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Authors: Kevin Courrier
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be the group’s biggest gamble.
It Comes to You in a Plain Brown Wrapper
was conceived as a complete reimagining of the American blues to be spread out over two records. With Bob Krasnow at the production desk, the group began recording sessions in TTG studios in Hollywood. On this record, Beefheart wanted to present a boldly new improvisational music integrating the Delta blues sound with the improvisational textures of modern jazz. The first recordings began as a series of long blues jams, slowly building songs like the astonishingly extemporized nineteen-minute epic “Tarotplane,” where the group dipped into Robert Johnson’s “TerraplaneBlues,” caught echoes of Blind Willie Johnson’s passionate plea “You’re Going to Need Somebody on Your Bond,” then added a sampling of Willie Dixon’s saucy “Wang Dang Doodle” for good measure. Beefheart would call out verse after verse, punctuating each one with his squeaking blues harp. What Beefheart sought—and would actually find two years later on
Trout Mask
—was a music that was, as Greil Marcus once described, “as far ahead of its time as it was behind it.” Beefheart was out to destroy what Frank Zappa would later call the affliction of time. In particular, how time imposes certain values on life and art, where innovative deviations from the norm get considered out of time, or ahead of their time—rather than timeless. “A lot of people think they have time, you see, and they put on a little circle on their wrists, which is really amusing:
keeping
time,” Beefheart told
Downbeat
in 1971. Beefheart’s long musical excursions were attempts to shatter time, make it irrelevant as a point of definition or reference, and rather explore it as an infinite playground with no imposed boundaries.
On “25th Century Quaker,” Beefheart opens the song by introducing the shinei, an Indian reed instrument given to him by Ornette Coleman. He bends time along with the musical grain by wedding a flower child of the 60s, who has eyes “that flutter like a wide-open shutter,” with a Quaker of the future. On “Trust Us,” his answer to “We Love You,” the Rolling Stones’ 1967 drug bust anthem to their supportive fans, Beefheart calls out to trust us “before you turn to dust,” stating that mortality is merely a dot that punctuates time. The abstract ballad, “Beatle Bones ’N’ Smokin’ Stones,” is his reply to the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever.” John Lennon’s beautifullymournful dirge about childhood lost, where time itself slipped away and became locked eternally into the caste of a Salvation Army orphanage. Beefheart’s reply is an elliptical meditation on timeless bereavement. “Blue veins through grey felt tomorrows,” Beefheart laments, “celluloid sailboat your own feathered kind, blow it into a pond swaying in circles.”
Never losing sight of the blues, however, Beefheart castigated pretenders to the cause in “Gimme Dat Harp Boy.” He invented dense blues figures for simple confections like “Kandy Korn.” But it was “Mirror Man” that would become the skeleton key which opened the Pandora’s box leading to
Trout Mask Replica
. Based on a 1966 piece performed in Lancaster by the now outcast Doug Moon, “Mirror Man” was an epic exploration, not only of the musical language of the blues, but of language itself. Beefheart breaks apart the phrases of the title into syllables and consonants. He invents puns on the spot (“Mirror Man is but a mere man”) and transforms the song into sound fragments boldly illustrating a painter’s love of splashing color on the canvas. “Mirror Man” wasn’t an exercise in endless noodling, though, as was the fashion of the time by bands like Iron Butterfly (“In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”). Beefheart was reshaping the power of the blues by altering the timbre of the music rather than its message. It became clear, while listening to “Mirror Man,” that as the music became less
It Comes to You in a Plain Brown Wrapper
was conceived as a complete reimagining of the American blues to be spread out over two records. With Bob Krasnow at the production desk, the group began recording sessions in TTG studios in Hollywood. On this record, Beefheart wanted to present a boldly new improvisational music integrating the Delta blues sound with the improvisational textures of modern jazz. The first recordings began as a series of long blues jams, slowly building songs like the astonishingly extemporized nineteen-minute epic “Tarotplane,” where the group dipped into Robert Johnson’s “TerraplaneBlues,” caught echoes of Blind Willie Johnson’s passionate plea “You’re Going to Need Somebody on Your Bond,” then added a sampling of Willie Dixon’s saucy “Wang Dang Doodle” for good measure. Beefheart would call out verse after verse, punctuating each one with his squeaking blues harp. What Beefheart sought—and would actually find two years later on
Trout Mask
—was a music that was, as Greil Marcus once described, “as far ahead of its time as it was behind it.” Beefheart was out to destroy what Frank Zappa would later call the affliction of time. In particular, how time imposes certain values on life and art, where innovative deviations from the norm get considered out of time, or ahead of their time—rather than timeless. “A lot of people think they have time, you see, and they put on a little circle on their wrists, which is really amusing:
keeping
time,” Beefheart told
Downbeat
in 1971. Beefheart’s long musical excursions were attempts to shatter time, make it irrelevant as a point of definition or reference, and rather explore it as an infinite playground with no imposed boundaries.
On “25th Century Quaker,” Beefheart opens the song by introducing the shinei, an Indian reed instrument given to him by Ornette Coleman. He bends time along with the musical grain by wedding a flower child of the 60s, who has eyes “that flutter like a wide-open shutter,” with a Quaker of the future. On “Trust Us,” his answer to “We Love You,” the Rolling Stones’ 1967 drug bust anthem to their supportive fans, Beefheart calls out to trust us “before you turn to dust,” stating that mortality is merely a dot that punctuates time. The abstract ballad, “Beatle Bones ’N’ Smokin’ Stones,” is his reply to the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever.” John Lennon’s beautifullymournful dirge about childhood lost, where time itself slipped away and became locked eternally into the caste of a Salvation Army orphanage. Beefheart’s reply is an elliptical meditation on timeless bereavement. “Blue veins through grey felt tomorrows,” Beefheart laments, “celluloid sailboat your own feathered kind, blow it into a pond swaying in circles.”
Never losing sight of the blues, however, Beefheart castigated pretenders to the cause in “Gimme Dat Harp Boy.” He invented dense blues figures for simple confections like “Kandy Korn.” But it was “Mirror Man” that would become the skeleton key which opened the Pandora’s box leading to
Trout Mask Replica
. Based on a 1966 piece performed in Lancaster by the now outcast Doug Moon, “Mirror Man” was an epic exploration, not only of the musical language of the blues, but of language itself. Beefheart breaks apart the phrases of the title into syllables and consonants. He invents puns on the spot (“Mirror Man is but a mere man”) and transforms the song into sound fragments boldly illustrating a painter’s love of splashing color on the canvas. “Mirror Man” wasn’t an exercise in endless noodling, though, as was the fashion of the time by bands like Iron Butterfly (“In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”). Beefheart was reshaping the power of the blues by altering the timbre of the music rather than its message. It became clear, while listening to “Mirror Man,” that as the music became less
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