I’ve worked through John “Drumbo” French’s book “Beefheart: Through the Eyes of Magic”. 800 pages by perhaps the musician most responsible for Trout Mask Replica, and who Van Vliet didn’t even put in its credits.
Robert Polidori and I discovered Beefheart and TMR in 1969, when it was released. At that time, after years of playing in a grade school garage rock band, I was listening to Cage, Stockhausen, Terry Riley, Reich, Roland Kirk, Ravi Shankar, Zappa, Coltrain, Varese, and others, including much music from other cultures. I was ravenous for new music.
When I heard Beefheart, I heard: short single-measure phrases, often repeated for four measures. Each instrument had its own phrase, rhythm, and sometimes of different length, and similar to Steve Reich’s phrase shifting compositions, they were composed to play themselves out, and then all end together on the same beat. Played together they were cacophonous, so you had to listen to each phrase separately before you could understand the structure of a single moment. Similar to Indian music, all of the instruments were synched to the same beat and tempo, which was a major default for all the songs on the album.
The instrumental music didn’t keep to western scales, they were often polyphonic, and usually if they were mostly within a scale, jumped out randomly. However, the singing for any given song would usually stay within a single key and scale. I’m sure that this is because Beefheart grew up listening and singing to blues and R&B, and that was how he knew to sing.
French’s book is fascinating to me for many reasons, and part of it is that he articulates exactly how TMR—as well as Beefheart’s earlier albums—were constructed. His earliest recording, Safe as Milk, was blues songs all the way, and French gives Ry Cooder credit for pulling the music together so it could be recorded. His next couple of albums were really blues jams, and sounded like it. A couple of songs from that period crept into TMR, such as Veteran’s Day Poppy, and while I always liked them, they were oddly conventional compared to the other music on the album.
Polidori, my friend David Swatling and I went to hear Beefheart in NYC in 1971, touring on their next album “Lick my Decals Off”. I had memorized the album before hearing them live. I was amazed by the band’s ability to play every note as it was on the album. Understand that the album—like TMR—sounded both structured and cacophonous, and that many if not most people just thought it was noise, with no structure at all. But hearing the guitar solo “One Red Rose That I Mean” live… and hearing that every note and hesitation was exactly as it had been played on the recording—was a confirmation (for me) of the musicality of the band. For myself, having survived the overplayed improvisations of Cream, Grateful Dead, and so much of the rock/blues of the late 1960s, I didn’t need to hear any improvise within a given scale. I wanted to hear new composition, which is what they delivered, bravely.
French details how, in 1968-1969, TMR was born. First of all, Beefheart couldn’t play any instruments other than a harmonica. 95% of harmonica playing requires zero knowledge of music theory. Beefheart would bang out a phrase on the piano, which French would either record or, later, transcribe onto notation paper. This would be repeated for every instrument’s part in a song (except for drums, which French usually provided himself). French would then teach each band member their part. As they practiced a piece together, French or the other musicians would revise their parts so that they would fit together, in the ways I explained above. The other musicians did know how to play their instruments, and like French, knew enough music theory (or at least, the logic of their instruments) to map the notes to their fretboards, and find a way to make non-fretboard generated riffs playable.
Beefheart, knowing no music theory or even how to explain the limitations of western musical practice, would lay down rough phases that were not generated from a western theory. So it is not surprising that his phrasing doesn’t sound as though it came from a Berkeley or Julliard. If you started from music theory in the late 1960s, you wouldn’t get to where he got. For instance, no one else did.
Beefheart was able to do what he did because of what he didn’t know.
What was also needed was someone to use standard construction tools to put the pieces Beefheart generated into a structure that would hold up, and that could be repeated. This is the role that French played in TMR. The third requirement was someone who could (and would) learn the music from French and French’s notation, and play it back from memory. That is what the other musicians in the band did.
Van Vliet was several years older than the teenaged TMR musicians. French relates in detail how Van Vliet bullied them using cult-leader cruelty into staying in the band, and dedicating years of time to learning and performing this music. It breaks your heart to read the stories. But it was what was missing in each of the TMR musicians, and Van Vliet, that allowed the music to be constructed and recorded. If the musicians had been older and had more knowledge of both music, they would have left like Ry Cooder did. If Van Vliet had more musical training, he wouldn’t have approached composing like he did.
French makes the good point that it isn’t enough to simply work from intuition without any musical background. Van Vliet couldn’t repeat what he banged out on piano, and he had a lot of trouble even coming in at the right point when performing on stage. What he supplied was something the musicians couldn’t, and what they supplied was something he couldn’t. Music was bigger than each of them.
-Sunnyvale 2025