Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band’s Trout Mask Replica (2007)

I was sad to find out the author of this entry in the 33-1/3 series, Kevin Courrier, died in 2018. His book on a very difficult album stands up a good defense for it, explodes various myths and misinformation about it, and continually extends sympathies toward the haters, who are legion. For many, it’s an album that exists as the very epitome of terrible, unlistenable music. Courrier met his share of them along the way, even before he was working on the book. He came to the album a few years after its release and the anecdote about that, from his time working as a youth counselor in a crisis center, sets a nice, slightly comical tone about the project of taking on the album. I knew Trout Mask Replica myself in about the same timeframe, when I was in high school, at which time I defended it with “you have to listen to it a few times.” I might have added, “also, you have to want to like it.” I still have to remind myself to “listen to it a few times” every time I think to come back to it. Among other things, Courrier does a good job of charting its respectably big influence. The main part I appreciated was Courrier’s thoughtful history of the troubled relationship between Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet) and nominal producer Frank Zappa. Their friendship started in the ‘50s when they were schoolmates in a California junior high. Courrier is also good on some of the mistaken ideas around how the music was conceived. Legend has it that Van Vliet went to each member for each song and literally told them exactly what to play. Courrier says the reality is that the drummer, Drumbo (John French—everyone in the band gets a funny alias), was more the mediary between the band and Van Vliet, who didn’t always have the vocabulary to explain what he wanted. Courrier has some fun with Van Vliet’s disappointment about the lack of commercial success, which Van Vliet believed was the fault of Zappa and others. For his explanation, Courrier wryly pivots to the avant-garde, often atonal music itself—I think he has that right. People are driven from rooms by this album. The approach of many of these 33-1/3 books, I’ve learned, is a history of the band or artist to the point of the specific album under consideration, then a track-by-track rundown. Courrier’s rundown may be a bit rushed—hey, it’s a double LP with lots of tracks—but his history of Van Vliet, Zappa, and the Magic Band (they stopped being “His” eventually) is quite good. It cleared up a lot of points for me on how this vexing album came to be. Courrier, a Canadian, also wrote books about Zappa and Randy Newman and, from 1990 until his death, was a film critic for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). If you care anything about Trout Mask Replica—love it, hate it, or meh—Courrier’s book is probably a useful stop.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.