A ‘classic record’ is often based on perception. Great albums are published every day, but unleashing something that captures the hearts and minds of the audience, catches the zeitgeist, and blusters in something novel determines if it transcends the ‘good new music’ moniker and becomes something bigger. Peter Hook of Joy Division knows that too well.
Hook’s brave band’s Unknown Pleasures is so influential that you can still detect its eerie vibe in much of what has followed. The late DJ John Peel claimed that he heard more of that record on all the cassettes brought to his desk than any other in music history.
Its stormy and brutalist tones sounded if Fydor Dostoyevsky was being called by séance to 1970s Manchester’s industrial borders, and the greatest beauty was that this divination was happening without much thinking or pretense. The band were mostly working-class punks who pranked The Buzzcocks by throwing mice into their van. They were not shady poets who hunted for the worst trench coat in the mist.
Thus, less aware people may attribute their records’ mysterious enchantment to “ironic” luck. But that’s seldom true with iconic records. They may not have lived and breathed the macabre mysticism they presented so well, but it lingered in their ranks, so when they tapped into it, it was like entering an alternate planet within themselves.
Other records are so pre-planned and deliberately set up to be ‘iconic’ that you can’t help but sense the ‘originality’ is simply a premeditated attempt at ‘a selling point’. Hook felt Captain Beefheart’s frenzied Trout Mask Replica was that.
Steve Morris, New Order’s drummer, loved Beefheart, but I considered him uninteresting. I wanted to like it because Steve adored it, but I lost. Ian Curtis found it simpler to convert us to the Doors, put it that way,” the bassist joked about a love-it-or-hate-it masterpiece. The Doors’ leather pants have probably turned off more people than their music.
But Captain Beefheart is truly musically contentious. Trout Mask Replica is one of the most difficult first listens. If not for its backstory, it may have gone into obscurity.
Don Van Vliet and his band fled to a small, rented house in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, with the keys to creative oblivion in their pants and a handsome record deal from Frank Zappa, the Captain.
A commune was formed around the Captain’s mad whims. He sometimes seemed to have forgotten the album, sending troops to steal lentils as money ran out. Everything seemed to disintegrate while the band stayed in this stifling home for eight months. He wanted to make Zappa proud after years of being passed around labels like cornettos, but it’s unclear how that led to The Barrel, a wooden drum that any member who made a mistake had to enter and Vliet would strike with a stick.
These anecdotes are well known, and the album’s legend may give it more impression than the music, making it a classic. At least Hook thought so. “Trout Mask wasn’t a work of untutored genius, it was untutored crap,” he told the Guardian. Why Tom Waits might call it “the roughest diamond in the mine,” Hook thought it was a lump of coal cleaned up after the fact thanks to its unusual past.
People try to teach new musicians with songs like this, but I never understood Captain Beefheart’s appeal. I didn’t last four sides. Except for Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music and Trout Mask Replica, I gave up on few records. It sounded like a jerk. But again, I’ve never been a big jazz lover, and this was selfish,” he said, condemning the record for self-indulgence.
Hook joked: “It sounds like you feel after taking the wrong drugs, like going to your friend’s dope party on speed. I’d listen with my head in my hands. Trout Mask’s unique rhythm and song structure impressed post-punk bands, but weren’t they full of crap?