Of course, on first hearing, it is laughable to most. 'They're just goofing off' is most people's immediate reaction. 'They're just running their fingers across the fretboard in any old manner. It's random!' I found it quite baffling on first hearing, but I was always determined to persevere with it.
If you approach the music passively, it will do nothing for you. If you are used to music simply swarming into your head and affecting you emotionally, this music will just be noise. If you actively engage with the music, and try to decode the musical activity, it becomes enormously rewarding. Indeed, if you have been used to hearing generic rock groups all your life, it makes most music sound tame. I have since sold most of the record collection I had before I was thirteen - and I have never regretted it.
For years, the gestation of the music was mired in myth. Don van Vliet, the Captain, was a compulsive liar and exaggerated aspects of his life to gain cachet in the artistic community. He took all the compositional credit of Trout Mask for himself, which is not wholly true. The myth that circulated for years was that Vliet wrote the entire album in eight and a half hours and that it took him six months for him to teach it to the band. (Apparently the group watched Fellini's 8 1/2 whilst rehearsing and this may have made a dent in Don's creative imagination.)
By 1968, Vliet acquired a piano, an instrument he couldn't play, and all his ideas would thence be canalised through this instrument. John French, the drummer, was to be his musical amanuensis and his duty was to transcribe these lapidary fragments and give them to the rest of the group to play. This was a far more grueling process than Don made out to be and took place over a far more protracted length of time. Initially Don was more specific and tried to dictate every nuance. As time wore on, he stopped doing this. French then had the daunting task of assembling all these disparate fragments of music into some sort of structure.
Because this was an instrument that Don could not play, he would strike unfamiliar chords and he would create jagged, discontinuous, angular lines. This made playing them on guitar and bass devilishly difficult, as they were not permeable to the conventions of the instruments. The metre of the songs would vary at unprecedented rates; often each instrument would play in a completely different time signature.
The idea of multiple lines going on at once, and complementing each other at the same time, had been developed in avant-garde serious music. Yet this music was deeply indebted to blues - the entire album is played on slide guitar, there are bluesy riffs and there is, of course, Don's voice which mimics great blues singers. A lot of people have suggested parallels with free jazz, particularly the big band improvisations by Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane. Whilst the group was listening to these artists at the time, I struggle to see the connection to be honest. Apart from Don's occasional noisy sax solos, I think that the harmonic language is very remote from jazz, even the avant-garde variety.
The whole album was tightly rehearsed over an arduous period of nine months. The group would rehearse sixteen hours every day. By the time it came to laying down the tracks on the studio, they could run through these songs like clockwork. Frank Zappa, a classically trained musician, couldn't distinguish between the different takes. 'It was rehearsed to death' was his summation.
Don tried to create an oppressive, manipulative atmosphere in the cramped dwelling in which they rehearsed. No member of the group was allowed to leave the house. Once every week, one of the guitarists, Bill Harkleroad, was sent off to get groceries. The group's diet was reduced to one tin of soya beans each day. French, on reflection, said 'I felt like on of those Eastern mystics.' Don even attributed each member a pseudonym and they were never addressed by their real names. Don was trying to create a kind of farcical freak show where the band members would have to perform all the time. They were left without a private life. The group lived in poverty and destitution, cut adrift from the rest of the world. They were constantly bullied and mentally coerced. Although Don may have thought this to be an apt way to create the right ambiance for the music, the rest of the group members grew to resent it later in life.
Depending on the time of is construction, each song varies in the degree of its unorthodoxy. The earlier songs were more coherent and holistic whereas the songs composed later on were more arbitrary in origin. 'Moonlight in Vermont' and 'Veteran's Day Poppy' predate the acquisition of the piano, but they already flirt with poly-metrical ornateness and atonal dissonance. 'Sugar 'n' Spikes' (an instrumental version is displayed for your consumption below) is a song with a slightly steadier pulse, but which already firmly adopts its radical new language. The guitars seem to invert one another with angular parts. The bass is similarly intricate and fascinating, played with an even more original and unusual timbre. As French was the musical director, the drum parts hold the coagulating lines together. The drums, irregular in their timing, complement the other parts. Although this may not seem the case at first, further listening elucidates just as crucial part the drums play in the co-ordination of this sundry music.
Other highlights include 'Hobo Chang Ba,' where the guitars seem to play rhythm. Stravinsky was one of the first composers to 'write rhythm' and much modern music put special emphasis on it. After these clashing polyrhythms have been dealt with, the band become more harmonious while Don monolithically croons 'Hobo Chang Baaaa.' The most exhilarating tracks on the album are 'My Human Gets Me Blues' and 'Steal Softly Thru Snow,' mainly because of their frantic and priapic changes. It's truly exhilarating to hear this music, just to hear the quick transitions. The musicians play them with jaw-dropping bravura.
The opening song 'Frownland' is one of the later songs to be composed and it is quite likely the densest. What a opening track! Quite likely the most abrasive and assaulting opener in the history of rock. The instruments clash into one another, appear to dissolve until they reach volatile and hot-headed denoument. There's not much rock music which cramps so much information in such a short space of time (the track lasts less than two minutes.)
Don never rehearsed with the group and, when it came to record the album, he refused to use headphones. The musical material and Don's vocals were never synchronised. At times, this can obfuscate the marvelous arrangements. (I suggest you look out for the Grow Fins box set which has instrumental rehearsals without the vocal parts.)
But the vocals are equally compelling! Don's voice, of course, harks back to the rhythm and blues of Howlin' Wolf and Son House. His lyrics are just as multifarious and dense and merits as much attention as the rest of the music. But, above all, the lyrics are funny! If all the writing above makes this seem like grueling labour, I can assure you that Don's lyrics have a very puckish sense of humour. A lot of the time, like Mark E. Smith, he approaches the material as Dadaist anti-art. He seems, a lot of the time, more interested in the sounds these words produce than in their meaning. The lyrics are also quintessentially American. The guitars seem very tarnished and rusty; they sound like they came out of the desert! Don grew up in the Arizona and this environment is deeply embedded into his world-view. He makes mention of Hobos, sea men who've undergone searing journeys and ample, open American landscapes have an indelible effect on his imagination. Flora and fauna are of special importance to him, as he concocts surreal tales about the 'Carp trout replica,' 'the neon meat dream octafish,' 'the fish in its bowl lay bloating' and how 'I'm gonna find me a cave and talk the bears into taking me in.' A song like 'Steal Softly Thru Snow' reveal his environmental preoccupations. The few times where the vocals don't really work are when he veers away from American folklore. 'Dachau Blues' grieves over the genocide of the Jews, but it doesn't work because one of the aspects of the blues is that is about something very personal and quotidian ('I woke up this morning' and so on).
All these years hence, how does this music stand? For me, it is the best rock music ever made. It completely transcends its formulaic and ephemeral language. Don said at the time 'Forty years on from now, you'll wish you'd gone wow.' And indeed, this is the rock music with the best longevity. It never grows old. To those of us tired with what Don called the 'catatonic state,' and for those of us in search of a more exciting and polymorphous music, Trout Mask Replica is the ideal respite.
