Many of the 'tunes' were created by The Captain sitting at a piano – an instrument which he couldn't play – and discovering stuff which John French (aka Drumbo) would transcribe into music for the others to learn and rehearse, 12 hours a day, every day. There was talk of physical and emotional abuse, starvation, desperate shoplifting forays for food, cult-like mind games, breakdowns and the like. He claimed to have taught each band member every note to play on every track from scratch. Label-less and somewhat disillusioned, The Captain was offered the chance to record, no strings attached, for childhood pal Frank Zappa's label Straight and so Trout Mask came into being, gathering a fair amount of mythology from the get-go.įirst came eight months of The Captain and his band holed up in a small house in Woodland Hills, LA. Then came Strictly Personal, somewhat further out there, eventually released on Blue Thumb having been rejected by Buddah. It was great, a sort of psychedlicised Howlin' Wolf with Ry Cooder on guitar. But, amazingly, the third offering from its author, Don Glen Vliet, aka Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart from Glendale, California, had recorded since his first LP with his Magic Band, Safe As Milk, a couple of years earlier for Buddah. Not for the faint-hearted, nor the narrow-of-mind, Trout Mask Replica is just one of those albums that you either get, then grow evangelical over or… well, in the words of legendary rock critic Lester Bangs reviewing it for Rolling Stone on its release in July 1969, 'You can see straights run and hide, teeny boppers covering their ears, and hippies crawling away in horror as the sounds here are unleashed'. Eventually I had a road-to-Damascus experience. The singer's not even singing, he's just growling…". 'I put it on and just thought, "What the f*** is this? They're mucking about! They can't even play their instruments. About the sixth or seventh time, it clicked in, and I thought it was the greatest album I'd ever heard'.Īndy Partridge of XTC backs him up. Then I listened to it a couple more times and, about the third time, I realised they were doing it on purpose – they meant it to sound exactly this way. Here's Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons: 'The first time I heard it, I thought it was the worst thing I'd ever heard. The bean-counters may well have been the first to be gob-smacked by Trout Mask Replica but, believe me, they were nowhere near the last.
But afterwards, with the album in the can, DVV went ahead and hired one anyway, to give the oaks and cedars a thorough check-up – the bill duly arriving at the baffled accountants' offices.
The record company brass had baulked at the great man's request to have an expert on hand to ensure that the trees surrounding the house where the band were doing their thing did not become frightened of the noise and keel over. Well, actually, not during the recording. To be strictly accurate, $250's worth of tree surgeon because that's how much Don Van Vliet charged Straight, his record company, for the services of an arboriculturalist's services during the recording of the album we're here to celebrate. Let's get this party started with the tree surgeon. Steve Sutherland sits transfixed like Alice in Wonderland by this 180g reissue It was a release that had all the pundits scratching their heads for how best to describe it.
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