Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band
Trout Mask Replica

Do you remember The Line by Lagostina, when the cartoonist Osvaldo Cavandoli interrupts the white line and makes his charming creature sink into nothingness? That's the feeling, the abyss created by listening to this album.

Many have become fans of it, and numerous music enthusiasts have expressed their opinions on the matter (a perpetual tribute to the overwhelming greatness of the album); moreover, sources abound on the sacred web and, although it seems that algorithms direct us to useless shores of the infosphere, every navigator with good intuition will recognize the right direction to follow an optimal course, sailing the cosmos of music.
Or not. Abandoning themselves to the mighty and invisible currents of the web, there will nonetheless be a point waiting for them, a landing point or a shipwreck, which will certainly constitute a condition of arrival, even if unforeseen, nevertheless suggesting that the essence lies in the journey.

Interpreting this metaphor of the adventurous sailor is synonymous with delving into the unmarked scores of Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band pertaining to the mystical double album, Trout Mask Replica.
Strange, visceral, magnetic, repellent and devilish forces are inherent in the work dated June 1969. They fresco what is to be listened to, while those who have already listened know well what they are getting into, namely a unique (as strong as the Hungarian bitter tasted for the first time after always having drunk Coca-Cola) of strong impact that marks a point of no return for anyone who has had the idea of delving into the listening, remembering that Captain Beefheart considered music akin to figurative art.

First of all, the cover. It depicts the band with the solarized colors of the photograph by Ed Caraeff, here serving the artwork of the graphic artist of that period of Frank Zappa (and Tom Waits)... and I'm talking about Calvin 'Cal' Schenkel. In it, the vision and union that the Captain established with Schenkel's creativity are celebrated, giving shape to an intuition by Cal. On the front cover appears the Captain, with a carp head used as a mask on his face and a Quaker hat on his head, an image affixed to the red-magenta background. Inside is depicted the Magic Band in psychedelic attire, and on the back stands the Captain in a bucolic area, top hat on his head and the skeleton of a lampshade in hand.

Frank Zappa is the producer of the album for his own Straight Records and is the one who ensures his friend (the two have known each other since high school), that is, Captain Beefheart, aka Don Van Vliet, total freedom for the project, representing a great breath of fresh air for our genius, as it is the creative freedom he has been seeking for some years, right after releasing a couple of singles for A&M and two LPs - Safe As Milk (Buddah Records) and Strictly Personal (Blue Thumb).

Having meanwhile matured artistically, as has the band, our Captain can no longer contain his eagerness to express personal ambitions thanks to the present opportunity.
The foundations of the project laid, the legend of the Replica begins. History gorges on it with both hands by recording and absorbing, from the time of its creation to today, every fact concerning the stories and strange effects that are told, also found in future autobiographical publications of the various magicobandists.

The Captain is a poet, carrying within himself a vision of the world that diverges from what his contemporaries consider 'normal'. Endowed with extra-sensitivity, equipped with original thoughts that now find no restraint, from his mouth issues music and consonant expressions, as well as profound textual pearls that enrich the work. The lyrics are all his, as are the melodic constructions, although the trusty John 'Drumbo' French, the most educated in the group in musical theory, provides structural direction in terms of writing, compensating, with advice and precious arrangements, for the theoretical-musical unpreparedness of the leader, who nonetheless retains the final say on every decision: many decisive flashes belong to the Captain, brilliant insights that widely credit his intuitive greatness.

The absolute mind is therefore Beefheart, who for the occasion will industriously familiarize himself with the piano in no time, despite not knowing how to play it, but being very capable of finding through this instrument a feeling akin to John Cage's compositional processes.

We must consider the mid-'68 to mid-'69 period as a counter-cultural reference to give a historical context to the work; imagine being catapulted into that time and seeing our competencies acquired over half a century of music being reset. But even without such artifice, the current experience of confronting the surreal matter of the sonic matrix (the Captain was not only a painter and sculptor, but the record was born under the wing of certain 'dada rock' and the love for Salvador Dalí) will undoubtedly create significant imbalances in each listener: think of the voices claiming that dear Captain summoned a botanist to his garden to be reassured about the disturbances caused to some trees subjected to the continuous sonic glimpses produced by the Magic Band at the house in Woodland Hills.

The molecular mass of this artistic conglomerate would reveal itself as a powerful flow pertaining to improvised music, and if such a tendency seems to surface - probably due to the technical musical deficiency of the magicobandists and the Captain's reluctance to follow the common technical recording norms in use, suggested by the seasoned Zappa, now an expert on the matter - it is indeed the opposite.
The authoritative and orthodox Beefheart & Associates have spent eight months of strenuous rehearsals (averaging 14 hours a day) immersed in a high-stress climate, yet managed to guarantee the musical parts by executing them methodically, adhering to deadly stop & gos, accommodating the rhythm with constantly varying and changing times and countertimes, awarding the compositional and arrangement method as a turbulent novelty inherent in the 28 pieces composing the fabulous Replica.

It must be said that the band, already impoverished during the first productions, lives in a discouraged and melancholic climate due to failure and lack of money (a condition that makes them decline the invitation to participate in the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967). Unfortunately, the gigs are missing, and in the delicate market transition from beat to the officialization of pop songs, our Beefheart places himself at the extremes of the trend, resulting in exceptionally difficult. Hurling his insolent, dirty blues that offers no consolation, where the tracks are exhausting, and the dissonant voice - but fiercely energetic -, unleashes an animal magnetism of severe craftsmanship, standing as a bulwark of authenticity and expressive freedom, deposited as the sole distinctive mark of an offbeat character for the times mentioned (see nonetheless the live recordings appearing in “Mirror Man”).

Therefore, when Zappa proposes the deal to Beefheart, a contract not stellar but decent, the spirit dormant under the ash is rekindled and the band swiftly moves to action, renting a house outside Los Angeles - in Woodland Hills - to live in commune style, aiming solely to create what will become their masterpiece and core disc with extensive rock experimentations, although influenced by multiple elements.

It was eight inhumane months, made of hardships, hunger, reduced to family aid and stealing from supermarkets just to eat. Furthermore, an additional cause weighed on the collegial life, the psychological and violent dominance through which the Captain subdued the band, not only imposing 14 hours of rehearsals a day but acting as a sadistic tyrant who implemented absurd punitive practices, for instance, cramming the errant member into an expiatory barrel, sometimes reaching extreme states of humiliation, excessive physical and verbal violence, deeply affecting the lives of those barely twenty-year-olds (the Captain was seven years older).
Controlling and having ownership over everything done, strictly according to his own rules, was the worst aspect of Beefheart (afflicted by paranoid-schizoid effects). Thus, in such an atmosphere of affliction, hard work, deprivation, and suspicion (held towards friend-enemy Zappa and band members: imaginary issues of lèse-majesté and mutiny), the work was nonetheless accomplished.

Whether the monocratic and tyrannical management was healthy or not, concerning the musical discourse experienced by the Captain, remains a consideration that finds no quantifiable counterparts. For sure, greater emphasis would have been placed on the submerged talents of the magicobandists and especially John French would have enjoyed deserved and adequate recognition for the immense work done, as did the Jimi Hendrix rhythm section - but, gradually, time puts things in their place.
It is established, however, and even dissident John French admits this, that Trout Mask Replica affirms the genesis of a prodigy marking a breaking point with all rock production of the time, positioning itself as a possible neuralgic point of what could have happened in a rock album from then on. Inside, all the cultural radicalism connecting the band members is expressed, looking beyond Flower Power and generational easy diversion. Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band were a galaxy apart in that sixties America.

The great Lester Bangs, in Rolling Stone, identifies vector lines similar to the free experiences of Ornette Coleman, but also of Shepp, Sanders, Ayler, and Taylor. No adherence to a precise thread that retraces a style, the energy developed by such an aggregate is the primary and essential trait shareable on which to smooth out the rough and fantastic sonic material.
The intellectualization of the work can be experienced secondarily, embracing the themes addressed in the lyrics and implicitly examining the intrinsic literariness: surrealism, irony, the holocaust, ecology, nonsense, dry black blues, folk, jazz, poetry, puns, heightened visionariness, personal compositional talent, powerful hallucinatory and oneiric imagination.

In summary, some extraordinary points are notable, for instance, the predestined friendship between Zappa and Beefheart; how is it possible that those two promising boys, in some ways so similar, ended up partying together and later became timeless personalities of extreme cult and valuable music? Incredible!
Also extraordinary is the love for art, nurtured since childhood by Don Van Vliet (who will forego an artistic scholarship that would have taken him to Europe), being the cornerstone of all his production and filter for every vital conception.

Some additional biographical notes.
Don will live, but already before 1980, with his wife Jan in a road-mobile home, stationed in the Mojave desert, and later on the ocean coast, towards the northern tip of California. Retiring definitively from the recording scene in 1982, he will dedicate himself exclusively to the creative pictorial act (which economically proved more beneficial than his musical activity, although the Van Vliet Estate holds the intellectual property rights of the Captain and the Zappa Family Trust the rights of the Replica).

The Trout Mask Replica album object proves to be a magnificent graphic masterpiece, and the music a sonic commentary for images incomparable in the world.

Performed live at Trout Home during 4 and ½ hours of uninterrupted session, the album has a cinematic cut that describes an abstract universe, where reverses, appearances and absences of linear narrative elements mix and blend, entering into a filmic discourse interested in the sensorial teeming with fabulous, tragic and ironic factors, treated like an untidy interplaying of occurrences, emerging and rising from a mysterious, magical, burdensome, and disoriented place, where reality is bewilderingly confused and senseless.

A guide should be hired to navigate through the album's contents, but such does not exist; instead, there remain a series of fairy-tale actors railing, strumming, persisting on the oddities they declaim from elaborate inaccessible pulpits, yet close. Everything heard can be touched by hand. The mind processes the deviant suggestions into distorted images, drafting plots that charm with fleetingness and the innovative imperial of the sonic plot, breaking every classic narrative context.

The ground of freedom is treaded, conceived as a parallel and adverse alternative (contrary) to the methodical reality of thought to which we have been accustomed and dictates our reason. The consequential formalism of reason collapses, constructing the new avant-garde, extreme, free, sincere, and seductive theme, a pattern from which there will never be a return. Watch out!

The Replica rises to become an album of witchcraft that slips into an unconventional temporal dimension, where unknown-named geniuses, wizards with star-studded pointy hats, Indian soothsayers, evil spirits, circus fools meet; giving life to a surreal iconography where delirium flows and madness is touched. Hybridized talking, gesticulating, and adorned animals, colored with iridescent hues that fully consciously embody something fatal that can be found among the characters of Pinocchio: they are the freaks half-man and half-animal embodied by King Beefheart and his magicobandists, endowed with essential descriptive, ironic strength and with highlighted insistence on the original ambient blues of the Delta - steamships, huts, fields, natural riverside landscapes, roots, disillusionment, and the great, arcane, unreachable spirits of Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Son House, Robert Johnson - participating in the powerful explosive scene. Old-fashioned nomadic wagons welcome thirsty, hungry, angry hobos in search of freedom, intertwining along dusty, dry, stateless, heartbreaking lands, marching on enchanted railways, where the stories make a stop at falling antiscaler urban landscapes. Complex paths to trace, out of sync between thought and action, collaborating in processing the expansion of space within the corresponding compression of the space-time relationship, here aimed at nullifying every distance, imagining living in a single agglomerate necessarily alien to urbanity.

When suddenly, here it comes bursting at full speed from such an impasse - and jamming into a mirage of sounds, others and high, raising the suspensions and angularities of the brass, including all the unreal work of guitar/bass/drums that mocks, satirizes, provokes and dazes leaving amazed - the monstrous creativity.
It literally slams the feverish state of invention against the linearity of the mainstream, the nightmare incites the dream illuminating the precursor discord thanks to the eternal lamp originated here that emits astonishing beams of diseased gray light, acid gold, and doberman pink, in essence, the colors conceived by the brilliant mind of Don Van Vliet.

Oh beautiful locomotive
Slim iron trout
Eel, eel
On the shining rail
Trout caught on the lure
Of time and space
Trout, fast topaz.
Trout or indigestible wife
Or petulant locomotive,
Without a line, God catches you
In the immense net
Of the firmament's rails.
God tightens the earth
And unravels at his talent
An ironical juice
Of exhilarating velocity.

(from “Locomotive” by F. T. Marinetti)