659: TROUT MASK REPLICA | CAPTAIN BEEFHEART AND HIS MAGIC BAND

The great David Fricke at Rolling Stone: Released 50 years ago, on June 16th, 1969, Trout Mask Replica — the third studio album by Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band — still sounds like a tomorrow that has not arrived, a music created at a crossroads of sound and language so far distant it continues to defy definitive summation and universal translation. Guitars jut out at improbably severe angles in ice-pick treble, like broken bones slicing through skin. The drumming comes in a rush of agendas, U-turn spasms of loose-limbed time and tempo under melodies which, in turn, feel like they are yet only partially born, still evolving in sense and structure. The singing is another primal logic altogether, an extreme in octaves and sustain that goes from hellhound bass to wracked falsetto, the pictorial cut-up frenzy of the lyrics run through archaic Delta-blues vernacular.

Here is an apparent chaos of pure impulse performed with insanely drilled conviction on a double LP of 29 tracks, only eight of which pass the three-minute mark; a mass of disparate roots — field hollers and Fifties R&B; Sixties garage rock and psychedelia; free jazz and tape manipulation — whipped together in a taut, explosive confrontation with no clear precedent and, after a half-century of canonization on “Greatest Albums of All Time” surveys, no certain legacy. The phrase “Beefheartian” is often used as a measure and compliment in record reviews, to assess the aspiring weirdness of other, especially younger artists. It is a misleading judgement, particularly in relation to Trout Mask Replica, the most Beefheartian album that the singer himself, Don Van Vliet, ever made. As punk icon John Lydon, one of the record’s most famous fans, told Pitchfork, “It was anti-music in the most interesting and insane way” — a “confirmation” to him, as very young man, frustrated by the rules in pop, that “there was room for everything.”

On Trout Mask Replica, breaking through the limits of coherence and cohesion already reset in the wide-open liberty of rock in the late Sixties, Van Vliet and his greatest Magic Band — guitarists Bill Harkleroad and Jeff Cotton, bassist Mark Boston, clarinetist Victor Hayden and drummer John French — established new margins of personal, idiosyncratic expression, much as the Velvet Underground did for drone, minimalism and literary transgression. But even Van Vliet — who continued to press his singular, soulful dada onto records as varied and inspirational as 1970’s Lick My Decals Off, Baby; the near-pop of 1972’s Clear Spot; and his true triumph, 1980’s Doc at the Radar Station — never made another album as foreign and raw as Trout Mask, maybe because it was too dangerous to go back there.

“That is a hell of a thing to ask somebody to do, to give blood like that,” Van Vliet, who died in 2010, said of composing in 1989, during one of my last conversations with him. Fifty years later, like its infamously literal cover, Trout Mask Replica still comes to you in vivid rivers of red.

Everyone with a copy of Trout Mask Replica has a story of walking into it for the first time, typically in disbelief. “I thought it was the worst thing I’d ever heard,” the cartoonist Matt Groening admitted in the 1997 BBC documentary, The Artist Formerly Known as Captain Beefheart. “It was just a sloppy cacophony,” he went on, until the “sixth or seventh” listen when “it clicked in, and I thought it was the greatest thing I’d ever heard.” In his original rave review of Trout Mask Replica in Rolling Stone, published in July, 1969, Lester Bangs initially admitted that “the rhythms and melodic textures jump all over the place … Given a superficial listening, they seem boring and repetitious.”

But as he reaffirmed a decade later, in a 1980 article in The Village Voice, Trout Mask Replica was “not even ‘ahead’ of its time in 1969. Then and now,” Bangs insisted, “it stands outside time, trends, fads, hypes … constituting a genre unto itself.” That album “reinvented from the ground up rhythm, melody, harmonics, perhaps what our common narrow parameters have defined as music itself.”

I came to Trout Mask Replica in the summer of ’69 with preconceptions — all formed by Beefheart’s first two albums: the eccentric, angular pop of 1967’s Safe as Milk and the rattling heavily-phased blues menace on 1968’s Strictly Personal. I heard the former LP’s garage-rock blitz “Zig Zag Wanderer” (with stinging-Byrds guitar by a young Ry Cooder) on FM-underground radio in Philadelphia and ordered the album from a local record shop. By the time I got it, I already had Strictly Personal and decided that Beefheart’s Magic Band were my Rolling Stones on Mars… AMAZON

To the left is another great cacophonous Captain Beefheart record. Doc At The Radar Station is this little gem from 1980 set in the time of post-punk and new wave it swims in it’s own channel like Trout Mask did.