Captain Beefheart and His Magic
Band‘s 3rd studio album was released on 16 June 1969.
In 1968, Beefheart found himself
without a label, and a completed album waiting to be released (the sessions
would not be released until 1971′s Mirror Man), when Don Van Vliet’s
(Beefheart) high school friend, Frank Zappa offered him complete artistic
freedom to release an album on Zappa’s Straight label (Trout Mask Replica was
the second album on Straight, following Alice Cooper’s Pretties for You
released in May 1969).
Van Vliet prepared for the
recording session by having the band all live in the same house, where band
members later confirmed that they were not allowed to leave, frequently abused,
verbally and physically, rationed food (being fed soybeans for a month), and
subjected to grueling rehearsal sessions that lasted 14 hours.
The resulting album is one of the
most original, confounding, alienating, and engrossing albums ever released.
“Then and now, it stands outside time, trends, fads, hypes, the rise and fall
of whole genres eclectic as walking Christmas trees, constituting a genre unto
itself: truly, a musical Monolith if ever there was one,” Lester Bangs wrote.
It was a commercial disaster in
the US, but peaked (for a week) at #21 in the UK.
