Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica (12 page)

Once they got rolling, the sessions began very casually, as if Zappa and Beefheart were once again revisiting that old Webcor in the abandoned classroom. In the beginning, Zappa set up the band (minus Don) and had them play all the songs they had been tirelessly working on. Meanwhile he was instigating a number of theatrical pieces, as well, to include on the record. Most of them involved Mark Boston (including a Rockette Morton routine that precedes “Fallin’ Ditch”). But John French wanted none of it. “Frank would occasionally approach me and suggest some zany verbal role which he had undoubtedly spontaneously conceived in a moment of ‘inspiration,’” French recalled. “I for the most part ignored him, feeling that this was Don’s ‘show’ and I would be firmly vilified
later for allowing myself to be manipulated by Frank at any level.”

On the surviving tapes of the house sessions, the mood was pretty upbeat and the only tension was in the anticipation of just what might happen. The first day begins with engineer Dick Kunc trying out the Uher. Once he discovers that everything seems to be working, Bill Harkleroad and Mark Boston begin rigorously practicing the opening notes of the song “Hobo Chang Ba.” Kunc then becomes aware of how quickly he will have to ride the levels. There are obvious surprises built into this music. “That’s really loud,” he says astonishingly while monitoring the playback on his headphones. “You can hear that in there?” Harkleroad asks surprised because his amp isn’t even turned on. Don jumps in quickly to warn Kunc that these guitarists just might break the speakers. Kunc then becomes apprehensive, perhaps wondering what speakers he is referring to. “Are we waiting for something?” Kunc asks quietly, not sure now what to expect. “Us,” is the answer from Boston, “if it’s alright to get a microphone.” “Can we play now?” asks Harkleroad impatiently. Kunc is now feeling the kind of confidence he recently gained from the Mothers’ tour. He replies, “Yeah. If you want to. Sure.” “Alright,” Don says eagerly awaiting the results. “What would you like to play?” Kunc asks. Don answers, “‘Dachau.’” The amps are turned up as Kunc gets the levels down and the cacophony begins with the first instrumental phrases of the apocalyptic number “Dachau Blues.”

After the band struggles through a few moments of “Dachau Blues,” they settle into the instrumental “Hair Pie: Bake 2.” “Magnificent!” Zappa yells approvingly as the song ends. He sounds assured that this field recording is up to his
expectations. Meanwhile French describes to someone the acoustic effect of the corrugated cardboard he has placed on his drum set. Apparently, the neighbour next door was complaining about the noise coming from the group and French tried to soften the sound of his set. “We had this neurotic neighbour who couldn’t stand any noise,” French remembered. “Every time we started to practice she called the police. We had several visits from the police before I finally put cardboard on my drums.” This charitable act ultimately evolved into an artistic strategy by the time they started the final recording sessions—an idea that Zappa wasn’t too crazy about. “Usually, when you record a drum set, the cymbals provide part of the ‘air’ at the top end of the mix,” he wrote in
The Real Frank Zappa Book
. “Without a certain amount of this frequency information, mixes tend to sound claustrophobic.” Nevertheless, it provided for the percussion its own distinctive quality. Rather than simply keeping the beat, the drums were now as discrete as the other instrumentalists. Once they wrap the first day’s recording, Don says, “Jesus!” in response to the wonderful noise he has just heard. Everyone appears to be happy. It sounds like a musical Garden of Eden.

Within days of that recording, Beefheart was taxing the patience of the Garden’s residents. It began with the demands he was making on the executives at Bizarre/Straight. While doing these house sessions, he had asked for a tree surgeon to be in residence. Apparently, Beefheart thought the trees around the house might become frightened of all the noise and fall over. “What I remember most of all is a pair of male and female eucalyptus trees,” Beefheart explained. “We’d play music to them, and they were really thriving, although they hadn’t been when we got there. But it started raining terribly
and I was really worried about them. I suddenly decided, ‘God, I’ve got to get something done about this.’ So I went out and got eight tree surgeons and we saved those trees.” Straight refused Beefheart’s request outright, but they still received a bill for $250.

Next, despite everyone’s satisfaction with the recordings, Beefheart accused Zappa of being cheap and demanded to bring the band into a studio. “I recall Don had brought Frank into the living room on approximately the third day of recording,” French explained. “‘Look at them, Frank!’ he said. ‘They’re trapped! They can’t transcend their environment!’” The group hardly felt trapped. According to French, they were doing just fine in their home environment. But Beefheart demanded to see studio time, which pretty much jettisoned the idea of the album becoming an anthropological field recording. Quickly, they moved the proceedings to Whitney Studios in Glendale, a studio that Dick Kunc had discovered that was owned by the Mormon church. “They had a monstrous pipe organ with rooms full of pipes and remote instruments,” Kunc told Mike Barnes. “The group was certainly well rehearsed … and was ready for anything.” This became an important factor, since Zappa initially wanted the basic tracks recorded in the house, while saving the studio for Don’s vocals. Now he had to provide about six hours of studio time to do twenty tracks, plus the vocals.

Besides the arduous task of accomplishing that feat, Beefheart was creating more headaches for Zappa. “Ordinarily, a singer goes in the studio, puts earphones on, listens to the track, tries to sing in time with it and away you go,” Zappa explained. “[But] Don couldn’t tolerate the headphones. He wanted to stand in the studio and sing as loud as
he could—singing along with the audio leakage coming through the three panes of glass which comprised the control-room window. The chances of him staying in sync was nil—but that’s how the vocals were done.” Beefheart couldn’t fathom what Zappa was so upset about. “I was playing—just like the whales,” he told Zig Zag. “I don’t think there is such a thing as synchronization … that’s what they do before a commando raid, isn’t it?”

Given what he was faced with, Zappa probably would have preferred a commando raid. He just dug into the trenches and quickly ran the group through the songs. But even after all the complications, he was astonished that they could play this music—note for note—exactly the way they did back in the house. “When Beefheart recorded the
Trout Mask Replica
album, Zappa told me that he was totally amazed at the band because they went into the studio and recorded the entire album … in one take—pretty much without stopping,” Don Preston recalled. “But the thing was, Zappa wasn’t so satisfied with that.… Frank said he needed to have the band do a second take just in case he needed to switch things around a bit. So he asked them to do it again, and once again they did the entire album in one take! Zappa was completely amazed because the second takes were virtually identical to the first.” During the sessions, Zappa didn’t take many suggestions from Kunc for fear that Beefheart would find something else to complain about. In five or six hours, the recording was done, which led many to believe that Zappa just nodded off at the control board. “Dick Kunc was engineering, so he would go, ‘Okay,’ and we would go … and twenty-one tunes later, we were done,” Harkleroad said. “Frank was just sitting there.
He didn’t really produce the album. There was no musical input, nothing.”

Since musical input had only inspired paranoia, Zappa preferred to do his real production work once he got the tapes in his possession. “You couldn’t explain, from a technical standpoint, anything to Don,” Zappa told Nigel Leigh of the BBC. “You couldn’t tell him why things ought to be such and such a way. And it seemed to me that if he was going to create a unique object, the easiest thing for me to do was keep my mouth shut as much as possible.” As a rationalist, Zappa was trying to build a foundation for Beefheart’s art, while Beefheart, the irrational artist, railed against the perceived limitations Zappa was imposing on him. “I think that if he had been produced by any professional famous producer, there could have been a number of suicides involved,” Zappa would later remark. On Easter Sunday 1969, though, Zappa called up Vliet and told him that the album was done. Beefheart had all the guys in the band get dressed up, “as if they were going to Easter church,” Zappa recalled. They came over to Zappa’s studio early that morning and sat in his living room and listened to it. Apparently, they loved it. Considering all the adversity stirred up in making it, the record’s defiant originality cut through the foibles. Within a few months, when a few brave people put the record on their turntable, they would discover just how defiantly original it really was.

I do not write experimental music. My experimenting is done before I make the music. Afterwards it is the listener who must experiment.

—Edgard Varèse

When
Trout Mask Replica
was released in the US in the early summer of 1969, it was a double LP, not a single CD. It’s significant to point this out for a variety of reasons. With an LP, you always had to approach your turntable with it, take out the record from the jacket, and turn it over to play the other side. You had to do this four times with
Trout Mask
. It was like an open dare—a summons—just to see if you could sustain your curiosity long enough to find out what lurked on the other side. With the
Trout Mask
CD, you are left with pretty simple options. For one thing, once you stick the CD in the tray, you never have to touch it until it’s over. Secondly, with your remote, you can abruptly skip tracks, or put it on pause while
you shake your head in disbelief at what you’ve just heard. You can quickly turn it off from a safe distance, too, sitting comfortably in your chair. You never ever have to play it again. All things considered, it was far more audacious for
Trout Mask Replica
to come out in the age of the LP. To risk its contents, you constantly had to
handle
it.

Cal Schenkel’s cover art for the record merely doubled the dare. With Vliet in his mammoth hat and fish-face, we find the familiar image of the American artist donning a mask to disclose his most impudent work. But the mask doesn’t work here, as it does metaphorically in the case of Randy Newman, with subversion hidden under the hood. Beefheart uses the mask as a totem of transformation. He doesn’t hide behind it, he becomes the mask. To be a different fish, you first have to
become
the fish. So Cal Schenkel had to find himself one. “The way it came about [was] I went and found this carp head at some fish market,” Schenkel explained. “We took it back to my studio, which was the same place that I did the
Uncle Meat
cover … and I took this trout head and hollowed it out—the thing stank like hell—and Don had to hold it up to his face for a couple of hours while we shot.”

The back cover was less startling, but it didn’t make it any easier to approach the music. Mike Barnes, in his Beefheart biography, perfectly described its impact. With the band surrounding him, Beefheart is in his top hat and shades, pointing a shadeless lamp and “looking like a forlorn Mad Hatter, and lighting the way into the wilderness.” The inside gatefold design had a color negative photo of the group that was cropped incongruently and shaded by psychedelic colors. However, this was no average psychedelic group. As Barnes would remark, “[T]he Magic Band weren’t going to be saddled
with any of the beads, bells and incense hokum of the increasingly disparate hippie tribes.” Early editions of the record had a lyric sheet featuring a scattering of some of Victor Hayden’s lithographs. (These are now included in the CD edition.)

“Frownland” kicks the record off in 7/8 time, until the guitar notes start to fall away aimlessly like raindrops, and French’s drums begin to resemble falling rocks. “My smile is stuck,” Beefheart declares over the avalanche, “I can’t go back to yer frownland.” What begins as a basic rock and roll song is quickly swept away with a steel broom. “The standard role of the two guitars, bass, drums rock line-up is subverted to the point where nothing ever settles or is repeated to any extent,” Mike Barnes writes in
Captain Beefheart: The Biography
. Beefheart acknowledges his past, where he once built new bridges with blues based material, but the songs featured on
Trout Mask
demand new ears to listen with. “Beefheart is not concerned to build bridges for his audience or to make it any easier for anyone to come along,” Langdon Winner reminds us in his “Stranded” essay. “Either you’re interested or you’re not.”

While Beefheart doesn’t patronize listeners with this miniature manifesto (“Take my hand ’n come with me / It’s not too late for you / It’s not too late for me / To find my homeland”), the music arrives with a shocking force that ultimately gives you little choice. “[Beefheart] bellows out a yearning, soulful blues which further warps the already warped structure, pleading, ‘I want my own land,’ realizing that his wish is becoming fulfilled as he sings the words,” Barnes writes. Rock and roll has always been predicated on finding new ways to get the listener onboard, if not up on
the dance floor. In “Frownland,” Beefheart decries the conventional rules of rock and roll to open up a territory away from standard notation and the precepts of conventional society. “The vision of
Trout Mask Replica
is fundamentally that of an American primitivist surrealist,” Langdon Winner explains. “The land he asks us to visit is one we already know very well. It is
not
, as many of us fans have supposed, outer space or the realm of late 1960’s hippie, psychedelic weirdness for weirdness’ sake.” It is America, a self-made country, built on ideas and ideals, both failed and realized, and Beefheart conceives an elaborate map that defines what those attributes mean to him.

The next track, “The Dust Blows Forward ’N the Dust Blows Back,” is the first of three a cappella recitations. If “Frownland” points toward a future in a new world, “The Dust Blows Forward” resembles a strange relic unearthed from the distant past. That’s partly due to the poem being recorded on a portable cassette machine at the house. The clicking sound of the pause button, which opens the track, is heard repeatedly between each of the vocal passages replicating the clicking heard on old 78s of the needle running through the grooves. But it can also be heard as a picturesque story out of the early American wilderness tales of James Fenimore Cooper, only told through the eyes of a surrealist. The poem begins with ole Gray “with ’er dovewinged hat” and ole Green “with her sewing machine.” Exchanging puns for perceptions, the narrator quickly abandons the couple and observes the dust going forward and backward in an endless cycle, while the wind blows black and the industrial smokestacks blow up into the sun’s eye. He asks himself if he’s gonna die.