Further thoughts on the "Trout Mask Replica" guitar project

Jeff Cotton's part from "Wild Life." I'd forgotten what a bear it was to sync the parts on this song.

YouTube viewer Alexander Gedeon writes, "Do you have any new thoughts or insights about how [Trout Mask Replica] was made? Do you [see] an underlying logic to the compositional style or does it all have a degree of randomness?"

My first thought on this was how much work the musicians did over ten months, learning these parts by ear and memorizing them. An incredible feat. And of course, John "Drumbo" French's task of notating Don Van Vliet's piano compositions and arranging them for the other musicians to play. All to record them -- 20 songs -- in a single four-and-a-half-hour session, and then never play most of them live (except for one show where they concentrated on easier material). On the album, much of their work is buried in the mix, obscured by Don's prominently-mixed vocals and sax, or extraneous elements like the phasing effect on "Neon Meate Dream Of A Octafish," or the overdubbed screams on "Pena."

There is definitely logic to this music; the only randomness would be in the way Don composed the pieces on piano, but even those, as arranged, have their own internal logic. When there is unity between the two guitars, they're probably playing what Don's left and right hands were playing. French tended to arrange repetitions in groups of four or eight, which is typical of Western music, although there are exceptions -- fewer or more repetitions, or phrases that are played once and never repeat. Some of the variations on themes on the record could be mistakes musicians made in the studio, because they were so rushed. I suspect as long as they all started and ended together and played the sections mostly correctly, there wouldn't have been retakes.

The songs are really collections of riffs that are blues-based because that's the vernacular the Magic Band traded in. The musicians were accustomed to fingerpicking, although the hybrid picking on heavy strings with metal fingerpicks was something new. (I've always thought of this as Don's revenge on string players for the feelings of inferiority he felt early on, playing with more experienced and skilled musicians.) There's a good amount of single-string melodic stuff, which only occasionally -- as in Bill Harkleroad's part on "Frownland" -- departs from the blues.

It's interesting to me how Jeff Cotton played many of the more interesting parts, and there were a couple (French mentions "Ant Man Bee" and "Wild Life" in his book) where Cotton learned his parts directly from Don (who probably sang or whistled them, as he did in the Strictly Personal period), without French's involvement. Jeff was musically literate and, as a clarinetist, had actually given Don some pointers on playing the sax. But he had the job of transcribing Don's lyrics, in the same way as French took on the role of transcribing Don's piano extemporizations. When we hear the tonic-flat 5th-octave chord (which corresponds with a 3rd and 7th, also heard in blues), it's usually Cotton who's playing it. (Guitarist Ken Duvall once chided Beefheart biographer Mike Barnes for referring to the chords in "Circumstances" on Clear Spot as "dissonant;" they're 7ths -- blues chords.)

I see Don's achievement on this album as similar to John Fahey's with his "American primitive" style of solo acoustic guitar playing -- using raw materials gleaned from blues, but deploying them in the manner of a classical composer, in cells or movements, rather than following a strict harmonic progression. (Samuel Andreyev's analysis, also on YouTube, is invaluable here.)