A how-to guide to actually enjoy ‘Trout Mask Replica’
There’s one album which sits in many an eager muso’s record collection but is rarely played, or at least subject to cueing abandon before its first track is even over. However, whether it’s every few months or after years have gone by, Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band’s notorious double LP will occasionally dare you to give its atonal jams another crack, frontman and leader Don Van Vliet’s carp mug almost winking with goading beckon. Reeling you in, you ask yourself: “Is this the day I finally get Trout Mask Replica?”
Ever since its 1969 drop, the Frank Zappa-produced Beefheart opus has revelled in an avant-garde reputation as a musical endurance test. This intimidating aura is wholly confirmed upon the first few seconds, album opener ‘Frownland’ aggressively cascades out the speakers with its rust-junk blues and panicked anti-R&B scoring Van Vliet’s disjointed Howlin’ Wolf snarl, an enveloping mess that could be mistaken for indulging in its own, self-satisfied esoterica.
“I thought it was the worst thing I’d ever heard. I said to myself, ‘they’re not even trying!’ The Simpsons creator and weird music aficionado Matt Groening stated on BBC’s The Artist Formerly Known as Captain Beefheart in 1997. “About the third time, I realised they were doing it on purpose; they meant it to sound exactly this way. About the sixth or seventh time, it clicked in, and I thought it was the greatest album I’d ever heard.” A phenomenon also confirmed by XTC’s Andy Partridge on a 2006 The Guardian feature on Van Vliet’s “unlistenable” masterwork, the first step to experiencing Trout Mask Replica‘s penny drop is to give it several goes, let’s say eight, to truly see its lauded light.
The next step is to remember that underneath all its blistered dissonance is a keen, albeit warped, embrace of his native musical foundations. For all the traditionalists out there, Americana’s 20th-century DNA is present throughout Trout Mask Replica. Desecrated, twisted, and deconstructed sure, but its primordial being exists in the blues, free jazz, garage rock, and even country stroll of the States’ musical foundations. Along with its demand for repeated listens an understanding that Trout Mask Replica isn’t a completely alien deviation from music’s bedrock will stand you in good stead.
Knowing the blood, sweat, and tears that went into its recording, consider the third step in wrestling some level of appreciation out of Trout Mask Replica‘s gasping, wriggling capture is knowing the Magic Band’s pain and unfairly buried contributions to the fraught sessions. Desiring the commune experience for his avant-garde pièce de résistance, everybody lived together in a small rented house in Los Angeles’ Woodland Hills for eight months of intense rehearsal, Van Vliet tyrannically dictating each member’s playing style and berating with venom anyone not perceived to cut the mustard. Guitarist Bill Harkleroad’s fingers were a “bloody mess” due to Beefheart’s dictatorial order to use heavy strings, and drummer John French likened the claustrophobic sessions as “cultlike”.
Restricted from leaving the house and often subsiding on nothing more than a can of beans a day, consider your quest to add Trout Mask Replica to your pantheon of great albums a noble pursuit of recognising the backing musicians’ wounded recording experience and dispelling the myths that Beefheart ingeniously conceived every piece of music in eight hours. If you won’t listen due to Beefheart’s spoilt despotism, at least do it for his poor Magic Band.
Finally, it is less a step and more a little piece of advice. You’re allowed not to dig Trout Mask Replica. Just as you’re entitled to think large swathes of Frank Zappa’s oeuvre is over-complex kitsch lost in a tedious wallow of smug cynicism, if by the last stuttered drum roll splashes at the end of ‘Veteran’s Day Poppy’ still leaves you fatigued and irritated on its eighth spin, then this double LP ain’t for you, and it’s a fair bet that Beefheart would have infinitely preferred honest contempt than phoney veneration for any of his creative endeavours.
Beefheart’s extraordinary body of work is full of greater albums, standout triumphs, and celebrated ‘comebacks’, but whether you ever truly discover what all the fuss is about, Trout Mask Replica will always stand as his seminal offering, a record which will eternally fascinate and torment in equal measure.
