The first Beefheart thing I ever heard was in 1970 when I was 12, whipped on pot and acid, laying on my bed listening to WABX here in Detroit which was a radical underground station and they played "My Human Gets Me Blues" off Trout Mask and I was instantly hooked--instantly.
I eventually bought the album and played it start to finish several times in a row without pausing. It was like Beefheart was packing notes of different colors into bags and then tossing them from a 100-story window and letting them splatter randomly on the sidewalk and then taking blurry snapshots of what he'd just created.
At first, it seemed to me to be anti-music but by the 10th listen in a row, I was thinking of it more as extremely non-conventionally musical. But was it like a musical version of Videodrome? Ever see that movie about the sexually sadistic pirate TV signal that infects of minds of those who watch it? It was a scathing indictment of television but years before that came out, I was wondering if Beefheart was secretly deconstructing the minds of listeners and putting them back together his own way and what was blatantly anti-music suddenly sounds musical in a totally weird way. Was I infected, I wondered.
At times, the stuff on Trout Mask seemed to approach actual music--like "China Pig" is pretty close to real blues. But I would picture Son House or John Lee Hooker listening to it. What would they think? Was the fact that it was pretty much a straight blues Beefheart's way of saying that blues was already deconstructed and could not be further twisted or modified?
"The Dust Blows Forward and the Dust Blows Back" made me think of those film clips of houses getting annihilated in nuclear bomb blasts. You'd see the dust move one way and then the other and the house, which hung together at first, would burst into pieces. Was Beefheart giving us the music of a post-nuclear war? Some lonely guy sitting out in the desert by himself with no civilization left to get away from singing into a little cassette recorder. And was there a parallel between the destruction of the planet and destruction of my pre-Beefheart musical knowledge and beliefs? "Dachau Blues" seemed to confirm that there was.
Were phrases as "fast and bulbous" some kind of viral code that rewired my brain and was this good or bad? What did this album do to me? Was it like Beefheart's own little MK-ULTRA program? Occasionally, I pull Trout Mask out and listen to it from start to finish. All these years and literally thousands of listenings later, I'm still not sure what to make of it. I probably never will. Did Beefheart even really know what he was creating while he was doing it?
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