I really WANT to like Trout Mask Replica...

Yes, it is a racket, and you if you can't see the charm in that, you won't like the album... Garage Beefheart.

I guess the lyrics turned it round for me, loved the words and that got me to adjust to the music.

phil is right, get 'my decals' though I'll always love trout.

One time, I taped it for the car, and only got the left channel. This made for an interesting listening experience.

Other than that, as harold melvin would say, "If you don't love it by now... try in five years or so."

- listening to one channel first as Mark suggests
- listening to all their other albums first (especially Decals)
- listening to one track repeatedly over and over
- putting it on in the background and absorbing it by osmosis rather than trying to tackle it head on
- putting it on to play while you're asleep

I think Matt "The Simpsons" Groening best expressed the reaction many people have when hearing TMR for the first time - as well explaining precisely why it's worth the effort to overcome them:

"It had Frank Zappa's name on it, so I bought it. Took it home, put it on ... it was the worst dreck I'd ever heard in my life - 'They're not even trying, they're playing randomly!' And so I thought: 'Frank Zappa produced it, I'd better give it another play,' and I played it again and I thought: 'It still sounds horrible, but maybe they meant it to sound that way.' By the third or fourth time, it started to grow on me, and by the fifth and sixth time I loved it, and after the seventh and eighth plays I thought it was the greatest album ever made and I still do."

But I was quite old by then.

But I reckon I would have if I'd had it when I was 20.

But it would have screwed up my guitar playing even worse (Marquee Moon was most responsible for that).

Life is good.

Has anyone seen that Corbijn documentary on Beefheart?

I somehow managed to attain the ripe old age of 31 without consciously properly hearing any Beefheart.

I'm not at all sure I'd have got it at 20.

The good documentary was The Artist Formerly Known As Captain Beefheart

Funnily enough, as a bunch of lads messing about with a tape recorder, one of us took to interjecting "urrrgh DACHAU BLOOZ" to much unfamiliarity (I wondered years later if he was doing Deacon Blues steely dan), and "Ooooh she's too much for my mirror -- she cracks it..." to much hilarity... (should have asked about it / taped it off him)

1) you can only afford singles en masse
2) Albums tend to be things you can play w/mates

yessssss!!!!!!!!

Yes, both those things, but more significantly: the main thing that made me want to investigate Beefheart at that time was Buzzcocks' / Magazine's amazing version of "I Love You, You Big Dummy"; however that song wasn't on any of the albums I found on the shelves on the occasions that I looked (even in those days Lick My Decals Off Baby seemed to be in short supply!) and to make matters worse, the Beefheart album everyone said was best was a double.

I was hardly going to fork out for a double album by some old sixties weirdo, just because I liked a cover version of one of his songs, when the singles racks were stuffed full of things with nice reassuring pictures of men with spiky hair, leather jackets and tartan bondage trousers that I could be pretty sure I'd like!

I do have to admit also that I actually did hear one Beefheart track, Dirty Blue Gene (on the Virgin "Cash Cows" sampler album) but for whatever reason it didn't particularly grab me at the time.

After "Don's Birthday Party" I'd also recommend

"Live At My Fathers' Place" (which was widely bootlegged, often as "New York Hot Dog Night", before it was legitimately released as "I'm Going To Do What I Wanna Do" by Rhino Handmade a couple of years back) is pretty good too and "Mersey Trout - Live In Liverpool 1980" and the live compilations "Railroadism" and "Magnetic Hands" (which you'll probably find in your local Virgin / HMV / Our Price, although they are actually bootlegs) aren't bad.

Avoid "London 1974" for reasons which should be obvious (it's the Tragic Band!) and "Dichotomy" (both of which again you'll probably find in your local record shop).

Which is only part of the reason I like it so much.

I'm not sure it was 'paradigm shifting event in '69 bcz I didn't buy it in '69.

I wasn't buying any recs in '69.

'stoned blues riffs': er, its far more focused than that!

thanks stewart.

Look out also in particular for the track "Hoboism" (Don jamming with Denny Walley during the Bat Chain Puller seesions) and if you manage to find "Death March" by The Omens then you could make me and a lot of other Beefheart obsessives very happy.

Sorry, I'll shut up now.

Maybe.

are there any live albs from the late 60s/early 70s (in the beefheart doc on bbc there was this version of click clack (as i dimly recall) which sounded fantastic!). i want some of that.

yeah one guy was dancing and digging the rhythm, so was I, but the version on spotlight kid was just horrible in comparison.

Mind you, apart from Mirror Man, I haven't bought another Beefheart album since. And that was nearly twenty years ago.

There's a stunning version of "I'm Going To Booglarize You Baby" from the same show that you can download here.

I'm afraid actual live boots from the 60's and 70's seem to be few and far between - I suspect because there are so many later recordings with so much better sound quality.

There are plenty of tapes about 'though....

Was there a video of "Diddy wah diddy" set on a beach?

Or am I vibing again?

My story with this album, right there, though I did buy the CD used rather than taping it.

I'll join the line of folks who can't understand 'not connecting' with TMR - it certainly blew my mind when I first heard it. And I still listen to it regularly (that, and The Mirror Man Sessions.

I suspect I'd play more Beefheart if I owned more on CD - vinyl is often such a chore. But yeah, fuck it - classicclassicclassic

Fantastic gtrs, absolutely. It's always slightly annoyed me that I don't know which guitarist plays which part. I know Rollo played a Telecaster; so if I only knew what brand of guitar Jeff Cotton played...I STILL wouldn't be sure! (Can't differentiate between "glass finger" and "steel appendage" guitar...)

Thats a nice story, but I don't find it dated (whatever that means). I guess I loose you when Sonic Youth comes in, while I enjoy them I never understood the idea that they just blew guitar music apart or redefined it or whatever they were supposed to do.

I liked this right away, the only album I've heard from the Cap'n so I have nothing to compare it to. Eventually I'll get the others once I am not poor. The guitars are so scraggily, the spoken word/field recordings so absurd, the imagery is fantastic, TMR is it's own universe, an end to itself, while somehow fitting into the blues-based garage-rock what-ever tradition, albeit as somekind of mutant or abberation. It sounds old-timey and new-futurey at the same time. It doesn't sound dated, still, to me, it sounds other-worldly (or alternate-dimension-ly). So, so classic and I am going to listen to it after Futurama is over. (and if you have any drugs do those before listening to it obv.)

Other methods I've used to try getting into music I find difficult: randomizing the song order, listening to it in a different environment and/or eating delicious beef jerky while listening to the music on headphones.

Has the album yet been recorded that doesn't sound at very least tolerable while drinking a bottle of ice cold vodka on a warm afternoon?

They did? News to me.

If you hear the "outtakes" on the Grow Fins box (actually the fruits of an abortive first attempt at recording the album at the house where they were rehearsing), it's often hard to believe they aren't the recorded versions with the vocal track turned off, the playing is that precise.

The ones that aren't there on Grow Fins, are the ones recorded in Zappa's proper studio.

Plus "The Blimp" (which I always wondered about, as it sounds completely different musically to the rest of the album) was the Mothers not the Magic Band anyhow.

But you knew that...

That's a good point. I guess I'm being unfair to Cotton by assuming that the best licks are Rollo's. If you read his book Lunar Notes, he gives a song-by-song account of the records he played on, which should help in sorting out who played which parts.

Urban myth I'm afraid - they did try to record it in the house but gave up and went into the studio - very few bits of what was recorded in the house (mainly speaking bits etc. and one of the Hair Pie's IIRC) were actually used on the album.

Also 3 tracks that were used on the album (Moonlight On Vermont is definitely one of them, can't remember what the others were) were actually from an earlier demo session before they moved into the house at and have either Jerry Handley or Gary "Magic" Marker on bass rather than Mark Boston!

"Plus "The Blimp" (which I always wondered about, as it sounds completely different musically to the rest of the album) was the Mothers not the Magic Band anyhow."

That's right - although bizarrely it was actually Art Tripp and Roy Estrada who were playing, both of whom subsequently ended up in The Magic Band. I've got a couple of tapes with them playing it live!

Where should I go from here? Decals? (For what it's worth, I'm more of a Tom Waits fan than a Zappa fan [these are the best comaprisons i can think of].) I think I confused Beefheart and King Crimson back when I was in uni and so my abstract catalogue know-how is all mixed up.

Can you think of any meaty posts - or good 500-1000wd reviews - I could read online about this here thing? I'm curious about what's been said on the record, but don't really feel like reading a Beefheart book at this point.

reviews archive. lester bangs etc.

Of course, TMR will sound positively lush and pleasant to anybody whose daily listening includes the Boredoms or Merzbow or whatever other racket is coming out of Japan these days (this being 2006 and all.)

Ah, the expressive fallacy. This is pretty much why I don't like Lester Bangs, even though I like some of his writing.

http://cookham.blogspot.com/

captain beefheart wrote most of the songs on the piano and gave the recordings to zoot horn rollo. beefheart's songs were mostly singing and banging, and rollo had to flesh them out into band arrangements.

this might have been natural for the band, but in the context of pop music up until that point, it's a pretty mind-blowing thing. messaien had been doing the same thing for the last ten years with birds, now rollo was doing it with beefheart himself.

as far as i know, it's the first "pop" record that rigourously exercised a conceptual performance practise during its recording.

anyway, I have been listening to Trout Mask so long, I don't perceive it as all that difficult, or hard to figure out. I mean it's a skein of drumming and there's some stuff hung on it--when I first listened to this record, it sounded dirty to me, not obscene, but vaguely musty, or like something just recently dead. I'm amazed he made as much of it work as it he did--it all works, for me, except some of the comedy shit which is better than Zappa's comedy music. the best is "Pachuco Cadaver" which kinda sums up what's great about this record, nobody has ever done anything that swings quite like that. as I always say, every time I talk about Beefheart, the essence of it is swinging/not-swinging at the same time, with those locked-in sections of...whatever, they're almost not even "riffs"--being the point, and the moss or whatever Beefheartian nacheral-world signifier you want to use, hanging over it. whether this was all DVV, all John French, both, who knows?

so, a record I don't listen to much any more--I still like to hear "Decals," "Clear Spot" and "Doc at the Radar." doesn't beat Howlin' Wolf but he comes close in his way, and of course beats Wolf and everybody, still to this day (TMR is hardly a buncha tired ol' beatnik/hippie shit, altho that's part of it, since that shit was tired in '69), in sheer egocentric bravado--right up there with James Brown or the Meters in my book-o-rhythm...

As far as I'm aware John French has always been pretty clear that "all" that he contributed to the process was basically to recognise the validity and significance of what Don was trying to achieve and to give himself over pretty much entirely to making it happen in whatever way he could. That's not to say that I believe that it would or could have happened without him - and I'm certain that it wouldn't / couldn't have happened in quite the same way without him.

All the guys involved in making that album went through some pretty severe privations during the 8-or-so months that they were basically locked up in that house in Laurel Canyon on starvation rations rehearsing that album over and over and over again and generally having their heads fucked.

Antennae Jimmy Semens actually tried to escape a couple of times and the rest of the band had to go after him and bring him back!

In his autoboiography, Zoot Horn Rollo otoh does seem to want to claim some credit for his part in the creative process - and whilst I wouldn't want to deny him that, it must be said his 2001 solo album doesn't seem to have much in common with The Magic Band.

I really think "TMR" and that music is as much French as anyone--he's what makes it all happen. he saw how stiff Don was, really, and being a good Christian he decided to give him his head...

http://ajournalofmusicalthings.com/captain-beefhearts-trout-mask-replica-album-amazing-hard-listen/

Meh

nobody "really wants to like" metal machine music