Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 188

Record label: Straight/Reprise

Produced: Frank Zappa

Recorded: Whitney Studios, Glendale, California and Ensenada Drive, Woodland Hills, California; March–April 1969

Released: November 1969

Chart peaks: 21 (UK) None (US)

Personnel: Zoot Horn Rollo AKA Bill Harkleroad (g, flute); Antennae Jimmy Semens AKA Jeff Cotton (g); Captain Beefheart (bass clarinet, ts, soprano sax, simran horn, musette, v); The Mascara Snake AKA Victor Hayden (bass clarinet, v); Rockette Morton AKA Mark Boston (b, narration); Drumbo AKA John French (d); Doug Moon (g); Dick Kunc (e)

Track listing: Frownland; The Dust Blows Forward ’N The Dust Blows Back; Dachau Blues; Ella Guru; Hair Pie: Bake 1; Moonlight On Vermont; Pachuco Cadaver (S/France); Bills Corpse; Sweet Sweet Bulbs; Neon Meate Dream Of A Octafish; China Pig; My Human Gets Me Blues; Dali’s Car; Hair Pie: Bake 2; Pena; Well; When Big Joan Sets Up; Fallin’ Ditch; Sugar ’N Spikes; Ant Man Bee; Orange Claw Hammer; Wild Life; She’s Too Much For My Mirror; Hobo Chang Ba; The Blimp (mousetrapreplica); Steal Softly Thru Snow; Old Fart At Play; Veteran’s Day Poppy

Running time: 79.08

Current CD: Warners 7599271962

Further listening: Lick My Decals Off, Baby (1970)

Further reading: Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica 33 1/3 (Kevin Courier, 2007); www.beefheart.com

Download: Not currently legally available

In 1968, a revamped Magic Band moved into a rented house in Woodland Hills, near Los Angeles, and set about rehearsing the music for Trout Mask Replica. Safe As Milk and the full-blown acid rock of Strictly Personal had made the group’s reputation, but now signed to Frank Zappa’s new Straight label, Beefheart – aka Don Van Vliet – was about to make his art statement. To avoid any confusion arising from his musical instructions and whistled lines, he set about composing on the piano. Technically, he couldn’t really play the instrument, but at this point he had confidence to spare.

Beefheart had put the brakes on his voracious consumption of LSD but was convinced the house was built on a Native American burial ground, and claimed he talked to the spirits. Meanwhile the group spent six months in grinding poverty learning John (Drumbo) French’s transcriptions of Don’s piano outpourings – which were often overlaid in different keys and metres; a feat of superhuman dedication. Beefheart had given all the musicians new names and was becoming increasingly tyrannical. Problems like noise complaints from the neighbours were minor compared to elongated ‘brainwashing’ sessions, fist fights breaking out in the fractious atmosphere and the group getting arrested during a shoplifting spree. By spring 1969 they were ready to make a ‘field recording’ in the house with Dick Kunc – a near neighbour, occasional house guest and regular engineer on Zappa’s music – bringing over his portable 2-track Uher reel-to-reel.

‘They were certainly well rehearsed. I seem to recall it was pretty much controlled chaos, with Don very much in command,’ he says. After a few tracks had been recorded, Beefheart insisted they use a proper studio, and they decamped to Whitney, in nearby Glendale. Although Kunc was ‘ready for anything’ he admits that ‘as a neophyte to that galaxy of music at the time, I wondered how to tell the difference between good and not-so-good performances.’

The album was recorded at breakneck speed and emerged as a massive scrapbook of free jazz, blues, rock and surreal poetry. Lester Bangs waxed rhapsodic in Rolling Stone, while others found it incomprehensible. In Britain, largely thanks to the patronage of John Peel’s Top Gear, Trout Mask Replica almost broke into the top 20 and remains surprisingly popular for such an extreme record. In an HMV poll of customers’ favourite albums in 1998, it ambled in at number 42, one place above Bowie’s Hunky Dory.