Replica. Vigorously lauded and reviled ever since, the album remains a unique artistic document of the 20th Century, so tightly wound and insanely self-referential that its importance as music is difficult to assess even now. But in the catacombs of subterranean culture, Trout Mask has never ceased to function as a talismanic symbol of art created in the guise of commerce. If there was ever a presumed limit to how massively weird one could act whilst pursuing a corporate paycheque, the existence of Trout Mask obliterated it once and for all. It would be incorrect to say that the album’s birth was an easy one, however, or that the resulting post-partum depression ever really abated. Indeed, Trout Mask was so successful in defining its own terms, that neither Van Vliet nor any of the members of the Magic Band were ever able to fully escape its semiotic shadow.
In many respects, 1999 is turning out to be the Year of Beefheart in certain circles. Although he has not been a working musician since he turned to painting full time in 1982, the sounds that Don Van Vliet issued are currently near the forebrain of many people. This revival of interest began with a book. Entitled Lunar Notes, authored by guitarist Bill Harkleroad (with the help of Billy James), this memoir began to shed light on the creative process of Beefheart’s oeuvre (once considered merely the by-product of magnificent creative spasms). As word of Harkleroad’s tale of the band’s privations seeped into cultural currents, long-dormant arguments about Van Vliet’s place inside of his own vision-trail flared. Some people maintained that he was a holy monster, who had vampirically bled the creative juice from the host of young musicians who had worked with him. Others pointed out that none of these musicians had subsequently gone on to do anything that was much like the Beefheart music with which they’d been involved. Consequently, he could’ve used any old musicians to achieve the same results. These arguments are not without merit, but neither of them tell the whole tale.
The true evolution of Beefheart’s music has now been unveiled (at least to a degree) by a batch of reissues and archival recordings that have just come out, raising interest in the Magic Band to a new height. Buddha has reissued the combo’s first two album recording sessions (Safe As Milk and Mirror Man) with a host of previously obscure out-takes. Rhino has countered with the brilliantly paced 2CD set, The Dust Blows Forward. Its discs catalogue and contextualise Beefheart’s work across innumerable personnel changes (and eight different record labels). Even more exceptional is the Grow Fins 5CD set on the Revenant label. This includes hours of previously unheard material, enhanced CD video footage, and a spectacularly detailed history of the band, written by John French, and accompanied by a wild assemblage of visual souvenirs. But even after consuming this entire, rich meal, my contention remains that the band hit a particular level of creativity with Trout Mask. It remains the apex of Beefheart’s career, regardless of the fact that some of his later recordings are actually a lot easier to listen to.
The road to Trout Mask begins with Alex Snouffer. Alex was a student at Antelope Valley Joint Union High School in the late 1950s. His classmates included Frank Zappa and Don Glen Vliet. Taking up guitar in 1958, Alex formed his first band, the Omens, at about the same time that Zappa began his musical career with the Blackouts. The Omens were, by all reports, a redoubtable R&B band and lasted several years, after which Alex left town for "real" work. When he returned to Lancaster in 1964, Alex was a confirmed blues hound. His search for like-minded individuals led him to a group of former classmates, including Don. Don’s sole ’62 jam with the Omens (as a saxophonist) had been a disaster, but he’d been newly reborn as a singer and harmonica player. Alex was shocked to discover how well Don could recreate the low moans of Howlin’ Wolf and the hellish harp-rake of Jimmy Reed. A new band was immediately planned.
Although Don could be almost catatonically shy, his blues fanaticism had grown to the point where he was willing to ignore his fears and follow his heroes’ path onto the stage. The new group was christened Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band. This name reportedly derived from a mocking reference to Don’s exhibitionist uncle’s description of his engorged penis, combined with a motif devised for an unproduced Zappa film script. The group began offering their dry hump primitivism to the car clubs and beer drinkers of the Lancaster area in 1964. Some demo material they recorded in this nascent stage is on Grow Fins. It shows a band as deeply steeped in traditional African American song form as their British contemporaries (The Pretty Things, Animals or Rolling Stones) with a singer whose profoundly coarse vocals give no hint that he was actually an artistically-gifted beatnik living in California’s high desert.
By April, 1965 the band’s name had begun to seep away from their homebase and they were able to secure a gig at Hollywood’s Teenage Fair – an odd cross between a commercial exposition, demonstrating products that teenaged consumers might dig, and a day of live music. The Magic Band played a set of blues and Stones covers on the main stage, but Don’s interest was focused on a band called the Rising Sons, who were making their live debut on a small stage co-sponsored by Martin Guitars and McCabe’s Guitar Centre. The front line of the Rising Sons featured Ry Cooder (already a veteran-if-still-teenaged session guitarist) and Taj Mahal, both of whom blew Don’s mind by playing electrified rural blues to the sea of bleached blonde surf bums who crowded the Teenage Fair.
The Magic Band’s gig at the Teenage Fair introduced them to the world beyond the desert. This led to their signing a contract with A&M Records, at whose behest they entered the studio with producer David Gates (now best known as the former leader of soft-rock titans, Bread). The A-side of their first A&M single, a cover of Bo Diddley’s "Diddy Wah Diddy", was a bass-riven blues-pop scorcher. The track was heavily touted by both Wolfman Jack (then the most powerful radio voice in the Southwestern U.S.) and John Peel (who was employed as the Resident Englishman at KRLA). Unfortunately, Boston’s Remains released their version of the song simultaneously, so neither single broke nationally. But the Magic Band’s track was a monster in California.
A second A&M single was released, but it stiffed, perhaps because the label plugged the wrong side. Two key A&M tracks have just resurfaced on The Dust Blows Forward, and they show a band clearly prepared to "make it" in Los Angeles garage terms. As 1966 progressed, besides playing at the Whisky and the Cheetah, the Magic Band began to visit such burgeoning hippie palaces as San Francisco’s Avalon Ballroom, and even scored a spot at the Beach Boys’ Summer Spectacular. But chart status remained chimeric, and the Magic Band, still in Lancaster, began to go through some changes. Pot and acid, delivered regularly from L.A., began to replace beer as the recreational fuel of choice, giving rehearsals a rather hallucinatory quality. At the same time, Don began to write more original material for the band, shifting the knob in a rather more lysergic direction. Teaching the band his songs was a bit difficult, however, since Don didn’t really play any instruments or understand musical notation. But he could whistle like god’s own thrush, so, in a pattern that was to last for years, Don conveyed his ideas to the band by whistling and singing melodies. The others completed the process of turning them into actual songs. Unsurprisingly, the band’s new material was too strong and strange for the squares at their label. A&M’s president, Jerry Moss, freaked out when he heard the stuff. Legend has it that he decreed the material, "Too negative." All plans for new recordings were scotched.
In the fall of 1966, John French came in as the Magic Band’s permanent drummer. Although his background was straight surf and blues, and he was a cultural generation younger than the rest of the musicians, French’s technique was a uniquely busy and unbalanced propulsive engine for the group. After he arrived, the Magic Band freed themselves of both their A&M contract, and their formalist teen-friendly rhythms. Next, Don convinced them that they’d never make the big time unless they got their asses to L.A., so they all moved to a house in Laurel Canyon. Original guitarist Doug Moon says that this is when things started getting strange.
"A lot of problems started to surface then," Doug says. "People were doing drugs and one thing or another. When we left Lancaster we got into the influence of L.A. – all the people and stuff down there – and it got crazy. Don was listening to everybody. And everybody had their own opinion. The band, at some point in there, lost its soul. We were no longer in control of our own thing."
At this time Don was also angling to get Ry Cooder (whose guitar technique had besotted him ever since the Teenage Fair) into the band. Through a series of behind-the-scene machinations involving Don, ex-Rising Songs bassist Gary Marker (who wanted to produce and manage the band) and Bob Krasnow (a Kama Sutra Records executive who signed the band to his Buddah subsidiary), Cooder was eventually cajoled into joining. As a result, Doug Moon was ejected. Ry began to work out arrangements for the material they’d been writing and the band’s first album, Safe As Milk, was recorded in the spring of ’67. Don was a nervous wreck in the studio, and the lyrics to the songs needed a great deal of reorganisation, but the outcome was an extremely satisfying slab of psychedelic garage-blues. All the evidence you could want is on Buddha’s newly mastered reissue. With Safe As Milk in the can, Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band were prepared to take on the world.
The group was scheduled to appear at the legendary Monterey Pop Festival. As a warm-up they played the Mount Tamalpais Love-In (along with the Byrds, Tim Buckley and Jefferson Airplane) a week earlier. Don had been having performance-related panic attacks for some time and he had a monster one when he got on the stage at Mt. Tam. During the band’s second number, "Electricity", he stopped singing, turned, and walked off the back of the ten foot high stage, landing on Bob Krasnow’s head. The group finished the set without Don, but that was the final straw for Cooder, who was already irritated by the singer’s unprofessional behaviour. John French tried to talk him into staying, but Ry got on the plane to L.A. and never looked back. At a band meeting after the show, Don was asked about his behaviour. He blamed his departure on a disturbing hallucination he’d had while singing, involving a female audience member turning into a goldfish. Alex Snouffer was unsympathetic and pointed out that turning into a goldfish should have been the girl’s problem, not the band’s. Regardless, the Magic Band’s momentum was broken by Cooder’s departure and the opportunity lost at Monterey.
By the time that Safe As Milk was released, the group was in shambles. They played a few disconsolate gigs with a replacement guitar player, but it didn’t work out and Don moved back to his mom’s place in Lancaster. Krasnow was still convinced they could be made into stars, however, so the band was reformulated with the addition of a young guitarist John had worked with previously, named Jeff Cotton. Jeff played an extremely aggressive blues style that allowed the group to push even deeper into the unknown. This version of the Magic Band went into the studio to record a series of songs and jams that Buddha has just reissued as The Mirror Man Sessions. These tracks show the new new direction the group was heading, blending acid rock extensions into a base of surreal blues action like nothing else on earth. In January, Buddah Records sent the band on a promotional tour of Europe. They played a couple of stupid industry showcases (the video of one is on Grow Fins), had some visa problems, and did a single legendary show in England.
When they returned to the States, the group changed labels via some questionable legal legerdemain and recorded the beautifully reckless Strictly Personal album, a brilliantly weird stagger through drug-blues, which is overdue for proper reissue. The Magic Band returned to Europe immediately and Don made good use of the soprano sax that John and Jeff had bought him with their session fees. His raw playing added feverish, free-jazz space to their jams, and there have been rumours that Don kept the horn in his mouth for two-and-a-half solid hours during their gig at London’s Middle Earth club. This tour is documented by a wild live show on the Grow Fins set. The band’s stylistic base was still recognisably the blues, but they used it merely as a place from which they could visit some very deep pockets of space. While they were in London, Krasnow came over with the acetate of the as-yet-unreleased Strictly Personal. They listened to it in the Rolling Stones’ business office and were surprised to find that Bob had psychedelicised their work by adding heavy phasing. There was disagreement about whether to release it.
John French remembers, "We sat there in London, listening to it on this big sound system, and I kind of liked the way it sounded. I thought it was a little strange that Krasnow had cut up ‘Mirror Man’ and some of the mixing was really horrible but, I thought, well it’s contemporary. It’ll work for now." They finally agreed to release it in the form in which it was presented, and prepared to finish the tour. But the band’s money mysteriously disappeared about the same time, so they cancelled their final dates and returned to California in a funk. Alex decided he’d had enough and he resigned in the spring of ’68.
By 1968, Don’s old friend Frank Zappa was nearing the top of his game. After an extremely fruitful exodus to the East Coast, Frank and his band, the Mothers of Invention, made a triumphal return to Los Angeles. In June, the Mothers drew 7,000 people to a concert at the Shrine Auditorium and Frank was working on a deal that would give him a free hand to run two speciality labels for Warner Brothers – Bizarre and Straight. These facts must have made an impression on Don. He reconnected with Frank, who suggested an old friend from the Blackouts to fill Alex’s place. This didn’t work out, so a young Lancaster guy who had played with both Jeff and John was enlisted. His name was Bill Harkleroad.
Bill was an incredibly loose and limber player with a string attack that was almost cubist in its angularity. Even though he’d forsaken the guitar for a few months to pursue his duties with the Tim Leary-associated Brotherhood of Light, his style meshed perfectly with the stranger landscapes the Magic Band was now prowling. When Bill joined, the Magic Band was living together in the fourth of a series of many group houses they would occupy. This time it was a bungalow on a rural lot in Woodland Hills. This became the pressure cooker-cum-hothouse inside which Trout Mask Replica was created.
In the fall of 1968, Zappa agreed to back Don for an album project and some studio time was booked. But before recording started, the original bass player, Jerry Handley, quit. Gary Marker from the Rising Sons was enlisted to sub for him (even though Gary had his own full-time group, Fusion, going at the time) and the Magic Band went into the studio with Frank manning the board. Don’s original idea had been to re-record the material from Strictly Personal without the effects, but he was talked out of this and they did a couple of new tunes, "Moonlight on Vermont" and "Veteran’s Day Poppy". All vestiges of the original band’s blues-pop bias are virtually demolished on these tracks. The guitars sound like metallic insects trying to burrow through the corpse of rock-formalism. The rhythms splinter and recombine like blobs of jelly riding a roller coaster. And Don’s vocals blast and bellow their way through everything with lyrics quoted from sources as disparate as Steve Reich’s tape loops and traditional gospel. There was no immediate follow-up to this session, however, so Marker returned to his own band. Another young Lancaster musician, Mark Boston, was brought in to play bass. This completed the exodus of original members. Now all of the Magic Band’s members were young guys who’d first been exposed to Don as the singer of Lancaster’s big hit single – "Diddy Wah Diddy".
It was in this period that Don got the mythical piano he used to write the Trout Mask songs. It was also during this time that the band members’ various nicknames – all names that would become code words for record collecting screwballs the world over -- were formalised. John French became "Drumbo", Jeff Cotton became "Antennae Jimmy Semens", Bill Harkleroad became "Zoot Horn Rollo", and Mark Boston became "Rockette Morton." By now, Don had been known as Capt. Beefheart for five years. Unable to lose that moniker, some have speculated that he refused to be the only guy in the band with a silly name. But the members’ names were also part of Don’s view of the band as an art project and his ancillary view of the musicians as role-players.
Gary Marker says, "Don had been coming up with those names for a while. He must have had a list with 300 weird names. He told me that he had this concept – it was always concepts – that these were characters. And that different people could play the characters. Zappa, by that point, had already started cycling people through the Mothers. He didn’t make them assume names, but I think Don had the same idea. Image was always important to Don. He fancied himself as an arbiter of visual and weird stuff. He wanted to do a show. He thought that it would be his ticket to fame and fortune. Quite accidentally, he created a mutant weirdness when he would do that. And the lyrics were all supposed to be weird and freak people out. ‘Wait ‘til people hear this stuff, man,’ he’d say. ‘They’ll wonder what this is all about.’ I’d say, ‘Well, I already wonder what it’s about, Don.’"
It has often been reported that Trout Mask was written in a single eight-and-one-half hour spurt. This timeframe was supposedly lengthened by the fact that Don had to figure out the fingering on a piano keyboard. Naturally, this version of the saga is a bit "poetic." Trout Mask was, in fact, ground out of the musicians involved, note by note, line by line, over a gruelling eight month spell of dark and potent voodoo.
The Woodland Hills house in which they all lived was crowded. Don and his girlfriend Laurie shared the main bedroom with their poodle. The band and the instruments were crammed into the common space, with the other bedroom being occupied on a rotating basis. The windows were often covered so that the cycles of day and night were not obvious. There were long periods of little or no food. Because the group wasn’t gigging and wasn’t even really signed to any label, there was no group money coming in. Cash infusions from Don’s family and from Bill’s mother allowed them to keep things somewhat together, but everyone remembers long periods of one cup of soybeans a day.
John French says, "I remember waking up in the middle of the night. I could hear everybody sleeping, so I crawled into the kitchen on my hands and knees, very very quietly. I took a piece of bread. It was like a heel of bread, and it must have taken me 20 minutes to do this I was so quiet. I lay with my head under my blanket, munching on this bread, like it was feast. I remember being that hungry, and really ashamed of myself for stealing the bread. Don seemed to have this thing going, where his girlfriend would wake up in the morning and go out into the kitchen and say, ‘Who stole the bread? Who drank the milk? Who ate the cheese?’ I actually remember one time drinking pancake syrup. I was so hungry I just poured it in a glass and drank it. I had to have something in my stomach."
Things got so desperate food-wise that the outlandish looking group actually tried to boost some victuals from the local Safeway at one point. Needless to say, they were busted immediately and spent a night in the local tank before Zappa came through with bail money. In Lunar Notes, Bill Harkleroad describes the criminals entering the supermarket.
"Well, as you can imagine – it being 1968 and John French with shaved eyebrows, both Mark and him with big afros, and Jeff and I with waist-length hair, painted nails, etc. – it stopped the store dead in its tracks. And that was before we were running around sticking bologna in our pants."
Wearing the frocks and costumes they bought at a Hollywood movie warehouse, the Magic Band’s four musicians rehearsed constantly, while Don lolled in his bedroom, Laurie typed up lyrics, and the poodle barked in tongues. Don would emerge late in the day, to work on new material at the piano, or get Jeff to recite some of Don’s lyrics, or to initiate one of his dreaded band meetings.
Throughout his musical career, Don was often at loggerheads with the guys in his bands. A lot of this aggro can be boiled down to the fact that Don approached music as an artist and the people he played with approached music as musicians. They had working knowledge of the tools required to turn Don’s art-statements into music, but it seems almost as though he thought of them as little more than workers whose technical chops allowed his beautiful notions to become real. It was like he was Michelangelo and the Magic Band’s members were the guys who lay on their backs and actually painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. This rubbed people the wrong way, especially given the fact that Don regularly took sole composer’s credit while remaining uninterested in learning the language of music. His approach existed entirely outside of their communicative patois. He might say that he wanted a guitar to sound like a garbage truck scrabbling down an alley. He might ask a drummer to recreate the rhythm of keys being tossed against a wall. He might gesticulate in three dimensions as a way of explaining a riff. These may have been the sounds that he heard in the music of his mind, but his request for musicians to reformulate them with standard instruments and a naturally-occurring compliment of appendages was a bit unfair.
At least partly as a way to redirect intra-band animosity, Don began hosting provocative band meetings during the group’s Laurel Canyon residence. The point of these meetings was usually to let someone know that he was unhappy with their playing. Some former members have expressed the opinion that this was primarily Don’s way of covering up for the fact that his non-musicality made him feel defensive around "real players." Putting the heat on another ass to preserve the comfort to his own, as it were. Regardless of their actual motivation, these meetings reached a fever pitch in Woodland Hills. Besides musical mistakes, all kinds of aesthetic gaffes and even external psychological attachments were among the topics discussed at meetings, which could last for over 24 hours straight. There were also physical fights provoked between members, some of which had lasting consequences.
Bill Harkleroad says, "Those sessions were brutal, just brutal. There’d be one goat, or two. The blame would shift after 12 hours and it might be directed someone else. But after thinking about that aspect of Don, and what he was doing -- yes, he went to libraries and tried to find out how to manipulate and brainwash people. I think those were conscious things. And I don’t know how else to describe it, but if we smelled bad or looked bad – he just used the same whip on us that he used on himself. This guy held his body language. I never saw that man run. The entire time I knew him I never saw him run. That’s the only person I could ever say that about. He couldn’t run, because it wouldn’t look cool. He couldn’t be the intelligent being and run at the same time. I really feel like he held himself to unbelievable standards of image, so that when somebody else busted it he couldn’t stand it. He couldn’t stand the embarrassment of us not living up to whatever his daily vision of us was. I don’t think it was directed at us personally, so much as it was just an outgrowth of his own fucked up self-conscious nature.
"We had a sense that was driven into us that the rest of the people on earth sucked. You know – Coltrane was okay, but he played notes. There was the constant process of beating us down, then feeding us the notion that we were doing the most brilliant thing on earth. Which in turn, makes the person who was doing it even more brilliant. But we were all players before we got there and we all excelled relative to our peers. I think we had an awareness that we were very competent at doing something so extreme, and getting comfortable with it, that we were doing something very powerful. But it’s tough to remember exactly what I thought as a 19 year old kid, because fear dominated my daily life."
The scent of the proceedings was not lost on Don. As he told me in a 1978 interview, "Stravinsky called me to his house while I was doing Trout Mask Replica. Laura Huxley called and wanted me to go meet him. She said, ‘The master must speak to you.’ And I didn’t go. Because of the fact that I was deeply involved in that album. The people I was with…if I would have left at the time they probably would have run right out the doors. So I didn’t go and I’ve never forgiven myself for that."
Throughout this turmoil, the band continued to work and the music for the Trout Mask coalesced. The sound’s genesis is made plain on two discs of the Grow Fins set. On one, it is possible to hear the Magic Band wrestling with the inhuman fingerings and time changes that resulted from Don’s keyboard excursions. It was left to John French to take these improvisations and get them into shape for the rest of the group, acting as de facto musical director.
John says, "Alex directed the original band, until Don kept asserting himself to the point where Alex became disgusted and gave up. Nobody in that period in between did, and I think that’s why the music is sort of chaotic on Mirror Man and Strictly Personal. It took somebody to arrange what Don was doing; not creating music necessarily – although I created a lot of my own drum parts – but just making sure that everybody knows what everything is, so that tunes don’t go on for 20 minutes.
"I had been tape recording Don’s piano parts. He would go on for hours, just hours, to get one little thing on there, and we finally ran out of tape. He was like, ‘John, record this! Get this, man! Get this! Come on!’ He’d be sitting at the piano, trapped in his own creativity, because he couldn’t get up. If he moved his hands he’d forget what he was doing. I’d be looking for tapes through these old reel-to-reel tapes. I’d drop one on the floor and it would roll away and unspool. It was just awful, just trying to find a tape that was empty. I couldn’t find any tape, so one day I just took the fuse out of the tape recorder and said it was broken. ‘Won’t work anymore.’ Because I had the music paper I tried writing out was he was playing on the piano. It’s a very visual instrument.
"Don couldn’t play that well. He did not think in long passages. Most of his passages were fairly short, just a bunch of riffs put together. And he couldn’t play from one to the other. The music works, but to me it’s rhythmically random. And it wasn’t done because Don was thinking, intentionally, ‘Oh, here I’ll go into ¾.’ He never thought about things like that. He never thought about key signatures. He never thought about time signatures. You could say, ‘Don, where’s middle C?’ And he wouldn’t know. He had no idea about that. That doesn’t stop someone from being a creative person, but it definitely stops them from being able to communicate what it is they want to do."
Bill Harkleroad adds, "For the bulk of the 16 or 18 tunes that come from the piano-based stuff, my contention is that Don could focus and play a rhythm only for a small part. He could play it two or three times, maybe, if John would hold his hand through it. Then, that was a cool part. It would be put over there. Then the next part would be a completely different thing. I can’t believe that Don had any conscious connective thing in mind. They were not done in linear order. John would say, ‘How do they go and who does what?’ And Don’s answer to him would be, ‘Well, you know.’ He was full of shit. Fortunately for him we were young enough and dumb enough to not question that, and question the stupid naïve way that it was put together, which makes it as cool as it is. But parts got changed. When it was my turn to sit with him at the piano for a two or three hour session we’d change notes and reconfigure it. We’d stick this part with that part – or no, that doesn’t work – how about if we stick that part over here? There was no obvious conscious effort to rearrange or arrange anything. We were just trying to get that barbed wire fence to roll out. The guy had a great sense of collaging feelings and rhythms, but he never figured a great way to connect them. They were just bursts. The music on Trout Mask is more of an art thing, or a how-the-hell-did-this-happen thing. It’s cool just in itself."
The rehearsals for Trout Mask lasted for months. At a certain point, Richard Kunc, the Director of Recording for Zappa’s Bizarre/Straight label consortium, came out to Woodland Hills. Armed with a portable Uher tape recorder and a microphone system he’d put together for recording the Mothers of Invention’s live dates, Kunc recorded some rehearsals, plus a variety of spoken stuff, and the horn improvisations of Don and his cousin, Victor Hayden. Hayden had been tangentially involved with the Magic Band scene since its earliest days. Victor was known as a painter rather than a musician, however, so the four extant members of the Magic Band were somewhat surprised when he arrived with a new nom de band – "The Mascara Snake."
John says, "I liked Victor. He was basically a nice person. When I first got into the group he was the guy who brought up the pot from L.A. and the acid, but he never should have been in the band. He was totally untrained, completely. He hadn’t even played a horn before. It was just basically squawking around a bit."
Bill adds, "Victor spoke and acted in a nice, creative way. And the poor guy had to be around Don as a cousin. I guess Don was feeling sorry for him or whatever. I don’t know how the transition came about, but Victor showed up with a shower cap and a bass clarinet. All I can say was that I hated it. I just fucking hated it. I was slaving to play these parts. I’d played for years before I got in the band and here was this nitwit – all attitude and no substance, getting an equal partnership on Trout Mask Replica. It was typical Don."
Although the band’s resistance to Victor’s participation in Trout Mask is understandable, given the privations they had endured, it must be said that listeners enjoyed his schtick. The spoken bits between him and Don, as well as the massive wheeze of their clarinet/sax improvisations, give the album an extra push in the direction of instability. By the time that Victor entered the fold, Don felt that the new material was ready to record. Zappa agreed to give the band six hours in the studio to record the basic tracks. By this time, the four players knew the insides and outsides of the tunes so intimately that Trout Mask’s instrumental parts were done live. In four-and-a-half hours they were through. The unimaginable stretches of physical and mental energy required to play that incredible music were their second nature. Listening to the convolutions and textures of the songs, it is impossible to imagine that they were cut live, but they were.
Trout Mask Replica was released in the fall of 1969. After the instrumental portion was complete, Don did some vocal tracks and various other bits were inserted -- spoken things from the house and studio, a blues jam between Don and departed guitarist Doug Moon, a narrative piece that Jeff Cotton phoned in to Frank Zappa at his studio, and whatnot. After this, came the album art that stopped so many young record bums in their tracks when it appeared.
Art director Calvin Schenkel remembers dealing with the literal trout mask imagery. "The essence of the concept comes from Don’s words. There may have been some discussion about actually making a mask, but probably because of time factors and everything else, it was decided that we would do it as a photo. That way, it was just a question of getting a fish. We went to Fairfax Market and bought this huge carp. We brought it back, my assistant cleaned the thing out, and then we used it. I remember Don devised some kind of mask-type thing with wires, but he did have to hold it, because it was too heavy. That’s why his hand is right there in front. It smelled pretty bad, but it all went pretty quick"
Almost immediately after Trout Mask was released, opinion about it started to calcify. Some people agreed with Groening’s assessment, others thought that it was complete doggerel. And the difficult conditions under which the album was created left their mark on the players. The Trout Mask band never played a real gig once the album was done. John French was kicked out around the time they passed up the opportunity to play at the Woodstock Festival. His name does not even appear on the album. Jeff Cotton left the group when "the fake Drumbo" (who briefly replaced John) broke two of the guitarist’s ribs during a band meeting. Victor Hayden quickly returned to painting. This left just Mark Boston and Bill Harkleroad to carry the band’s ever heavier reputation.
Once the Trout Mask band was rent asunder, the crew drifted up to Northern California, and employed a series of Zappa’s former sidemen. Ian Underwood, Art Tripp, Roy Estrada, Elliot Ingber, Jimmy Carl Black and other ex-Mothers spent varying amounts of time working with the Magic Band. These bands spent the early part of the ‘70s taking the sounds and techniques invented on Trout Mask and making them more ostensibly "musical." Although John French rejoined the band several times, he had ceded the artistic director’s chair to Bill Harkleroad. In John’s phrase, Bill was "thinking in longer phrases" than the band had been earlier, so that the music they created – while still very "out" – was much more recognisable as rock music per se. This was a wonderful period for fans. The live shows were great and there was a fine string of albums: Lick My Decals Off, Baby, The Spotlight Kid, and Clear Spot. In retrospect, it’s obvious that they evidence a band growing more toward rock normality, but each was still audibly descended from Trout Mask, and the live shows were just the sort of strange theatre one would expect from that album’s creators. Each member of the band fully inhabited his own strange stage persona and the wild cavortings of Mark Boston (in particular) assured that the Magic Band always lived up to its legend.
Throughout this period Beefheart remained more notorious than famous, however, and the Magic Band was never the commercial success that Zappa’s various Mothers proved to be. Don apparently saw this as a failing in the band's direction, and people were startled when he released an album as commercially glazed as Unconditionally Guaranteed in 1974. Soon after this, the last remnants of the Trout Mask band left en masse, in a defection led by Alex Snouffer (who had briefly returned to the fold). What followed was the extremely dull Blue Jeans and Moonbeams, the dissolution of the Magic Band, and a tour in which Don served as the lead vocalist for Zappa’s band.
By the mid-‘70s it had become almost difficult to remember why anyone actually cared so deeply about the guy’s music, but a dip into Trout Mask would always provide the answer. Still, it was interesting to hear that in ’76, Don was forming a new Magic Band. The musicians were a couple more Zappa alumni, the prodigal John French, and a unfolding series of ever-younger musicians who were of an age to remember the first time that the cover of Trout Mask had called out to them. Don’s music went through a period of rediscovery during the punk boom. Everyone from Debbie Harry to Johnny Rotten made a point of name-checking Beefheart in one interview or another, and the pre-natal "alternative" crowd was drawn to his shows in small droves.
The records and bands of this era were completely submerged in the Trout Mask myth. The extremely unpleasant ‘mersh stylings of the mid-‘70s were forgotten. The stage was filled with young guys who danced a lot like Rockette Morton, could wring sting out of their guitars like Antennna Jimmy Semens and Zoot Horn Rollo, and pummelled the drums like Drumbo (French himself was out of the band more often than he was in). In their way, they were great bands. And the records they cut (Shiny Beast, Doc at the Radar Station, and Ice Cream for Crow) were great records. But one always sensed that they were also approximations; that they were merely representations of what those guys imagined Trout Mask Replica, and the band that had cut it, to be like. Trout Mask Replica was and is a platonic ideal – a perfect form whose shape can never be truly replicated.
Perhaps Don sensed this. In interviews he’d still go on about how great it was to be playing with the bands he had. But he must have known that he’d never again be in the kind of unbearable situation that was required to produce a record as transcendent and earth-shattering as Trout Mask. Meanwhile, he focused more and more on his visual art as the years went by. In the early ‘80s he is supposed to have been told repeatedly that his paintings would be taken more seriously if he left music behind. For this reason or another, Don withdrew from the music scene in 1982. In the intervening years there have been persistent rumours about his poor health, but none have been confirmed. Certainly the speaking voice he uses in a recent Anton Corbijn documentary is far from the magnificent boomer that once rattled the world’s walls, but it is said that he’s able to have long regular phone chats with Polly Jean Harvey, so maybe he’s okay after all.
As to Trout Mask Replica, Reprise kept it in print as a two-LP set until the early ‘90s, by which time it had sold about 70,000 copies. But if a picture is worth a thousand words, the ultimate impact of an album as full of incredible pictures as Trout Mask is difficult to quantify. The copies of it that have floated across out planet’s face have surely delivered a million visions – each of them uniquely personal and roaring with light. And I may not know much about art, but man, if that ain’t it, what is?
