Fast and Bulbous: 50 years of Trout Mask Replica
The first time I heard ‘Trout Mask Replica’, I hated it.
At 17 years old I was a proud music geek and even prouder of my knowledge of the classic rock repertoire. I enjoyed discovering (with the assistance of Limewire) all that the genre had to offer, and I was perpetually excited to listen to what the critics deemed the greatest albums of all time. If you’re familiar at all with the ‘best of’ lists of yore, you’ll know the usual suspects: ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’; ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’; ‘Blonde On Blonde’, the list goes on. And among the revered few there always sits the anomaly of 1969’s ‘Trout Mask Replica’ by Captain Beefheart And His Magic Band. Its garish and beguiling cover art, where the titular Captain brandishes a carp head to conceal his face, is perhaps the best metaphor for the music within the album: it is at once lurid, colourful, absurd, and savage. However, even this warning couldn’t prepare my uninitiated ears for my first listen. On pressing play, the angular and syncopated avant-blues guitars of the band coupled with the snarling madman at their helm was enough to make my head spin. I was downright furious that this cacophony had ever been mentioned in the same breath as my sacred Beatles LPs. How could the rock press have lied to me so?
However, while this revulsion stuck with me for the rest of my highschool years and well into the first year of university, my morbid curiosity perpetually got the better of me. I could not stop listening to the damn thing. Even as I winced my way through all 79 mins of material, there was some strange magnetism to the whole ordeal. Was there perhaps light at the end of the tunnel? In short — yes, there was.
I vividly remember the moment when Trout Mask clicked for me. It was in the early hours of New Year’s Day, on returning from a party. Under some illusion of “opening my horizons” as a New Year’s resolution I decided to spin the album one more time on the new headphones that I’d received for Christmas. I’d be lying if I said that as soon as the opening chords of ‘Frownland’ played that I had a musical epiphany, but the melodies seemed comfortable and familiar and I enjoyed the frenetic grinding of the band. No, the epiphany in fact came slightly later in the track listing, during a song called ‘Sweet Sweet Bulbs’, where my comprehension of the song helped me unlock and understand the album as a whole. I suddenly found some sense in the chaos.
The track in question opens with a rather playful riff, with two guitars bouncing off of each other in the left and right channels and a jubilant bass bubbling underneath. This playfulness heralds in the Captain, who begins to describe a garden:
Sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet, bulbs grow in my latest garden
Warm, warm, warm, warm, warm sun-fingers wave in my latest garden
Flowers dance, their faces brave
Come talk freely in the garden of my lady
We hear of a sanctuary, a little oasis in the world for free talking and growing, with the joyful music mirroring the sunny disposition of the lyrics. A place of refuge for the open minded, inhabited by a bonneted lady called Phoebe. But not all is well, as the Captain explains:
And just behind ya was the sea of negativity
Tinklin’ like mercury in the wind
And with this the band switches into a dissonant menace. Gone is the warmth of sunlight, only a dark cloud of contorted guitar lines and ferocious drumming remains. This is the harsh world outside of the sanctuary, away from the freedom and the light of the garden. This is the bitter bleakness and despondency of city life, of the rat race, of the underbelly of the human condition. But fear not, for the Captain and Phoebe will guide us back to the light. We hear of her abandoning the negativity and walking “…back into nature”. As we take the lyrical journey with her, so too we take a musical one. As Phoebe creeps back into the garden so does the jubilant opening melody of the guitars. At first only one guitar plays the refrain in direct conflict with the more dissonant cloud while the Captain sings “Her garden gate swings lightly without weight”. As listeners, we’re on the border of the darkness and the light; we are at the entrance of the garden awaiting an invitation. And then it arrives: the full band plays the opening melody in harmony, just as Beefheart tells us that the garden is…
…open to most anyone that needs a little freedom
For God’s sake
Oh, come as many as you can
In dark or light you’re free to grow as flowers
‘Sweet Sweet Bulbs’ is not only a song about rebirth and growth, but also a celebration of inclusivity and openness. If it were only for this message the song would already be a mini marvel, but the synthesis of the emotions of the lyrics with the musical accompaniment is both poignant and profound. Beefheart spoke of freedom in the track, and at the same time demonstrated freedom it in the composition.
I cannot overstate what a profound affect this revelation had on my perception of not only the album itself, but of music in general. In those early morning hours my focus shifted, much like an audio equivalent of a stereogram; I’d solved one of the Captain’s puzzles and my reward was a renewed musical pallet and a wider appreciation of sound. It’s not that the dissonance of the record suddenly became tonal and no longer sounded like noise — it’s that I could now hear how emotive and expressive noise and dissonance could be, and equally how playful and adventurous you could be with any sound. I saw that my previous definition of music was excruciatingly narrow and that there was so much more to discover in the world outside of the classic rock canon. With this epiphany, the rest of the album became my playground. Whether it was the absurdist humour of ‘Old Fart At Play’ or the dark foreboding of ‘Dachau Blues’, I fell in love with the intricacies of each track (and there are MANY intricacies to discover in the running time). After this followed a love affair with Beefheart’s wider discography and, more excitingly, a renewed fervour to understand music outside of my immediate comfort zone (I’m looking at you, Jazz).
On June 16th 2019 Trout Mask Replica turned 50 years old. In that time its had a staggering influence on music and popular culture. Tom Waits, Kate Bush, John Frusciante (watch the Chilli Pepper’s cover the track ‘Peon’ here, and fudge it a few times for good measure) are just a few that have name dropped the album as an influence in the music world. Elsewhere, Matt Groening has claimed it to be the greatest record ever made (so I’ll postulate that ‘The Simpsons’ wouldn’t exist if not for Trout Mask. Hyperbole? Perhaps. Completely outside the realms of possibility? Nope). But for all the grandeur of these statements, I treasure the album on a deeply personal level as part of my own musical and artistic journey. As such, I urge you to give it a spin so that you might experience something special. And if you don’t like it on the first try, don’t worry, it happens to the best of us.
