Boy, did I ever change my mind. Here’s part one.
Don’t gimme no affliction: 25 years of “Moonlight on Vermont” and other bush recordings
“It’s very gratifying to say that Captain Beefheart’s [Trout Mask Replica] is a total success, a brilliant, stunning enlargement and clarification of his art. Which is not to say that it’s in any sense slick, ‘artistic’ or easy.” – Lester Bangs, Rolling Stone
“If one is to enjoy Trout Mask Replica’s twenty-eight songs on a desert island or anywhere else, two major obstacles must be overcome: its music and its lyrics.” – Langdon Winner, Stranded: Rock & Roll for a Desert Island
“I love those words.” – Don Van Vliet
During the summer of 1993, which fell between my freshman and sophomore years of college and proved to be the final extended stretch of time I referred to my childhood home as “home,” some high school friends—Ivan, Oskar, Pierre, others since forgotten—and I piled into someone’s mother’s backfiring minivan for a trip to Canobie Lake Park. It was the nearest “big” amusement park, certainly larger than Whalom Park, which was soon to be closed and condemned—the decaying clown mural on the back of its potato-sack slide loomed like a horror over Route 12 for years afterward. So it was Canobie. It was always Canobie.
Road trips to New Hampshire were common, whether to Pizza Hut in Nashua or Clark’s Trading Post in Lincoln. “They wanna see you, bear, not me bare!” Canobie was somewhere in between and the weekend 495-to-93 traffic demanded a more consistent soundtrack than WFNX, WAAF, WBCN and WGIR could offer in tandem. Enter Oskar, who for years would gift the rest of us with mix tapes sourced from his own and his brother’s fantastic collection of Touch and Go, Amphetamine Reptile, Sub Pop and other releases: Tad, Love Battery, Big Black, even big-timers like Nirvana and Ice Cube. It was great stuff—these were formative years and I would not be the know-it-all purveyor of taste I am today without those tapes as a launching pad. I received four of them over the course of eighteen months or so and number three was produced and delivered ahead of the Canobie trip. Somehow I ended up in the seatless back of the van that afternoon, a handsome and serviceable spare tire, and for my inconvenience I insisted we pop that shit right into the deck for its debut. Everyone agreed.
Following an indeterminate and undoubtedly solid indie-rock set, out of nowhere—and I mean nowhere, because to that point Oskar had covered from, say, 1985 on—hits “BUM-BA-DE-BUM, BUM-BA-DE-BUM,” the Drumbo (John French) brilliance that opens Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band’s “Moonlight on Vermont” from 1969. Then the guitar, that riff, that leering deathray riff! And here’s the Captain, Thee Don Van Vliet, an impaled Howlin’ Wolf on (battery) acid, “Ooonlaht on Ver-maw-uhh… fektid errehbodday, eee-vin…” Even me! Especially me. Passengers were skeptical and a sheepish Oskar apologized for its inclusion. “No,” I responded. “I… like it?”
I don’t remember much else about the day, if we unloaded next to the Yankee Cannonball, how many times we rode the Turkish Twist… what else was even on the tape (“Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun” might have kicked things off)—sadly it, the other three and my own mixes, Interrupting Cow Blues included, are among the missing. (I do recall a proper seat for the return trip.) But I listened to it a lot sophomore year and beyond, hearing “Moonlight on Vermont” over and over, and sometime later I walked to Newbury Comics (now back to prioritizing comics over music but bobble-heads and other bullshit over all) in search of the Trout Mask Replica source. It was a naive impulse in the “Maybe it all sounds like this” vein, given that most of my sixties exposure was limited to the Doors, Led Zeppelin, the Who, the Animals and Steppenwolf, excellent bands that nonetheless did little to evolve themselves or challenge listeners. (Cream and Hendrix flamed out before growing safe or stale—they and the Stones, whose More Hot Rocks nudged me toward their experimental 1967, are exceptions; early Pink Floyd, represented my freshman year by the roundly ignored discs one and nine from a friend’s Shine On box, were a ways away; the post-1963 Beatles were somehow even further.) An oddball artiste like Beefheart stood no chance and my sonic adventure was scared straight and doomed to fail—I was nineteen or twenty and simply not ready.
The following weekend or thereabouts—likely emerging from a haze of Southern Comfort, mushrooms and Beavis and Butt-Head—buyer’s remorse parted the crowd, approached the stereo and ejected the error in favor of something crowd-friendly like Last Splash or A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing. My college friends, unable to rank Teriyaki Asthma and Dope, Guns and Fucking in the Streets releases like the elitist pricks in that van, each fell somewhere along a decidedly more mainstream spectrum of Alice in Chains, Bob Mould, Rusted Root and fucking Snow, and so my evolving catalog was often met with the blank stares and/or targeted derision that often accompany “weirdo shit” scorned by MTV and Spin culture. And I fell for it—no one offered “Stick with it!” encouragement or “Who cares what we think?” wisdom and the disc remained in my collection for novelty reasons alone, its overlooked red spine fading to pink in the Boston glare. Drag.
For years, Trout Mask Replica was reduced from a double album to an unsupported “Moonlight on Vermont” single. The enlightened advice of “It’s not too late for you if it’s not too late for me” from the opening “Frownland” was aggressively avoided in place of biased muscle memory: insert disc/press play/skip immediately to track six/listen for four minutes/stop-fast-stop-now! (The “squid eating dough…” introduction to “Pachuco Cadaver” served a purpose as the outgoing message on our answering machine for a period—I’m sure my roommates and their calling parents loved it—and was only embraced in the first place because, as track seven, I was sometimes slow to get the hook.) Even the album cover was strange, the good Captain sporting a trout mask, replica or otherwise (and covering only half his face), which served as a minor accessory to a thoroughly batshit ensemble. And the illustrations? And the illustrations! Lo, the Mascara Snake, what hath mine debit card wrought?
Time passes and people change. John Elway and the Broncos won two straight Super Bowls after losing three of four—badly—a decade earlier. Ian Svenonius emerged as David Candy after the estimable Make-Up was ruined “due to the large number of counter-gang copy groups which had appropriated their look and sound and applied it to vacuous and counter-revolutionary forms.” Kyle Katarn, having forsaken the Force since the events of Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight, regained his powers—and his lightsaber—in order to save the galaxy in Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast. And Jarrod P. Biffington (Jr.), future blog-maker, decided “Sure, ‘Marketing Assistant’ sounds like it pays OK.”
As a late-nineties nine-to-fiver with a thirty-minute reverse commute I was at last open to music beyond my Jesus Lizard/Unwound/Blues Explosion/Stereolab comfort zone, embracing mid-sixties Coltrane, English freakbeat and American garage and assembling them into a full-body orgasm of psychedelia that is well represented in the annual playlist blather (beginning, largely, with Volume 2). Trout Mask Replica, fortunately, had held fast to its dusty real estate between Cake Like’s Delicious (1994) and Cat Power’s Moon Pix (1998)—pigeons do enjoy their holes!—and my generous patience with an ugly relic was to be rewarded. The delayed appreciation of a masterpiece had begun.
More Cream Please 