A lively argument at the weekend about the merits and otherwise of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band's 'Trout Mask Replica' sent me back to the album yesterday. I listened to it in its 78-minute entirety while driving on motorways and dual carriageways, and played it loud.
I first heard it when I was twenty-one, after reading about its fearsome reputation in the music papers, and, like many others, found it a heady concoction of earthy blues, free jazz and apparently free association lyrics that was almost consistently confrontational in its approach. But after a few listens, I was a fan. However, few shared my enthusiasm for what I thought was a playful and blissfully unconventional record.
When I played it yesterday, I quickly understood why so many people dislike or even hate it. Most musicians want to make a decent living through selling records and it is common practice for albums to start with one of the more attractive, catchy tunes, as a way of hooking in the casual listener. I have read that Captain Beefheart wanted to make money from music but the first five songs on 'Trout Mask Replica' do not invite the listener in, they drive them away.
I don't know if it was Don Van Vliet himself who sequenced the songs but the opening number, 'Frownland' is a tuneless and aggressive bit of shouting that feels a lot longer than its running time of two minutes. It's followed by 'The Dust Blows Forward and the Dust Blows Back', a low-fi recording of a nonsensical poem that has not been properly edited. And then there's 'Dachau Blues', another ugly rant with nauseous horns and lyrics that are so literal ('Coughing smoke in the ovens / And dying by the dozens') some would surely find them tasteless.
The fourth song 'Ella Guru' does have a tune but it is like a children's song performed by mental patients. 'Hair Pie: Bake 1' is what Beefheart calls 'a bush recording', an ultra low-fi outdoor activity which is half queasy duelling horns and half art-rock work-out. Only when you get past that, does the first real 'song' appear - the mighty juggernaut that is 'Moonlight on Vermont'.
Those first five songs make up one of the most uncompromising opening salvoes in the history of the album. Other acts tend to put their more challenging experimental songs near the end of their records but Beefheart, whose entire ouevre is pretty obtuse, put some of the most 'unlistenable' songs at the front of 'Trout Mask Replica'.
That made me wonder about the impact a similar attitude to sequencing might have on other classic albums. Imagine if 'Revolver' opened with the atonal drone of 'Tomorrow Never Knows', with John Lennon singing from deep inside a tunnel, 'Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream / It is not dying.' Or if 'Sergeant Pepper' began with 'Within Without You'. Or if the White Album commenced with 'Revolution 9'. All this would have been unthinkable for the commericially savvy Beatles of course - there was an element of embarrassment about their interest in experimental music, which manifested itself in George Harrison's comment 'Avant garde a clue'.
The realisation that the sequencing of songs on side one of 'Trout Mask' was so off-putting only served to make me an even greater admirer of the album, a record that is completely uncompromising and as a result utterly liberating.
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