I: Introduction
Trout Mask Replica is the third album by Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, released in 1969 as a double album. The music was written by Beefheart (Don Van Vliet), composed at a piano, and arranged by the drummer of the band, John French (nicknamed “Drumbo,” and uncredited on the album).
TMR was produced by Frank Zappa, offering Beefheart complete artistic freedom on Zappa’s new label, Straight Records. This was Zappa’s most memorable album production (The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll, page 1105), as TMR has some of the most radically experimental music of anything in the history of rock and roll. The album combines Delta blues, free jazz, and 20th century avant-garde classical music concepts to create a near-chaotic sound with polymetre, polyrhythms, and polytonality.
I must be frank about TMR. It is by no means easy listening. It’s an acquired taste, to put it mildly. I remember my first listening to it as a teen in the mid-1980s, and I was so frustrated with it at the time that I almost wanted to rip the first record off the turntable and throw it against the wall. In the back of my mind, though, I sensed that significant forces were at work on this album, mysterious forces, but ones worth sticking with. Over time, I came to understand what I was hearing little by little, and now I realize that TMR rewards repeated hearings.
Indeed, this album, though initially selling poorly (as might be expected from such a challenging recording), is now considered Beefheart’s masterpiece, and is a great influence on many other artists, including those outside of music, like Matt Groening and David Lynch. Musicians who have praised TMR include John Lydon, John Frusciante, and Steve Vai. The album is ranked #60 on Rolling Stone‘s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list.
Here is a link to the complete album, and here is a link to all of the song lyrics.
Though Beefheart was a great blues player of the harmonica, he doesn’t play it at all on TMR. Instead, apart from his usual, gravelly blues-inflected singing (with a range of about four and a half octaves, from a deep vocal fry you can especially hear on “Dachau Blues” to a high falsetto), he also plays such winds as tenor and soprano saxophones, bass clarinet, and musette…all with a wild, atonal, free-jazz honking spontaneity that couldn’t care less what notes he was hitting.
Other musicians on the album, apart from the aforementioned French, include guitarist Jeff Cotton (nicknamed “Antennae Jimmy Semens”), guitarist Bill Harkleroad (nicknamed “Zoot Horn Rollo”), bassist Mark Boston (nicknamed “Rockette Morton”), and bass clarinetist Victor Hayden (“The Mascara Snake”). Doug Moon plays guitar on “China Pig,” and a number of the Mothers of Invention play on “The Blimp” (though uncredited and mostly inaudible).
Side One
II: Frownland
The themes that pervade this entire double album are paradox, contradiction, and incongruity: these are felt in the surreal lyrics as well as in the dissonant, polymetric music, made clear already in this song. A thorough analysis of the song, by Samuel Andreyev, can be found here; what he has to say about the musical structure of this 1:40-long song can give you a sense of how just about all the songs (apart from three a cappella ones) on TMR were put together.
Examples of paradox, contradiction, and incongruity in “Frownland” include the seeming chaos of it. In my introduction above, I mentioned the “near-chaotic sound” of all the music on TMR: that was a tad misleading, for in fact, all of the songs were tightly, precisely constructed. Beefheart’s music has been described as “a sort of modern chamber music for rock band, since he plan[ned] every note and [taught] the band their parts by ear.” (The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll, page 147) Actually, French transcribed many musical fragments that resulted from Beefheart’s noodling around on the piano, an instrument on which he had neither musical training nor experience playing. If Beefheart didn’t get a musical idea from the piano, he whistled it for the band.
Elsewhere, there’s paradox and contradiction in the music’s dissonance and seeming atonality. Actually, “Frownland” opens in C major, then it soon switches to the relative minor of A, followed by other modulations, as Andreyev explains in his video (link above). What is true about the dissonance is the frequent use of polytonality. Furthermore, not only is there polymetre, there’s also a juxtaposition of different tempi in this song, coordinated and synchronized so that the conflicting riffs begin and end together. Such an amazing accomplishment, heard elsewhere on the album many times, justifies the Rolling Stone Record Guide‘s comment that TMR‘s music is “astonishingly advanced rhythmically,” with “superb guitar work.”
As for the song lyric, consider a comparison of how the singer yearns for a happy world–in which “a man can stand by another man without an ego flyin’, with no man lyin’, an no one dyin’ by an earthly hand”–with how Beefheart actually treated his band during the creation and rehearsals of TMR. To say he was a domineering, hard task master is to put it mildly.
The band rehearsed his difficult compositions for eight grueling months, living communally in a small house in Woodland Hills, LA. They had minimal food to eat, often having–in their poverty–to shoplift, then need to get bailed out by Zappa when arrested. Worse, Beefheart was emotionally, verbally, and even physically abusive to his band, not allowing them to leave the house and making them practice for fourteen or more hours a day. French described the experience as “cult-like,” and another observed that it was “positively Manson-esque.” The house was Beefheart’s Frownland: his singing that he could “not go back to your Frownland” was pure projection.
So, as with Stanley Kubrick in his uncompromising vision to make a great film out of The Shining–resulting in the abuse of poor Shelley Duvall and the driving of Scatman Crothers to tears after endless reshoots of scenes–Beefheart demonstrated in TMR that he was both an artistic genius and an asshole.
III: The Dust Blows Forward ‘n’ the Dust Blows Back
This is the first of three tracks on the album with Beefheart singing alone, with no backup band at all. The other two songs of this sort are “Well” and “Orange Claw Hammer.”
The song’s imagery is of an ugly natural landscape, with a feeling of Depression-era poverty. In other words, the Frownland continues, though Beefheart again tries to keep his spirits up when he’s “[taken] off [his] pants and felt free, the breeze blowin’ up [him].”
“Tote an old grain in a printed sack” suggests the poor of the Depression having to lug their belongings as they move somewhere in hopes of finding work, as the Joad family does in Steinbeck‘s Grapes of Wrath. “The smokestack blows up in the sun’s eye,” for “the wind blows black through the sky,” a depiction of the ugly reality of urban industrialization. Yet Beefheart sings all of this with a paradoxically cheerful melody.
Indeed, in this song, Beefheart has temporarily tossed aside his usual blues leanings to sing what sounds like a traditional, old-fashioned song, like something a white working-class man might have sung in the 1930s. Instead of his non-rhotic, blues-inflected, gravelly voice, he sings with the rhotic, rustic charm of a ‘country bumpkin.’
Though the singer is in a depressing setting, where “the dust blows forward ‘n’ the dust blows back,” reminding one of the Dust Bowl era of Steinbeck’s novel, the singer tries to sound cheerful, “hand full o’ worms and a pole fishin’…gone fishin’ for a week.” This juxtaposition of depressing imagery with a cheerful singing tone is one of many examples on TMR of the themes of paradox, contradiction, and incongruity.
Examples of pollution, apart from “the wind blows black” and “the smokestack blows up,” include “a lipstick Kleenex hung on a pointed forked twig,” “one red bean stuck in the bottom of a tin bowl,” and “hot coffee from a crimped-up can.” With these sad images are also pleasant, if surreal, ones like “the moon looks like a dandelion.” These contradictions indicate that, while Beefheart is still in Frownland, his smile is stuck.
IV: Dachau Blues
As the title of this song implies, it’s about the Holocaust, in particular, the Dachau Nazi concentration camp. Beyond those atrocities, though, the song is also an antiwar one in general, begging our politicians to heed the warnings and protests of the young activists of the late 1960s, not to allow the Cold War between the capitalist West and the Soviet East to escalate to WWIII and nuclear annihilation.
While musically, the song has plenty of fitting harmonic tension, including some wild honking on the bass clarinet and tenor sax, Beefheart’s singing in vocal fry–an impressive demonstration of his vocal range–gives off an almost comic effect, which seems inappropriate for the song’s serious subject. Perhaps that ‘comic’ effect is meant to underscore the absurdity of continuing with warmongering and hate in our dangerously nuclear age.
The song ends with a monologue by Boston, the bassist, in which he talks about people trying to get rid of a bunch of rats by shooting at them with shotguns and beating them with sticks. One could hear a parallel in this monologue with the subject of “Dachau Blues”: the rats represent the Jews, or any group persecuted by fascists; the fascists, shooting in all directions, making one think one is going to get killed, are endangering the survival of everyone on the Earth with their reckless hate and violence.
V: Ella Guru
After all of the negativity felt and avoided (or what one at least tried to avoid) in the previous three tracks, in this one, Beefheart has only positive things to say in his praise of a girl he calls “Ella Guru.” She is lovely and wise, since “she knows all the colours that nature do.” Though the stress is on the second syllable of her ‘surname,’ she seems to be a true guru in life, for, “lookin’ like a zoo,” she is wonderfully wild and free as an animal. Though “like a zoo,” she is paradoxically not locked up in any cage.
She is as beautiful as the “moon,” which recall, “looks like a dandelion” in the second track. Her three primary colours, with puns on “yella”/”Ella” and “blue”/”blew,” make her beautiful. Beefheart has lecherous thoughts about her beauty, too, since “she blew,” “she’s young, too,” and is “tight, also.”
The point is that she’s beautiful in body and soul, and Beefheart wants to praise her as one of the few good things left in this stinking world. She helps him to keep his smile stuck, so he won’t have to go back to Frownland. She’s no phony: “She do what she mean and she do what she do.”
In the middle, instrumental section of the song, where the guitars are playing in a progression of F major and E♭major, the drums are going back and forth between a shuffle rhythm based on triplets and a slightly faster, duplet rhythm based on the duration between the first and third of those triplets (that’s at least what I think it is). In any case, it’s yet another example of how “astonishingly advanced rhythmically” the entire album is.
VI: Hair Pie: Bake 1
I’ll discuss the musical structure of this track when I get to “Bake 2.” As for “Bake 1,” I’ll discuss only what makes it different from 2, which isn’t very much in terms of musical structure.
The title of these instrumentals sounds like a lecherous continuation of Beefheart’s infatuation with Ella Guru. Since “she blew” in that song, it seems here that Beefheart is returning the favour with his honking on the soprano sax and bass clarinet (that low note on the latter being played by “The Mascara Snake,” I assume), this being the one essential difference between Bakes 1 and 2. Apart from that difference, Bake 1 also slowly fades in, with less and less sax and bass clarinet towards the end, while “Bake 2” is heard at full volume throughout, with no wind instruments at all.
Another difference between Bakes 1 and 2 is that the latter was recorded in a studio, whereas the former was recorded in the house the band was living in, the sax and bass clarinet parts in the garden of the house…hence Beefheart’s comment to the two visitors heard after the end of the instrumental: he tells them, “It’s a bush recording. We’re out recording the bush.” This “bush” reference sounds also like more of Beefheart’s lecherous feelings for Ella Guru, his blowing on the sax is an eating of her hair pie.
VII: Moonlight on Vermont
Beefheart spuriously claimed that he wrote all of the songs on TMR in one eight-hour session. “Moonlight on Vermont,” as well as “Sugar ‘n’ Spikes,” were actually written around December of 1967, and “Veteran’s Day Poppy” was written in mid-1968. The rest of the music was mostly written over the summer and fall of 1968. This would explain why these former three songs aren’t as radically experimental as the music of the rest of the album, but are more bluesy.
Other interesting features of “Moonlight on Vermont” that are worthy of mention include the, I’d say, ironic reference to the spiritual “Old Time Religion,” and to Steve Reich‘s “Come Out.” These two elements, appearing towards the end of the song, are as I say ironic because if anything, Beefheart’s song is about getting away from tradition and the leaden repetition that comes from it (and Reich’s recording). So the yearning for tradition (“that old time religion”) and the breaking away from it (to get away from Frownland) is more paradox and contradiction.
The song’s lyric is based on the old belief that the moon can make us into lunatics. Some man in the song has gone so wild, he’s brandishing a pistol (or is it his phallus? Has he seen Ella Guru?). The upper-class people of the lunatic neighbourhood aren’t playing bridge anymore.
“No more bridge” for “high society” could represent the bringing-down of the ruling class, liberating the rest of us as a result of the lunatic influence of the moon (“Goes to show you what a moon can do.”). The freeing of us in turn means we can finally get rid of the “white elephant” of our oppression, so we can be free to express ourselves, “escaped from the zoo with love.” We’ll be “walkin’, lookin’ like a zoo,” as Ella Guru does. We’ll be “free to grow as flowers,” as Beefheart sings in “Sweet Sweet Bulbs.”
Side Two
VIII: Pachuco Cadaver
Before the song begins, we get one of a number of Beefheart’s references to a preoccupation of his, his expression “fast and bulbous.” We already heard it in “Ella Guru.” It can be related to the upcoming song, “Sweet Sweet Bulbs,” too. He’s talking about something flowering, growing…yet plants aren’t fast in their growing.
In “fast and bulbous,” therefore, we hear another paradox, or contradiction. It seems rather like the development of TMR: Beefheart’s dictatorial driving of his band to practice his difficult music for long hours every day, never allowing them to leave the house, and berating them abusively whenever they made mistakes–this was the “fast” in the music’s “bulbous” growth.
Furthermore, the “fast and bulbous” paradox is a reflection of the contradiction between, on the one hand, the Frownland that Beefheart wants to stay away from, which is stressful in how “fast” everything has to be (think of how much worse we have it today, with all of our multitasking), and on the other hand, the childlike, free world that Beefheart yearns for, the “bulbous” world where we’re “free to grow as flowers,” where we’re “walkin’, lookin’ like a zoo” with Ella Guru.
Accordingly, we hear a number of references to flowers on TMR: “the moon looks like a dandelion,” the flowers in “Sweet Sweet Bulbs,” “Veteran’s Day Poppy,” and “her skin is as smooth as the daisies,” in “Pachuco Cadaver.”
The song begins with a guitar riff in A major, while the bass plays Es in groups of three, one set an octave apart from the other, and they’re played at a tempo slower than that of the guitars and drums. Beefheart then comes in, doing spoken word.
Whoever “she” is (Is it Ella Guru again?), she wears a “bolero,” which on the one hand is a cropped jacket, and on the other–given Beefheart’s predilection for lyrics full of puns and surrealist imagery–a Spanish dance in 3/4 time from the late 18th century…hence, “when she wears her bolero, then she begin to dance.” Her car, a Chevy sedan, is a “Pachuco Cadaver,” referring to how a Mexican-American might own an old car made from scraps, with a steering wheel from “a B-29 Bomber.” The car is “forever amber,” because of how rusted up it is–yellow with rust.
The “yellow jackets ‘n’ red debbles” (devils), which are “buzzin’ ’round her hair hive ho,” are barbiturates (pentobarbital and secobarbital/Seconal respectively for the yellows and reds), often taken in the 1960s by women with beehive hairstyles (one is reminded of that old song by the Rolling Stones). So “she” has her hair like this, and she’s buzzing on “chill pills” as she drives her car.
We get more puns when we hear that “she wears her past like a present.” The present can be a gift (the bolero jacket), or it can mean that she is a person of all times, past or present. ‘She looks like an old squaw Indian,” yet if she’s Ella, “she’s young, too.” Old, yet young. Another paradox…past, yet present.
“She” certainly seems to possess the attractive qualities of Ella Guru, for “her lovin’ makes [Beefheart] so happy,” he’d crack his chin if he smiled. “Her eyes are so peaceful, thinks it’s heaven she be in.” As these lines are said by Beefheart, the music has become cheerful, even celebratory, with a shuffle rhythm and guitar riffs in A major, at one point shifting down to A♭major, then back to A♮major; and the drummer sometimes shifts from the shuffle (often with quick triplets hit on the ride cymbal) to duplets played on the hi-hat. (Somewhere in this song, the melody from “Shortnin’ Bread” is heard among the guitars, but it seems to be so buried in there that I cannot pinpoint it.)
I mentioned above how “her skin is as smooth as the daisies” in reference to Beefheart’s love of flowers; it should be added to this the significance of “in the center where the sun shines in,” or, of course, the yellow centre of a daisy. This comparison of a flower to a light in the sky should be linked to another such comparison I also mentioned earlier: “the moon looks like a dandelion,” from the second track. These lines in turn should be related to what Beefheart sings in “Frownland”: “My spirit’s made up of the ocean and the sky and the sun and the moon…” He loves the flowers, the sun, and the moon; these beauties of nature are all one to him.
Fittingly, “when she walks, flowers surround her, let their nectar come into the air around her.” If she’s Ella, “she comes walkin’, lookin’ like a zoo”: natural, wild, free, and beautiful–like flowers. Is Ella the earth mother-goddess? “Her lovin’ stick out like stars.” The sun is a star, the centre of a daisy, like her skin. Her love is a star, the sun, the centre of a flower.
Beefheart would like to emulate her spontaneity with a sax solo that, though going along with the rhythm of the band, couldn’t care less if it conforms with the harmony or not. After that, the back-up band continues playing the cheerful riff in A major for a while, and the song ends.
IX: Bill’s Corpse
“Bill” in the song’s title refers to guitarist Zoot Horn Rollo (Bill Harkleroad), who upon having left an LSD cult to join Beefheart’s Magic Band had been in an emaciated condition; in fact, that emaciation may have also been a result of the conditions Beefheart had created in the house while the band rehearsed (recall how the band had starved).
Bill’s corpse can thus be seen as a metaphor for the unhappy, degraded state of the world described in this song lyric. After the celebratory happiness we heard in “Pachuco Cadaver” (an ironic song title to have come just before this track, the two songs giving off opposing moods…yet such is the thematic nature of TMR–paradox, contradiction, and incongruity), we have come back to Frownland.
“Quietly, the rain played down on the last of ashes,” Beefheart sings as the band plays in D minor to a by-now-typically conflicting rhythm. “She…” (Ella Guru, the sad earth mother-goddess?) is “hideously looking back at what once was beautiful.”
Since “her ragged hair was shining, red, white, and blue,” we can see how Ella Guru has gone from her happy yellow, red, and blue primary colours to those of the flag of the United States, where oppression and unhappiness have reigned for so long. Such misery is apparent in how, for example, “the goldfish in the bowl lay upside-down bloatin’,” symbolic of how environmental damage has harmed marine life in the rivers, lakes, and oceans…great fish bowls, as it were (also, there was the Dust Bowl of the Depression years).
Elsewhere, “the plains were bleached with white skeletons,” those of Native Americans killed by the white man and ironically, if redundantly, called “white skeletons,” or skeletons made so by whites. Related to the Native American genocide is how “various species [were] grouped together according to their past beliefs,” which can represent racism, which has sometimes been rationalized with Biblical quotes like Genesis 1:25. If God meant all the animals to be created “according to their kinds,” then, apparently, He would have wanted the black, white, Asian, and Native American ‘races’ to live “according to their kinds,” that is, separately.
Connected with such a racist attitude is how “the only way they ever got together was not in love, but shameful grief.” That is, the white supremacists got together for the purpose of persecuting blacks, Jews, natives, and any other racial or ethnic groups they hated. So much of the history of the “red, white, and blue” has been made up of such hatred. Beefheart doesn’t want us “to get together” in such ways. Getting together is normally associated with love, not hate; so this hateful getting together is yet another example in TMR of paradoxes and contradictions.
So “the rain [of sadness] played down,” that is, rained down on our world and ruined our happiness, saddening earth-goddess Ella Guru, the lady who would “look out of love.” She “should have us all,” that is, together and happy, or, if we cannot be, then she “should have us fall.”
X: Sweet Sweet Bulbs
In this song, we’ve left Frownland again, and we’re back with happy Ella Guru, that is, “in [Beefheart’s] lady’s garden,” where the “sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet bulbs grow,” and where “warm, warm, warm, warm, warm sun-fingers wave.” This garden could also be that of the house where he and his Magic Band were practicing his music…though–yet another contradiction!– he was actually working them like slaves, as I pointed out above.
For him, at least, the garden is a happy place where “flowers dance” and the sun, whose “fingers wave,” is also associated with joy, as I mentioned earlier. “Hominy,” a Mesoamerican food item, was eaten by the poor during the Great Depression, and thus it links this song with track 2 off of Side One.
She herself is linked to hominy, in her “smile” and her “snatch,” which in turn links her to Bakes 1 and 2 of “Hair Pie,” since–among other, obvious reasons–hominy is frequently used as a base for baked dishes, and there are pies with hominy, including baked Tex-Mex/Southwest pies.
Since, as I said above, hominy was eaten by the poor during the Depression, we can link it with the bare subsistence diet that the band had to eat while working on Beefheart’s music, in that house with that garden nearby: French, for example, had no more than a small cup of soybeans a day for a month. So the contradiction here is between the joy Beefheart is feeling about his artistic inspiration and his music being played on the one hand, and the suffering his band is going through on the other.
He calls Ella “Phoebe,” this name being a female version of Phoebus, as in Apollo, a god associated with the sun, since Ella, flowers, and the sun are images of happiness for Beefheart. Recall how “her skin is as smooth as the daisies, in the center where the sun shines in,” for “her lovin’ makes [Beefheart] so happy,” as he tells us in “Pachuco Cadaver.” He sees “Phoebe” in her bonnet, “with the sunset written on it.”
As for the music, we primarily hear a merry set of tunes played on the bass and guitars, in a largely pentatonic E major. By the middle of the second verse, though, the music gets more tense and in its by-now-typically disoriented state as Beefheart sings of how “just behind ya was the sea of negativity…she walked back into nature a queen uncrowned.” Yet when she recognizes herself “to be an heir to the throne,” and “her garden gate swings lightly without weight,” we return to the merry guitar and bass tunes in pentatonic E major.
Ella is the queen of this happy garden (of Eden?), which is “open to most anyone that needs a little freedom.” Beefheart would invite as many of us as can come to be “free to grow as flowers” and “share her throne,” for in his utopia, we’re all equals…unless you’re a member of his Magic Band, of course.
XI: Neon Meate Dream of a Octafish
Since the surrealist lyric of this song is about a wet dream, or at least a sexual fantasy, I can now understand why–in his discussion with the two visitors about “Hair Pie: Bake 1” when the music is over–Beefheart confuses the title of that instrumental with that of this song. The former track is about the female genitalia, and this song is about the male genitalia.
Apart from the phallic tentacles of the “octafish,” and other sexually suggestive references to “incest,” “tubes,” “speckled,” “waddlin’ feast,” “buds burst,” “meate rose and hairs,” “meaty dream wet meat,” “twat trot,” “whale bone fields,” and “serum in semen,” the lyric is chock-full of Beefheart’s typical use of puns.
So this song can be seen as yet another example of Beefheart’s lusting after Ella Guru. Fittingly, the music has such dissonance in it that it can legitimately be called “musical masturbation.”
XII: China Pig
The White Stripes did a cover of this song.
In this improvised recording with Beefheart’s singing accompanied only by Doug Moon on guitar, we have TMR‘s closest approximation to pure Delta blues. It almost sounds like something Robert Johnson would have done.
The song is about a piggy bank (“china,” as in porcelain). Not wanting to kill Beefheart’s “china pig,” then, simply means he doesn’t want to break and destroy his piggy bank.
So, not wanting to destroy the piggy bank, in turn, represents a need to refrain from spending one’s money carelessly, a need to save money, because one is poor, as during the Great Depression, or as in the impoverished state the Magic Band was in, rehearsing in that house. “A man’s gotta live. A man’s gotta eat. A man’s gotta have shoes to walk out on the street.”
The piggy bank, of course, has “got a slot in his back.” If he is desperate to get his hands on some money, he whips out his fork and pokes at the piggy bank: “I put a fork in his back!” This is to get coins out without breaking it.
So a song about being poor and needing to count one’s pennies is aptly played in a Delta blues style, since so many of the old bluesmen sang about their sorrows. Things might be a lot happier if “flowers grow/[Beefheart’s] china pig be quite a show.”
XIII: My Human Gets Me Blues
This song begins with striking dissonances from the guitars, especially in contrast to the straightforward blues of the guitar in “China Pig.” Such dissonance is fitting, since the song is about the discord between what one is supposed to believe about Christianity and what we often do believe about it.
Beefheart begins his singing by addressing the baby Jesus in His “X-ray gingham dress.” Beefheart can see through it, because he can see through the phoniness of the religion. Gingham is a fabric with patterns of horizontal and vertical stripes that cross over each other; so like the X in “X-ray,” they represent the Cross that Christ was nailed on.
Jesus is in a “dress,” meaning those robes worn in ancient times; but “dress” is also used as a pun on “duress” in the second line of the first verse. Jesus was “under duress,” that is, forced by God to die on the Cross (Matthew 26:39). But Beefheart knew Jesus under his dress, that is, he could see, like an X-ray, under the phoniness of the religion that speaks in Jesus’ name.
Jesus can “keep comin’,” as in the Second Coming. Like all those clergymen in their robes (‘dresses,’ if you will) who represent Jesus, He’s “the best dressed,” that is, in all that Catholic finery (or, in the case of the evangelical Protestants wearing those fine, expensive suits), the religious authorities are showing off their wealth, they who represent Christ. They “look dandy in the sky,” like foppish dandies in those fancy clothes and fraudulently imitating Christ, but they’re no ‘dandelions’ to represent the flowers of true happiness, as Beefheart saw in the dandelion-looking moon.
Jesus is supposed to be our Saviour, to give us peace and comfort, yet He would scare us with threats of Hell for not believing in Him…still, He doesn’t scare Beefheart, who–seeing through the Church’s phoniness–has “got [Him] here in [his] eye.”
“In this lifetime,” that is, in the material world we’re in now, as opposed to the spiritual afterlife, “my human gets me blues” is the painful feeling of being regarded as a lowly sinner (“human”), fallen from the grace of God, and needing the authority of the Church to be restored to God’s grace, that is, needing to conform to Church doctrine to be saved…salvation by grace through faith (Ephesians 2:8).
Beefheart doesn’t want to be thus coerced into such conformity, to be “under duress.” He’d rather roam about freely in the flowery fields with Ella Guru. He knows Jesus would “never come back,” i.e., there will be no Second Coming, as the Church has so fraudulently promised for two millennia. In Matthew, chapter 24, it was prophesied that He would come back, with the end of the world, before the death of that very generation hearing Him (Matthew 24:34).
There’s an “old lady” who is “afraid [she’d] be the devil’s red wife,” which sounds like the Whore of Babylon, a place that in turn has been seen to represent Rome. Since this song is critical of Christianity, Babylon-as-Rome can be seen as the corrupt Roman Catholic Church.
“God dug [her] dance” just as Jesus dances in a way Beefheart knew He’d never come back, hence the link between her and Jesus, or the Whore of Babylon and the Roman Catholic Church. God would “have [her] young and in His harem”: she’s an “old lady” because being a whore is the oldest profession.
Now, “everybody made Him a boy,” that is, we have never traditionally regarded God as female, hence, the all-male priesthood to represent Him (1 Corinthians 14:35). Because of all of these faults in the Church, among so many others, Beefheart’s got the “human gets me blues,” that is, the sadness of having to deal with all those human, all-too-human faults of the Church, as opposed to its supposed divine authority over man.
XIV: Dali’s Car
This short instrumental for two electric guitars (played by Zoot Horn Rollo and Antennae Jimmy Semens) was the first that Beefheart composed for TMR. He called it a “study in dissonance,” according to French in his book, Beefheart: Through the Eyes of Magic, pages 805-806. The instrumental was inspired by Salvador Dali‘s Rainy Taxi, or Mannequin Rotting in a Taxi-Cab, from 1938.
Side Three
XV: Hair Pie: Bake 2
As I said in my description of Bake 1, the only major differences between the two “Bakes” are the absence of sax and bass clarinet honking here and no slow fade-in here, as well as no visitors asking about the music. Instead, this “Bake” ends with Beefheart shaking jingle bells with the tape being sped up.
Now I’ll discuss some of the musical highlights of these two instrumentals. We can hear examples of polytonality in the two guitar parts and in the bass, as well as polymetre and synchronized polyrhythms. One noteworthy example of the latter is, shortly into the beginning, when we hear a riff in 5/4 time, then the drummer pounds a strong shuffle rhythm (implying triplets), which at first is heard alone, then the guitars and bass return with the 5/4 riff, perfectly synchronized with the shuffle rhythm.
Later, we’ll hear polytonality in the guitar parts, with one playing a descending line of C, A, A♭, and G, while the other is playing G♭[4x], and A, the former implying a key of C to the latter’s implied D major.
We’ll also hear the polymetre of such conflicting time signatures as 3/4 against 4/4, and 5/4 against 4/4. All of this conflict in dissonance, metre, rhythm, tempo, and key makes up the album’s musical equivalent to the lyrical themes of paradox, contradiction, and incongruity.
Between this instrumental and the next track, “Pena,” we hear a goofy dialogue between Beefheart and the Mascara Snake about all things “fast and bulbous.” They mess up a few times, first from Beefheart laughing, then from the Mascara Snake coming in too early with the line “Bulbous also tapered.” Zappa can be heard giving directions.
I mentioned above how I interpreted “fast” to mean our stressful lives, with everything so fast-paced; yet on the other hand, “bulbous” refers to a free, organic, natural world of flowers. So “fast and bulbous” is a paradox of our happy, yet unhappy lives. “A tin teardrop” is a surreal reference to how our modern-day, metallic world is taking us away from that natural world and thus making us weep. So, “bulbous also tapered,” along with “also, a tin teardrop,” refer to how our natural world of beautiful, bulbous flowers is being diminished and reduced of its thick bulbousness.
XVI: Pena
Antennae Jimmy Semens narrates this one in a hysterical voice, with Beefheart doing high-pitched, unintelligible screaming in the background. “Pena,” with “her head…like a barrel of red velvet balls,” sounds like the feminine of “Penis.” Her name can also be seen as a variation on “poena,” as in “subpoena,” and other words like “penalty,” “punishment.” What is necessarily ‘punitive’ in this surreal narrative, though, may not be all that obvious to see at first, given how it more obviously seems like another coded, symbolic sex fantasy, like “Neon Meate Dream” above.
That the “velvet balls” are red is symbolic of love, since, according to this video (about 9:30 into it), Beefheart says red represents love, as yellow does wisdom, blue does peace, and green does logic in songs like “Pena” and “Ella Guru.” So Pena’s head, “clinking like a barrel of red velvet balls,” suggests a ‘female’ penis and testes.
Now, with this album having come out in 1969 and therefore long before transgender issues became a big concern in mainstream thinking the way they are today, I doubt that Pena’s hermaphroditism is meant as an expression of transgenderism. I think the ‘female penis and testes’ of Pena are just more of Beefheart’s surrealism, with sex differences still perceived as just a binary, and thus the hermaphroditism is yet another example of TMR‘s theme of contradictions.
It’s significant in this connection that both aptly-named Beefheart and…aptly-nicknamed Semens…have high-pitched voices on this recording, making them sound rather androgynous. It’s also worth noting that in the promotional photos for TMR, Semens is seen wearing a dress. With the names Jeff Cotton and “Jimmy,” he doesn’t identify as a female. He’s just in a dress as part of the philosophy of the Magic Band as free and defying social conventions–it’s the same with all the band members’ goofy-sounding nicknames.
Back to the narration. “Treats filled her eyes,” that is, Pena’s, “turning them yellow…soft like butter, hard not to pour.” The treats, I suspect, are phallic, and the eyes are yonic and anal, the soft, butter-like yellow being ejaculation. “Sitting on a [phallic] turned-on waffle iron, smoke billowing out from between her legs” sounds unmistakably sexual, “making [the phallus] vomit beautifully.”
She’d “fall on [his] stomach” while he’d “view her from a thousand happened facets,” that is, he ogles her naked body from all angles. He may have hurt himself in his ecstasy, hence the “liquid red salt,” or blood from lovemaking (I suppose this was the penal aspect of Pena); “[he] later Band-Aided the area, sighed, ‘Oh, well, it was worth it’.”
Pena was pleased with the lay she got, but “sore from sitting, chose to stub her toe”…so it seems that she got punished for her pleasure, too. And in this pleasure-pain of both lovers, we see yet another of TMR‘s paradoxes. The “red pockets” of the “white pulps” would be more blood from the stubbed toe. Her being “tired of playing ‘Baby'” could mean that Pena, with the raised social consciousness of Second Wave feminism in the late 1960s, doesn’t want her lover to treat her as a mere sex object anymore; for being treated as such, despite the pleasure she got from the sex, she feels like she’s being punished for it.
The “blue felt box” completes the red, white, and blue with the “pulps” and “pockets”–the American flag, colours complained about in “Bill’s Corpse.” Note how the red, white, and blue colours all appear around Pena’s protesting of not wanting to play ‘Baby’ anymore. It’s in reactionary governments like that of the US where women and other oppressed groups feel so confined.
On the other hand, red, yellow, and blue are the colours of free-spirited, wise Ella Guru. “Out of a blue felt box let escape one yellow butterfly the same size.” Out of the blue of peace came the yellow of wisdom (recall the colour symbolism of the Beefheart video–link above). White is often considered the absence of colours, so without yellow in red, white, and blue, there’s an absence of wisdom. If white is, alternatively, the sum of all colours, as it’s also sometimes deemed, then the red of love, yellow of wisdom, and blue of peace are all lost in the mix, as was the case in the American involvement in the Vietnam War going on in 1969, when TMR was released.
The yellow butterfly’s “droppings were tiny green phosphorous worms.” Green, according to that Beefheart video, represents logic. So, from the wisdom of yellow we get the green of logic. Of course, yellow mixed with blue (from the “blue felt box”) is green, so wisdom mixed with peace is logic.
The song lyric ends with Pena blowing raspberries: “Mouths open to tongues that vibrated and lost saliva.” Is she, in her red love, yellow wisdom, blue peace, and green logic, sticking her tongue out at the freedom-crushing US flag? Is hermaphrodite Pena’s/penis’s defying of sex roles, in not wanting to play ‘Baby’ anymore, an example of that defiance?
In any case, the song musically ends with dissonant riffs heard mainly in 5/4, among some polyrhythms.
XVII: Well
This is the second of three tracks on TMR that Beefheart sings a cappella. As usual with his lyrics, this one is full of surrealist imagery.
A lot of the imagery is of oppositions: day/night, black/white, hard/soft, hard (as in ‘bad’)/well, melted/froze, and silent/scream. His singing is largely a hitting of two notes: G and E, implying a shift back and forth from G major to its relative minor in E. This implied progression suggests yet another opposition: major/minor. All of these musical and lyrical oppositions add to TMR‘s general theme of contradictions.
In the first two lines of the first verse, we hear of a human being (“a red raft of blood”) going through his day (“light floats down day river”) and feeling the sunlight. Then comes the night, with a giant black…beetle?…large enough to block out the light of heaven, the shining of “its hard, soft shell” is “white in one spot,” implying the shining of the moon and stars. Life is hard, but the singer is “doing well, well.”
“The white ice horse melted,” yet the singer “froze in solid motion.” In a reversal of time sequence, the horse’s mane melted last, and after that, the tail melted…more contradiction and incongruity. The melting of an ice horse sculpture would seem a bad thing, but it’s all “well” to the singer. His “life ran through [his] veins” in the “red raft of blood” that is his body. Is “the ocean swarmin’ body…well” Brahman, as opposed to the Atman of his “red raft” body?
Since the blackness of the night is “like a big, black, shiny bug,” then the singer’s having “heard the beetle clickin'” means he’s hearing the sounds of the night…then [he’d] “begin to dream” at night. And with the dreaming would come more surrealist imagery, since surrealism is an expression of the unconscious mind, and as Freud once said, “the interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.” So in all of Beefheart’s surrealist, non-rational dreaming, his “mind cracked like custard,” etc.
The “thick, black felt birds…flying” sounds like a metamorphosis of the “big, black, shiny bug” of night, these birds flying everywhere and blocking out heaven’s light. Now, they have “capes” and “feathers of solid chrome,” which can be a shiny, decorative cover on cars and motorbikes. So the night is shiny again, indicating the light of the moon and stars, “and bleached the air around them, white and cold, well, well.”
This white in black, just like all the other oppositions discussed above, can also be interpreted in terms of the dialectical monism of the yin and yang of Taoism. Yin is black, and yang is white. So, though “it showed in pain,” all is “well, well.”
XVIII: When Big Joan Sets Up
“Big Joan” would appear to be the diametrical opposite of Ella Guru, who is wise and attractive to Beefheart, whereas Joan is “too fat to go out in the daylight,” and her hands and “arms are too small.”
The song begins with a frantic guitar riff in A: a bend from A to B, then the guitar goes up to E, back down to B, down to E an octave lower, E again, up to A, to D, and to the upper E again. This is heard mixed in with other high-pitched guitar leads that Beefheart follows with his high-pitched vocalizing.
Joan’s physical unattractiveness sounds more like a comment on society’s unfairly high beauty standards for women than an actual criticism of her looks. She once “compared her navel to the moon,” as if to see beauty in her body, though society refuses to see that beauty.
Beefheart is willing to accept her as she is: he’ll “set up with…Big Joan,” for he admits that he, too, is “too fat to go out in the daylight,” just as she is. He “won’t droop” if she promises not to complain about her small hands. She needs to accept herself as she is, too.
“Something’s happening,” that is, the world of the late 1960s was changing in terms of its social attitudes, so Big Joan is finally willing to come out publicly. In this sense, Beefheart’s song is like “Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance,” by Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, from the 1968 album, We’re Only In It for the Money, in which “there will come a time when you won’t even be ashamed if you are fat.”
Yet, on the other hand, immediately after Beefheart says she’s “come out,” he essentially says she cannot come out, for “she ain’t built for going naked, so she can’t wear any new clothes, or go to the beach.” So we have in this verse another example of TMR‘s many contradictions.
“They laugh at her body,” oddly, not because she’s big and fat, but “’cause her hands are too small.” Is she “outta reach” because her hands are too small to reach us, or too small for us to reach them? Or both? Is this the real problem, not her physical appearance, but our inability to connect with anybody, while we use physical imperfections as an excuse not to reach out to other people?
“Hoy! Hoy! Is she a boy?” is an allusion to “300 Pounds of Joy,” by Howlin’ Wolf (i.e., the line “Hoy! Hoy! I’m the boy!”) As with “Pena,” the line between masculine and feminine is being blurred in Beefheart’s song, and while in Howlin’ Wolf’s song, his obesity is being celebrated, so does Beefheart’s allusion to it imply a needed celebration of Big Joan as a BBW, not a mere ‘fatso.’
As with an implied celebration of her looks, so can we hear, in Beefheart’s soprano sax soloing and in the band’s sudden, jerky stops and awkward silences, celebrations of dissonances and weirdness in general, things not normally valued, yet which perhaps should be.
XIX: Fallin’ Ditch
Speaking of being unattractive to those of the opposite sex, according to the dialogue between Beefheart and bassist Rockette Morton, which precedes the next song, it seems that one needn’t worry about the latter “with any of those girls” because, “tak[ing] off again into the wind” (like a rocket, no doubt), he “run[s] on beans,” making him not smell exactly of cologne.
The lyric of this song seems to be a repeat of the emotional conflict expressed in “Frownland”: pain is unavoidable, but one tries to avoid it all the same, of course. Beefheart won’t let any setbacks in his life break his spirit.
Accordingly, the music starts off with the usual dissonance and conflicting instrumental parts, yet by the second verse, after we hear the refrain, “Fallin’ ditch ain’t gonna get my bones,” the musical back-up is more tonally centred and up-beat, suggesting a more positive outlook on life.
We all “trip” every now and then, and “get lonesome,” and when we’re down like this, in the “fallin’ ditch, somebody wanna throw the dirt right down,” that is, there’s always somebody who wats to make us feel even worse. When Beefheart “feel[s] like dying, the sun come out,” that is, he knows that when matters are at their worst, that is when our fortune often changes for the better.
So he, defiant against all ill fortune, sings, “Who’s afraid of the fallin’ ditch?” Boasting of his optimism, he asks us, “How’s that for the spirit?”, right as the musical background is cheering up.
XX: Sugar ‘n’ Spikes
This song, like “Moonlight on Vermont” and “Veteran’s Day Poppy,” was written earlier than the other songs on TMR; in fact, “Sugar ‘n’ Spikes” was written in late 1967, just a few months after the release of Beefheart’s album, Safe as Milk. So this song sounds far less experimental than the new songs.
“Sugar and spikes” seems to reflect the dual nature of life–sometimes sweet, and sometimes painful. Similar opposition is heard “in neon nights”–sometimes light, and sometimes dark, which is also reflected in “lights in chains”: the pleasure of light vs being bound in chains. This good/bad dichotomy is further heard in “coughin’ smoke, whoopin’ hope.”
So everything is “sugar and spikes…and everything nice and crazy.” Instead of saying that ‘what little girls are made of is sugar and spice and everything nice’ (a totally unrealistic and confining way to describe the female sex), Beefheart more accurately affirms that “what little worlds are made of” is part pleasure and part pain.
Examples of such pleasure combined with pain in the singer’s “little worlds” include being what seems to be an interracial relationship (his “new Friday’s house,” as in a female Friday to Beefheart’s Robinson Crusoe), and all the pleasures that go with such a relationship; and the irritations of having no hot water (“no H on [his] faucet”), or a bed for his mouse. Nonetheless, he’s content as “king for a day with [his] lady, who look fine.” If she’s his “Friday,” I suspect that his being “king for a day” means he’s putting her in a subservient role, as Friday was servant to Crusoe; in other words, in this relationship we see yet again a combination of pleasure and pain…just as in the servile relationship of Beefheart’s band to himself.
Has he given his “honey” a Speidel wristwatch as a gift? Going to see the vicar, he plans, I assume, to marry her, perhaps in a church named after St. Paul or St. Peter.
The only experimental-sounding part of this song occurs with the drum solo after all the words are sung; it’s a frantic solo going at a much faster tempo than that of the guitars and bass, riffs heard also during the music played earlier with the verse beginning with “lies steam stale.”
The song ends with Beefheart singing high-pitched, childlike nonsense syllables that were also heard, and with the same musical backing, in the verse in which he sang “sugar and spikes and everything nice.”
XXI: Ant Man Bee
Musically, this song more directly merges rhythm and blues with more experimental elements, and the blues aspect is made clear right at the beginning, with the guitar riff.
The “Ant Man” of the title indicates that Beefheart is comparing the modern human condition with ants. The white, black, “yella,” and brown ants are obviously meant to represent all the different racial and ethnic groups of the world, who “can’t get along.” We’re all “longin’ to be free…Uhuru!”
Note how the ants are “in God’s garden.” Is this the Garden of Eden, where Adam blamed Eve for tempting him with the forbidden fruit, and she blamed the serpent for the same thing–like the ants, the three couldn’t get along. The Garden of Eden was like Beefheart’s lady’s garden, where the “sweet, sweet bulbs grow.” And it’s the garden of the house where the Magic Band rehearsed the songs of TMR…and Beefheart, in his fiery temper over their mistakes, couldn’t get along with them, either.
“That one lump o’ sugar” that the ants fight over would be the wealth of the world, hoarded by the greedy plutocrat capitalists. And because of their greed, and all the money to be made by the weapons manufacturers, war profiteers, and in the general racket that war has always been, “war still runnin’ on.”
Now, the bee in “Ant Man Bee” is the liberator of us all; he “takes his honey, then he sets the flower free”…and recall how Beefheart loves his flowers. If only the ants could “set each other be,” or let each other be.
With this understanding of the ever-fighting ants, Beefheart goes into more dissonant sax soloing, to represent that never-ending conflict. With two saxes going at the same time, he sounds as if he’s doing an impression of Roland Kirk, with Rockette Morton doing a bass line of D, E, C, A, A (an octave higher).
Side Four
XXII: Orange Claw Hammer
This track is the third of the a cappella songs on TMR. With hard rs from his heavily rhotic pronunciation, Beefheart sounds as if he’s affecting a pirate’s voice. After all, he’s his daughter’s “peg-legged father” whose “seaman’s eyes…flow out water, salt water.”
The setting of this lyric seems to be putting us back in the Depression-era 1930s, since the pirate-singer is a hobo on trains during such economic hard times, and there are references to a Piper Club airplane (built between 1938 and 1947) and Ohio Blue Tip Matches. “The old puff horse” could be the train he’s going on (an iron horse), or it could be himself, puffing on a cigarette he’s lit with the match.
We get a vivid sense of the man’s poverty, with his “clothes in tatters,” though he has “an eagle” US $10 gold coin (issued from US Mint from 1792 to 1933) in his “hole watch pocket.” Another contradiction, in other words. He sees “a gingham girl, baby girl,” who “passed [him] by in tears.” Is this his long-lost daughter?
The song’s title is derived from the sixth verse, in which we get the surrealist lines “an oriole sang like an orange, his breast full o’ worms, and his tail clawed the evenin’ like a hammer” (my emphasis). Are the sights of the oriole and a jackrabbit meant to be omens that the girl he’s met, and willing to do “odd jobs” for, is his daughter?
He tells her he “was once [her] father,” but had to leave her to work in a “roundhouse” (a locomotive maintenance shed, or a cabin on a sailing ship). His poverty and the tyranny of having to search everywhere for work has caused his alienation from her.
She’s “a youngster” compared to him because he’s so old now. He’s so happy to have her back; he wants the “little one” to give him her hand, and (with that gold coin in his pocket, presumably) he’ll “buy [her] a cherry phosphate” (an old name for cherry soda from the late 1800s, using phosphoric acid to add a tangy flavour). Again, details like this bring the narrative back to the 1930s, when these drinks were still popular.
He’ll also take her to where his old ship was moored on “the foamin’ brine and water.” It’s designed with the wooden image of a beautiful, big-breasted goddess “with the pole out, full sail, that tempted away [her] peg-legged father.” Like Odysseus, the pirate-singer was taken away to sea and separated from his family for many, many years, and tempted into the bed of another woman (like Circe or Calypso), “a soft lass with brown skin.” Would she be the “Friday” girl of “Sugar ‘n’ Spikes”?
It seems that, after she “bore [him] seven babies with snappin’ black eyes and beautiful ebony skin,” he abandoned her and their litter, the same way he was “tempted away” to sea, and he abandoned the daughter he is now teary-eyed to see again, after “thirty years away.” Life is, indeed, full of sugar ‘n’ spikes.
Beefheart sings this song in a melody that largely suggests a back-and-forth progression of E minor and D major.
XVIII: Wild Life
“They,” or those who would “take [Beefheart’s] wild life” and “[his] wife” are presumably those in our modernized, industrialized, capitalist society. He wants to live his free, natural life “in [his] lady’s garden,” where the “sweet, sweet bulbs grow.”
Is his wife Ella Guru? Is she the “soft lass with brown skin,” the “Friday” of “Sugar ‘n’ Spikes”? Is she “Big Joan”? Are all of these women the same one, beautiful, yet fat and “too much for [his] mirror”? If she is all of them at once, we have yet more contradiction and paradox on this double album.
This toxic modern society, the spikes taking away his sugar, have already “got [his] mother’s father, and run down all [his] kin,” so he and his wife are next to be taken. To save himself and her, he’s “goin’ up on the mountain for the rest of [his] life.” He’ll find himself a cave, “and talk them bears into takin’ [him] in.” He wants nothing to do with fake modern society.
Small wonder Beefheart lived a cult-like existence with the Magic Band in that house.
As an expression of that wildness that he idealizes, Beefheart does more of his wildly spontaneous soprano sax soloing.
XIV: She’s Too Much for My Mirror
The song opens with a brief monologue by Richard Kunc, saying, “She’s too much for my, or anybody’s, mirror.” According to French, Kunc would make a little joke on every take recorded, this being the one that got included on the album.
This song seems in many ways to be a sequel to “Wild Life,” for “she” is a personification of Chicago, a city of toxic, modern, capitalist decadence that Beefhart wants to leave “for that little red farm.” He yearns for the country life, “remember[ing] the butterflies and the sweet smell o’ corn, and the bubblin’ fish in that lil’ pond.”
The city’s decadent, “floozy”-like ways are “too much for [his] mirror,” that is, they trouble his conscience and self-concept. The capitalists of the city “make a young man a bum,” for Chicago makes him “hungry and cold.” So he’s going up on the mountain, so to speak, for the rest of his life, before Chicago takes his wild life and his wife.
Speaking of her, I said above in my discussion of “Wild Life” that the wife could be Ella Guru, the dark-skinned “Friday” who gave him seven kids, and who was also “too much for [his] mirror.” If so, that he’d take her along, yet leave her (as representing Chicago) would be yet another contradiction. Maybe he loves and hates her at the same time–she’s both “sugar ‘n’ spikes.” Maybe escaping with her to the mountain “before they take [his] wife” is precisely that she is getting to be “too much for [his] mirror,” that is, she is Chicago because she is becoming too much like Chicago, and he needs to restore the Ella Guru in her.
She’s like his mother (in the sense of being an Oedipal transference, or as Mother Nature, the Earth Mother Goddess), who once “told [him he] oughta be choosy,” that is, not settle for less, and be ambitious like the money-making capitalists in Chicago. He thought she was a friend back then, but now he knows “she’s a floozy,” for she’s become a whore for capitalist greed.
So he’s lost the beautiful, natural Ella Guru he once loved. He doesn’t want to return to the Frownland of Chicago, so he longs for “Lucy,” or “Losey,” the woman he did lose to Chicago.
The song begins in E minor, then goes through a number of modulations to other keys, including a few progressions of subdominant to tonic in those new keys. It grows quite dissonant towards the end.
XXV: Hobo Chang Ba
This song is essentially a vignette of a hobo hopping from train to train, or stowing aboard boats, traveling from dawn to dusk. The song could represent someone like the solo singer of “Orange Claw Hammer,” or on “The Dust Blows Forward ‘n’ the Dust Blows Back,” a poor homeless fellow from the Depression era.
With the name “Chang Ba,” is he supposed to be a Chinese-American? If so, thankfully, Beefheart doesn’t affect a racist, stereotypical Chinese accent for his singing voice.
Apart from the usual dissonant guitar jangling, one riff that stands out in this song is an ascending power chord progression of D, E, F♯, then D-E-F♯-D-E.
XXVI: The Blimp (Mousetrapreplica)
We can hear Zappa’s voice at the beginning and the end of this track, in the form of a phone call. Instead of the Magic Band, we hear three of the Mothers of Invention–Roy Estrada on bass, Don Preston on piano, and Art Tripp III on drums, playing a riff in 7/8 time.
The bass is playing sixteenth notes of C-C (then a sixteenth rest), C-C (sixteenth rest), C (sixteenth rest), C-C-B-B-A (sixteenth rest), with the piano playing a C major triad with the fifth going up to a sixth to make a C sixth chord during the bass notes of C-C-B-B-A. The drums are playing a beat to parallel exactly the bass and piano.
Over this music, we hear Antennae Jimmy Semens reciting Beefheart’s poetry, which is an account–of sorts–of the crashing of the Hindenburg (“the blimp”). Semens’s hysterical reciting might remind us of the news reporter, Herbert Morrison, and his emotional, eyewitness response to the disaster (“Oh, the humanity!”, etc.). Semens is addressing Zappa, calling him “Frank,” as he speaks.
The comical nature of this track suggests that the crashing of the Hindenburg is just a metaphor for a “blimp” like Big Joan, or some other such “bulbous” person.
XXVII: Steal Softly Through Snow
This song begins with a guitar riff in 3/4, then a few dissonant chords, and Beefheart begins singing.
He is saddened to have both his reflection in a mirror and the moon obscured from his view. In other words, he is being prevented from engaging in introspection and from contemplating his Jungian anima, as represented in the moon goddess: recall how in a number of the previous TMR songs we’ve looked at, Beefheart derives happiness from such objects as the moon, the sun, and flowers.
He would “steal softly through sunshine” and “snow,” that is, he’d move stealthily through all of life’s happy and unhappy moments, or to be able to cope with life successfully. He wishes he could escape “the winter of our discontent” the way a goose can just fly away from it, but sadly, of course, he can’t. So all he can do is “steal softly through” life’s ups and downs.
Swans, which are largely monogamous throughout their lives, “live two hundred years of love, they’re one,” so he is saddened “to see them cross the sun,” that is, to see them enjoy its light, warmth, and love, knowing he can’t go and enjoy it, too, for he has to stay in a loveless, alienating world in which relationships break up all too often.
There’s more of Beefheart’s wordplay in “grain grows, rainbows,” expressing more of his delight in nature, “up straw hill.” It “breaks [his] heart to see the highway cross the hill,” that is, to see the destruction of nature in the paving and tarring of the ground. Man has lived for millennia, “and still he kills.” Beefheart “can’t go” into a state of introspection in front of a mirror covered with “black paper.” All he can do is sneak about between the happiness of sunshine and the sadness of snow.
XXVIII: Old Fart at Play
This track, originally intended as an instrumental, was to have the title, “My Business Is the Truth, Your Business Is a Lie.” Zappa, however, insisted on adding vocals to the track, and made Beefheart relent, so the latter recited a narrative over the music.
Beefheart is likely referring to himself as “the old fart,” wearing “his wooden fish-head,” a “very intricate rainbow trout replica”…hence the title of the album and the cover, on which Beefheart is holding a fish-head mask in front of his face. “The old fart was smart,” for “only he noticed” things that others can’t, the trout mask apparently helping him see better.
“The fish-head broke the window” to the kitchen where “mama was flattening lard with her red enameled rolling pin.” So his insight into the world, given to him through the trout mask, breaks into our normal world, where people like mama engage in domestic drudgery, and shakes up the established order.
His sense of smell is improved, too, thanks to “his important breather holes” on the mask. It’s odd that he is “now breathin’ freely” through “the nose of the wooden mask,” just as it is odd that he’d see better with the mask on his face, noticing things better than other people can. Yet such is the contradictory, paradoxical nature of TMR, and why the title and cover for the album are so fitting.
With this better insight into the nature of things thanks to his mask, “an assortment of observations took place.” Mama, who had originally just been doing the usual domestic servitude that women have traditionally been doomed to because of the patriarchal family, is now engaging in odd, but creative and liberating behaviour: she’s “licked her lips like a cat [enjoying pleasure, for once], pecked the ground like a rooster [a male fowl, symbolically implying a switch from the female to the male role, liberating her from her role’s limitations], pivoted like a duck [moved around and shifted away from her old ways, that is, she’s trying new things],” etc. His fish-head having broken the window, like breaking the glass ceiling, has freed mama from her traditional sex role.
“The old fart smelled this” liberation, and he, too, is liberated, “now breathin’ freely.” When you free others, you free yourself.
XXIX: Veteran’s Day Poppy
This is the third of the three earlier-composed-and-recorded tracks on this album, along with “Moonlight on Vermont” and “Sugar ‘n’ Spikes.” And as I said above, like the other two, this song is less experimental than the rest of the music on TMR…except for a few dissonant chords during the second half of the song, a plaintive instrumental section in 3/4.
The first half of the song sounds more upbeat and blues-rock oriented, more in keeping with Beefheart’s pre-TMR style. While Beefheart is singing the brief verse, one of the guitarists is playing a melody Gene Autry sang in the song, “El Rancho Grande,” a cheerful little tune.
Beefheart is singing about a mother who is mourning the death of her son, who died in WWI, and so she doesn’t want to wear a poppy on Veteran’s Day. So this song is another antiwar one, like “Dachau Blues,” and one opposed to all the hate and competition between different ethnic and racial groups, as in “Ant Man Bee.” This sadness, nonetheless, is heard over–as I said above–such an upbeat groove as to be yet another paradoxical, contradictory moment on TMR.
XXX: Conclusion
When I speak of the contradictory, paradoxical, and incongruent nature of the themes of TMR, I’m not trying to be disparaging of the album. On the contrary, these elements are among what’s crucial to what makes TMR great, for they reflect what life is all about. Everything, properly understood, is in dialectical contradiction. To understand something fully, one must be willing to see it from all perspectives, for reality is incongruous, never clear-cut.
TMR, therefore, is a great album not just because it is so advanced in its musical experimentation, but also in its joyful embrace of paradoxes. It’s musically advanced, yet it has a wonderful, childlike quality about it. It’s “awful-sounding,” yet it’s musical genius. It’s sugar ‘n’ spikes, and everything nice and crazy, for that’s what little worlds are made of.
Great art of any kind has a universal quality to it, and TMR, with its paradoxical embrace of both sides of everything, has that universality.
Infinite Ocean 