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After all, capturing its sound would mean somehow retracing the steps from Beefheart’s enigmatic brain to French’s devout hands to the Magic Band’s inhuman toil. The rules that Trout Mask Replica shattered haven’t been reassembled in quite this way by anyone since.
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Few records lend themselves to such a transformation, where they eventually click into place while still sounding so thrillingly wrong. In a 1993 BBC documentary, “The Simpsons” creator Matt Groening said it took him just seven listens to go from hating the album to deciding it was the greatest of all time. Like life in a cult, the music seems crazy to an outside observer but makes perfect sense once you’re inside. Its enduring place in the canon is due in part to the allure of Trout Mask Replica’s singular logic. Beefheart made more accessible music before and after, but his most difficult work is still his most famous, defining his musical legacy and the sound of the Magic Band for going on five decades.
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As Third Man’s new reissue makes clear, this 28-song double album might be the strangest record in major-label rock history. In less than a week, after adding two tracks from an earlier session and a few more made at the group’s house, Trout Mask Replica was born. Beefheart added vocals separately, syncing uncannily with the music despite rarely having rehearsed with the band and eschewing headphones during takes. Riding the adrenaline of their intense woodshedding, the group recorded 20 songs in less than six hours. Often they would sleep right where they had just practiced, and immediately continue upon waking.Īfter six months of this bunkered mania, the Magic Band entered a studio with Beefheart’s friend Frank Zappa, who “produced” them by staying out of the way. This unorthodox complexity forced the Magic Band to rehearse 12 hours or more a day, usually without Beefheart. French compared it to building a solid wall with bricks of unequal size. The resulting pieces were more like puzzles than songs, giving different instruments conflicting time signatures and varying part lengths that had to somehow meet at specific points.
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Some claim the musicians couldn’t leave the premises save for a weekly grocery trip, and drummer John “Drumbo” French said he spent one month eating only a cup of soybeans every day.īeefheart put a piano in the house-despite not knowing how to play it-and banged out ideas, which French transcribed and assembled into tunes. By many accounts, Beefheart imposed weird lifestyle rules and played mind games that bordered on brainwashing. The sessions in the house have since become a crucial part of rock legend, the subject of contradictory stories and much myth-making. In mid-1968, he replaced some members of the group with younger, more impressionable players (guitarist Bill Harkleroad and bassist Mark Boston were each just 19), gave everyone a nickname to match his own, and holed up with them in a house on the outskirts of Los Angeles. To gain the control he needed to express his vision, Beefheart morphed the Magic Band into a kind of musical cult.