TROUT MASK REPLICA - CAPTAIN BEEFHEART AND HIS MAGIC BAND.
For a period of about six months in 1968/9 Captain Beefheart locked up a bunch of 18-20 year old talented musicians in a house and cajoled, bullied, browbeat, played mind games with them - moulded, manipulated, mesmerised them into playing a whole new kind of music. Early in 1968 I had bought Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band’s first album ‘Safe as Milk’, without having heard anything by them before. It was the name of the band that did it for me, after seeing a mention of them in the N.M.E. Already intrigued by American psychedelia I guess I expected something along the lines of the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane or Country Joe and the Fish. But this was no meandering stoned, sunshine jam or your standard peace ‘n love type San Francisco paean to a kaftanned, beaded and free-loving Utopia. Instead here was a poppy yet quirky band fronted by a guy who sounded like Howlin’ Wolf, singing short, catchy tunes including ‘Dropout Boogie’, a sideswipe at the middle class hippie dream denied to the poor ‘white trash’ families living on the breadline. ‘Strictly Personal’ soon followed. A big change here with eight more lengthy, denser songs more akin to what was known as ‘acid rock’. Howlin’ Wolf on acid growling and shouting and hootin’ and hollerin’ in front of a grotesquely freaky looking band beginning to reach out into new musical dimensions, all that plus added phasing by the bucketload and lyrics even more surreal than early Bob Dylan.
But this was nothing, merely a preparation for the ground breaking opus known to us mere mortals as ‘Trout Mask Replica’. As John Peel said of his response to first hearing the album “You didn’t know what you thought. You suspected that it was crap because it was unlike anything else you’d ever heard in your life. Whoever you are, your value systems are based on comparitive judgements and you can’t listen to something in a kind of state of grace, and ‘Trout Mask Replica’ had no reference points. You could approach it from any direction, you could interpret it in any way, because it bore no resemblance to anything else you’d experienced.” This was the product of the band’s strange six month sojourn in the two bedroomed house on Ensenada Drive, Woodland Hills, on the outskirts of the metropolis of Los Angeles, close to the brooding Mojave desert. This was the music of the edge.
New, young band members had been recruited to join Jeff Cotton and John French, the only surviving members of the ‘Strictly Personal’ band. Before embarking on his notions of playing a radically different form of music, Beefheart heralded his vision by giving new names to the members of the band, new identities to forge in a brave new world. Jeff Cotton became Antennae Jimmy Semens (steel-appendage guitar), John French became Drumbo (drums); of the new members Bill Harkleroad became Mr. Zoot Horn Rollo (glass finger guitar, guitar, flute), Mark Boston became Rockette Morton (bass and narration), and Victor Hayden became the Mascara Snake (bass clarinet, vocals).
Once renamed, Beefheart began to try and change not only the way the band played music but, more crucially, on a deeper level, how they actually thought about music so they could break through the more traditional rock n roll methods of expressing themselves. With no musical training himself, Beefheart set about explaining in extremely esoteric fashion his vision of how he wanted the band’s music to sound. It was then left to John French to attempt to decipher this and then work out with the rest of the band actually how to play it. An arduous task for a bunch of increasingly emotionally and physically drained teenagers, demolishing all known musical structures and constructing brand new ones out of the debris, living off food stamps and practising eight to twelve hours a day songs for which eventually Beefheart would take total credit.
But however they did it, they succeeded. They had succeeded in translating the Captain’s gnomic utterances and deconstructed, some might say deranged, musical vision into something concrete and had become so proficient in playing this new music that it took a mere six hours for them to go into Frank Zappa’s studio and record some twenty odd tunes one after another, no second takes, and then go back home, job done. A shocked Zappa had allotted two weeks of studio time for them to perform this task.
Whatever effect this feat of interpretation had on the members of the band, what effect did it have on those who went out and bought it? (incidentally making it the band’s biggest hit in the U.K., charting at no 21 in the British album charts. None of his albums ever made it into the U.S. album charts. Draw your own conclusions!). Well, I bought it, took it home, turned it up loud and, by the end, only two of us were left out of a starting total of about ten. That’s the thing about Beefheart. Throughout my (ex) married life, I would only play him when my wife was out. You never think of putting him on at parties (unless it’s a meeting of the Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band fan club) and, indeed, you very rarely hear him played on the radio. Since the death of John Peel the chances have become much less likely. If there was such a thing as a Captain Beefheart fan club, John Peel would probably have been the president. In an interview with Mike Barnes, author of the excellent ‘Captain Beefheart. The Biography’, Peel opined that “If there has been anything in the history of popular music which could be described as a work of art in a way that people who are involved in other areas of art would understand, then Trout Mask Replica is probably that work”.
Now, although a lover of music, I know little of its complexities, how it is put together technically, probably because I am a drummer! Hours spent sitting there smoking and drinking while other band members say things like, “it’s in C so you are going to have to play it in F sharp major, Colin.” Like I said, I do not understand this. Music moves me (or not) yet without an understanding of how it is constructed. Like the underneath of Victorian railway bridges. You can look up and silently wonder at the beauty of the elegant curves of brickwork that hold it up yet without any idea of how it was constructed. Although I cannot argue with the idea that if I did understand it would probably enrich my pleasure. This is how I feel about Beefheart’s music.
I saw this particular Magic Band a couple of times in the early seventies. Firstly I was amazed that they could actually play this stuff live. Secondly, I was awe struck that they sounded even better, much funkier, than on the albums. To this psychedelicised punter, the strangely garbed Magic Band all looked as if thet were in their own little worlds, picking away at their instruments, almost as if the others didn’t exist, as if they were all playing their own little tune. Yet, out of the speakers came this roaring, rocking racket that you could not keep still to. How did they do it? Well, I remember reading an autobiography by Bill Harkleroad (Mr. Zoot Horn Rollo) in which he explained in musical terms how they managed to create the sound of the Magic Band. And, of course, it is very technical, yet in a way matches my more visceral experince of the music. The way he explains it is that they are indeed playing their own individual tune, playing in different time signatures so that every few bars they collide before hurtling off into their own little orbits for another few bars.
This is the antithesis of jamming, or free form. It can only work if played with the utmost precision and individual dedication to the whole. Ironically, then, much more communal than the long meandering jams of the Utopian dreaming West Coast hippie bands and the whole endless ego tripping solos of the progressive era. It is the music of total individual responsibility within a collective framework. Is this not the revolution once dreamed of, true anarchy in a social sphere? Utopia regained. No need for governments if people can work together responsibly, each playing their own part for the good of the whole. This is it, this is what they have discovered and put into practice. But no, I forget, I become carried away, it is not true anarchy. It would only work if Captain Beefheart was the President of the World!
For the members of the Magic Band would this be too high a price to pay? When asked, they do all seem to agree that, whatever personal hell they went through locked up in a house with the manipulative, controlling Captain of the ship, they have all gained artistically/musically and could not go back to playing as they did before. A group of largely teenage musicians snatched out of the suburbs to live in a claustrophobic, almost Mansonesque environment learning how to play a form of music never heard before, eventually transmuting themselves into the strange creatures staring into the camera on the back cover of the album. Despite the privations they seem to have no regrets, except financial and not being acknowledged by their leader for the part they played in his musical vision. As it says on the album “All songs written by Captain Beefheart. Words and music copyrighted for the world by Beefheart Music”. As it also states on the cover, they are His Magic Band, instrumental only in assisting him in presenting his unique vision to the world. But they all still seem to have the greatest respect for the the guy behind the trout mask. His genius has rubbed off onto them along the journey and transformed them for ever. In the words of the Grateful Dead “Sometimes the light’s all shining on me, other times I can barely see, lately it occurs to me, what a long strange trip it’s been”.