The 1969 album Frank Zappa called the most original in history: “Nothing else like it”
In the mid-1940s, Frank Zappa returned to his native Maryland.
His father, a Sicilian chemist of Arabic descent, had just taken up a job at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, where the military’s store of mustard gas was housed. Zappa’s childhood home was so close to this chemical weapons stronghold that gas masks adorned the walls of every room in the house. This was unusual to say the least.
Meanwhile, 2,650 miles away in sunny Los Angeles, Don Glen Vliet was having his own strange childhood. To begin with, young Vliet was a child sculpting prodigy, which is, we can all agree, one of the rarest prodigious talents a boy can display. But boy, did he display it.
He began sculpting at just three years old. His early works exhibited a particular interest in dinosaurs, fish and mammals. They were good enough to warrant exhibitions – or perhaps people were merely pretentious enough to pretend they were. Either way, the attention meant the toddler took his art very seriously. It is even said that Vliet’s parents had to push dinner under his door, such was his juvenile obsession with creative endeavours. This was also unusual to say the least.
So, when Zappa’s itinerant youth finally settled up the road from Vliet, it’s no surprise that they became friends. The pair attended what must surely be one of the weirdest High Schools in Los Angeles County, which would place it high in the running for weirdest worldwide.
Together, they exchanged odd artistic influences. Eventually, Vliet would, of course, become Captain Beefheart, and Zappa would be such a liege lord of the loonies that he even had his own label to foster their efforts in a business capacity.
In fact, he had two. They were aptly titled ‘Bizarre’ and ‘Straight’. Naturally, he signed the madman Vliet to Straight when their paths re-crossed in early adulthood after a period of estrangement. Interestingly, Zappa not only signed his old friend, but he gave him total creative control over his next album… the consummate record label exec.
This is a decision that would prove interesting. With the keys to creative oblivion tucked firmly away in the back pocket of his jazzy jeans, Vliet and his merry band of Beefheart brethren absconded to a small, rented house in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles. Little did some of them know how truly obscure their Captain was. If the drummer made a mistake, he would force him into a barrel and whack the outside of it with a stick. He’d make the band stay awake for hours on end. He’d be a wild autodidact in every way, strolling around like an avant-garde Napoleon.
But the record that resulted, Trout Mask Replica, is one that stands the test of time as either the weirdest masterpiece ever created or a horrific hoax that has fooled the gullible into believing it’s great, depending on who you ask. Zappa falls firmly into the former. “Trout Mask Replica was a splendid album, there’s nothing else like it,” he told Steve Rosen.
Frank Zappa’s seal of approval
Speaking about his music in a more general sense, Zappa told Matt Groening: “The best of it is unbelievable, and the worst of it is under the influence of some really bad A&R people at Warner Brothers. But there are things on Trout Mask Replica that are unbelievable.” And Zappa knew all too well that the album was truly unbelievable in every sense.
He was aware, for instance, that his old pal had written all 28 songs in a single nine-hour sitting at the piano. He had never played piano before. So it took him a little while to “figure out the fingering”. Thereafter, he presented these loose riffs devoid of a tonal centre to the band and burdened them with playing along. Naturally, nobody knew what the hell to play.
With extreme punishments for stepping out of line, the process moved forward tentatively. As the group’s drummer, Drumbo, puts it, “It was as though someone had taken a blank jigsaw puzzle, randomly picked up pieces and scribbled little pictures on each one, and said, ‘Put this together, I’ll be out later to see the thing when it’s done’.”
Meanwhile, Zappa sat waiting for a record as the strange head of Straight, wondering when it would arrive and no doubt questioning his decision to give the Captain full creative control.
The same can be said when the pieces were finally ready to be put together. One of the initial recordings involved Zappa finally coming to the house with engineer Dick Kunc and setting up the recording equipment in the centre of the crooked abode, then achieving sound separation by having each musician play behind a closed door in a different room of the house. This was unconventional, but it was exactly how Zappa had envisioned it.
“Don is not technically oriented, so, first I had to help him figure out what he wanted to do, and then, from a practical standpoint, how to execute his demands,” Zappa writes in The Real Frank Zappa Book. “I wanted to do the album as if it were an anthropological field recording — in his house.” Which was, as Drumbo would describe it, more of a “positively Manson-esque” commune. The results are reflective of that. And in Zappa’s eyes, that was close to perfection.
In many people’s eyes, it was close to a sham. Joy Division’s Peter Hook, for instance, famously quipped that “Trout Mask wasn’t a work of untutored genius, it was untutored crap”. He even found its mania symbolic of the deeper pretentiousness that runs through much alternative music. He explained, “Trout Mask was highly regarded by post-punk bands because of its idiosyncratic approach to rhythm and song construction – but those bands were full of shit, weren’t they?”
Well, were they?
