Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band, "Trout Mask
Replica" (Reprise, 1969)

Back in college, we'd often have situations where a large group of people would be present, and we'd want to trim the crowd in a hurry.

My former roommate, Mike, lived on the top floor of the fraternity house, in the place's plum room, which along the way got the nickname of Cloud 9. Due to its large size and remote location, Cloud 9 was a fairly popular hangout, even on nights when the guys who lived in there wanted to get some shut-eye.

On one such evening (or quite possibly early morning), Mike surveyed the gathering in his room and decided he prefer fewer bodies present. To achieve the objective, he pulled a record from the shelf and put it in the turntable. I smiled, knowing that would do the trick.

A few seconds later, the people in the room were greeted by the cacophony of fuzzy, dissonant guitars
playing over a halting beat. Then came the vocals, growling along in their own peculiar cadence, going on
about something called "Frownland."

Welcome to "Trout Mask Replica" by Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band, an hour and 20 minutes of music, the
likes of which never had been heard before, and probably never will again.

For the past three-and-a-half decades, rock 'n' roll scribes have attempted to describe the sounds produced by the Captain (Don Van Vliet) and his crew, boiling them down to something along these lines: a free-form cross between New Thing jazz and delta blues.

I guess you hear some of those elements along the way. But it's certainly difficult to put a label on something that truly lives up to the designation of unique.

Early publicity about the double-LP set put forth that Vliet had sat down at his piano (which he didn't even know how to play) and composed all 28 songs in the span of eight-and-a-half hours. That notion seemed plausible, given the seemingly random and chaotic nature of the music. But studio outtakes and live performances from the period show that the tunes were
meticulously scripted, with alternative versions sounding very much like the finished products. That would seem to indicate a whole lot more went into it than spending an afternoon at the keyboard.

At any rate, "Trout Mask Replica" long has served as a badge of honor for music enthusiasts who claim they "get it." If you're looking for something beyond what you're likely to hear on the radio or through the supermarket PA, here's a place to go. It's anti-easy listening.

It's also unpredictable, which makes it interesting. A song might simply be the Captain singing a cappella into a cheap tape recorder, as with "The Dust Blows Forward." He might convey a message of social relevance ("Dachau Blues") or of utter nonsense ("Neon Meate Dream of a Octafish"). He might launch into a saxophone solo by blowing through two of the instruments at once ("Ant Man Bee"). Or he might just let the Magic Band loose on a sublime jam, like in "Hair Pie: Bake 1."

Of the many intriguing twists and turns on the album, one really worth noting is "The Blimp (Mousetrapreplica)," on the fourth side of the original LP. If the vocal recitation sounds like it was recorded over a telephone line, that's exactly what happened.

The story is that the Captain had slide guitarist Jeff Cotton (listed on the album sleeve by his pseudonym, Antennae Jimmy Semens) call Frank Zappa to recite some lyrics Vliet had written. Zappa, Beefheart's old buddy, was in the process of producing the album, and he decided the recording of the phone conversation would be a cool addition. He added a backing track from a performance by his own band, the Mothers of Invention, and "The Blimp" was completed.

With material along those lines, it's understandable that many listeners don't last very long with "Trout Mask Replica." One exception, according to my old roomie Mike, was his 5-year-old niece or cousin (can't remember exactly), who couldn't get enough of it when he introduced it to her back in the early '80s. I wonder if she still likes it today.

As far as that night in Cloud 9, "Trout Mask Replica" did its trick, leaving only a few of us left in the room to enjoy what the Captain had to offer.