Album of the Week: Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band — Trout Mask Replica

If there’s an album people who are way into music have heard of but probably never listened to, it must be Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band. You’ll almost always see it featured somewhere on every best of all time lists, and the name itself is enough to make you sit there and go “huh?” but maybe not quite enough to make you want to seek it out and give it a listen. Probably something that Captain Beefheart, aka Don Van Vilet, would get a kick out of.

Your second test, if you made it as far as putting the album on, would be if you can make it past the first thirty seconds of the opener “Frownland.” It’s less than two minutes long, but the mixture of lo-fi production values, dissonant jarring guitar chords, and pseudo-blues ranting, makes for a challenging listen. Something that remains still true hearing it today, let alone those that were able to get past the fish-face cover when it was released back in 1969. Amazingly, it somehow spent a week at number 21 on the UK music charts.

The instrumental recording was done in a single six hour session, though had been written over a number of previous months in the ascetic impoverished communal house where the band lived, and the vocals were tracked in the days that followed. A double album, produced by fellow weirdo Frank Zappa, Trout Mask Replica does have moments where you can hear the postmodern everything-plus-the-sink oddball approach of Zappa that sets itself against Beefheart’s previously more straight blues influenced garage rock of his previous albums. It’s a bit more art rock and a bit less comedy than Zappa’s work, but you can still hear his influence, or at least why he liked Beefheart as much as he did. Though it sounds as though Van Vilet out-weirded the master in his approach by doing things during the recording process like covering the cymbals and drums with cardboard, or doing his vocal tracks without monitor headphones and singing along with the vague amount of bleed that he could hear through the studio window, rendering his efforts out of synch with the recorded tracks.

Though it sounds random, the music on Trout Mask Replica is very deliberately constructed. Van Vilet by accounts wrote much of it at the piano and then had drummer David French transcribe the parts for other band members to play on their instruments. This wasn’t done in a haphazard manner and though the end result took on the qualities of tape-splicing in experimental music the compositions were very much constructed. It’s difficult, then, to point to a particular song that defines the sound of the record or is a must-hear single; the album is best taken as a strange whole. The surrealist poetry that made up the lyrics of Trout Mask Replica would foreshadow the rest of Captain Beefheart’s career — the spoken word sections in particular. While much of it sounds like the fallout from a scarring LSD trip, it’s also chalk full of lyrical-pranksterisms and curious references that demand closer examination.

For all the noodling strangeness, Trout Mask Replica has cast a long shadow of influence, perhaps most notably on the influencers themselves, as famous music figures like the BBC’s John Peel, CREAM magazine’s Lester Bangs and John Lennon were fans. Musicians frequently mention it on having an impact on their work, even if for only it’s crazed adventurous spirit, but it would be difficult not to look at the approach to the guitar in particular, and hear its echo in the music of the punk through new wave era.

If anyone thought Psych music, blues rock and free jazz could never co-exist, they haven’t heard Trout Mask Replica. Give the whole thing a listen — it’s a challenge, see if you can handle it. And as always, let us know what you think in the comments!