I’ve had Trout Mask Repli­ca in my col­lec­tion for years. I can’t say I reg­u­lar­ly pull it out to give it a lis­ten, but I know I’d nev­er get rid of it. It’s a some­times impen­e­tra­ble slab of genius, wrought from end­less ses­sions and then a short burst of record­ing, led by a man who couldn’t read music, was prone to fits of vio­lent anger, but dammit knew what he want­ed. (And Zap­pa pro­duced.) When I learned lat­er that the house where a lot of this went down was locat­ed in the hills behind the sub­urbs of Wood­land Hills, it made the insur­rec­tion of the album all the more mag­i­cal.

But yes, it’s a hard one to get into. There are no “hits.” There’s no foot tap­pin’ pop (well, mayyyyybe “Ella Guru,” and only because I knew it first as a cov­er by XTC.) It’s dis­cor­dant. Don Van Vli­et aka Cap­tain Beef­heart sounds pos­sessed by Howl­in’ Wolf try­ing to sing nurs­ery rhymes on acid, and it often plays like mem­bers of the band are in dif­fer­ent areas of the house with a vague idea of what the oth­ers are doing. (This is actu­al­ly a bit close to the truth).

Vox’s con­tin­u­ing series “Ear­worm,” host­ed by Estelle Caswell, attempts to con­vert lis­ten­ers who may have nev­er heard of the album, by tak­ing apart the open­ing track, “Frown­land.”

As Caswell explains, with help from musi­col­o­gists Samuel Andreyev and Susan Rogers, Van Vli­et meld­ed blues and free jazz, and played it with a decon­struct­ed rock band instru­men­ta­tion. Drums and bass did not lock down a rhythm–they played inde­pen­dent of the oth­ers, with the bass even play­ing chords. Rhythm and lead gui­tar played two dif­fer­ent time sig­na­tures each, and nei­ther were easy, 4/4 rhythms. And then there’s the sax­o­phone work, drop­ping in to squonk and thrash like Ornette Cole­man. As Mag­ic Band mem­bers point out, Van Vli­et didn’t under­stand that a bass or a gui­tar did not have the same range of notes as an 88-key piano, which was Van Vliet’s song­writ­ing instru­ment.

How­ev­er, only jazz­bos dig on learn­ing about polyrhythms. There’s so many oth­er rea­sons to appre­ci­ate Trout Mask. For one, it’s in the proud tra­di­tion of Euro­pean sur­re­al­ism but also comes from a par­tic­u­lar “old weird Amer­i­ca” that pro­duced some of our most bril­liant nut­cas­es. (How many peo­ple, learn­ing that Van Vli­et was raised near Joshua Tree, nod­ded in enlight­en­ment? Of course he was.) You want drug music, the album says…well then, this is the uncut stuff.

And then some­times it real­ly just hits hard: “Moon­light On Ver­mont” is relent­less, with a cor­r­us­cat­ing gui­tar line and Beef­heart worked up into a lath­er over “that old time reli­gion.” He quotes Blind Willie John­son, con­flates pagan­ism and Puri­tanism, and tran­scends both. (Maybe this is the gate­way song for new­bies?)

The Vox video pre­cedes its defense with some neg­a­tive reviews from the con­tem­po­rary press, but this Dick Lar­son review from the time under­stood it from the get go, who writes about it as a giant step for­ward after Beefheart’s two pre­vi­ous, more acces­si­ble albums:

Dylan would sym­pa­thise with Beefheart’s ‘nature-and-love-trips’, but the Cap­tain is faster and more bul­bous (and he’s got his band). But this is it. In straight­en­ing out his music, he’s found some kind of reli­gion. It may be in hair pies (yes!) or in Frown­land, but main­ly it’s peo­ple, chil­dren and coun­try men and women. And this is a new delight for Beef­heart – a rough out­door human­i­ty blend­ed with humour and a rich ver­bal vom­it of imagery.

It is a wild album, lit­er­al­ly. There are field record­ings in between the music, with sounds of crick­ets and a plane pass­ing over­head. The LP art shows the band stand­ing, crouch­ing, and hid­ing in the over­grown back­yard of the house. There’s mys­te­ri­ous things in the stream below and only some of them are fish.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Tom Waits Makes a List of His Top 20 Favorite Albums of All Time

Hear a Rare Poet­ry Read­ing by Cap­tain Beef­heart (1993)

Cap­tain Beef­heart Issues His “Ten Com­mand­ments of Gui­tar Play­ing”

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

The End­less Sum­mer is over. The arche­typ­al 1966 surf doc­u­men­tary might have been scored by The San­dals, but the sound and the cul­tur­al dom­i­nance of surf cul­ture would per­haps nev­er come into being, and may not have sur­vived the decade, with­out Dick Dale, who died on March 18th at the age of 81. His gnarly, men­ac­ing gui­tar on songs like “Miser­lou” and “Pipeline” turned a fad dom­i­nat­ed by the teen anthems of The Beach Boys and Annette Funicello’s post-Mouseke­teers biki­ni and bee­hive into gen­uine­ly grit­ty rock and roll.

Dale’s sound defined the risky wan­der­lust of surf­ing that ear­ly skate­board­ers picked up on in the 70s and 80s, snow­board­ers in the 90s, and so on. Hun­dreds of gui­tarists stole from his dis­tinc­tive tech­nique long after the 60s surf rock craze died at the hands of British invaders. Dale rode the sound into the 21st cen­tu­ry, tour­ing and per­form­ing across a Unit­ed States whose pop­u­lar cul­ture he helped invent by appear­ing on (where else) The Ed Sul­li­van Show.

But it’s arguable whether his fame would have sur­vived as long with­out Quentin Tarantino’s shrewd use of “Misir­lou” in Pulp Fic­tion’s open­ing cred­its. It so hap­pens that Dale almost didn’t sur­vive past the six­ties him­self. If he had died from what seemed like a ter­mi­nal can­cer in 1965, it’s pos­si­ble surf gui­tar would have died with him, become a curi­ous rel­ic rather than a liv­ing tra­di­tion.

Jimi Hen­drix thought so—at least accord­ing to Dale in the lin­er notes to 1997’s Bet­ter Shred Than Dead: The Dick Dale Anthol­o­gy. “Then you’ll nev­er hear surf music again,” Hen­drix sup­pos­ed­ly said. Maybe in the purest sense, it’s true. Only Dale tru­ly “trans­ferred,” as he put it, the “tremen­dous amount of pow­er” of surf­ing into the gui­tar. His play­ing was an extreme sport; his shows were “stomps”; the audi­ence nev­er stopped mov­ing for a minute, whoop­ing and hol­ler­ing along with him.

And still, his cav­ernous gui­tar filled ball­rooms. He pushed Fend­er to build loud­er and loud­er ampli­fiers, and every­one else along with them. Like Hen­drix, he was a lefty who played a flipped-over right-hand­ed Fend­er Strat. Yet Dale didn’t restring the gui­tar, effec­tive­ly play­ing it upside-down. He used the heav­i­est strings he could find, the loud­est amps that could be made, and more reverb than any­one had pre­vi­ous­ly thought advis­able. “Bands like the Beach Boys,” writes Aman­da Petru­sich at The New York­er, “often sang about surf­ing,” but the genre Dale invent­ed “was wet and gnarly and uncon­cerned with romance or sweet­ness.”

His style earned Dale the title of “King of the Surf Gui­tar,” also the title of his sec­ond album and a fact he liked to trum­pet as often as he could, along with claims that he was called the “Father of Heavy Met­al.” (Link Wray might like a word.) He was a tire­less pro­mot­er and per­former with­out whose influ­ence there may’ve been no End­less Sum­mer-scor­ing San­dals or Sur­faris’ “Wipe Out”—surf cul­ture essen­tials that trav­eled the world.

Surf rock became a niche sound, pop­u­lar with increas­ing­ly spe­cial­ized audi­ences, before Quentin Taran­ti­no made it cool again. Pulp Fic­tion’s use of the song was not an iron­ic detourne­ment, but a gen­uine reminder of how dan­ger­ous Dale sound­ed. He buz­z­sawed through the ear­ly-six­ties scene of skin­ny ties and big hair. The footage of him above play­ing “Misir­lou” with The Del Tones—all of whom wear ter­ri­fied smiles and iden­ti­cal suits, above—is strange­ly Lynchi­an.

Part of the incon­gruity comes from watch­ing square white Amer­i­cans bounce through a haunt­ing Egypt­ian folk song, while look­ing like they should be play­ing “Mr. Sand­man.” Dale made 50s pop seem child­ish, and sound-tracked the entry of mild­ly adult sit­u­a­tions in 60s surf movies. He deserved to have fared bet­ter from his influ­ence and fame.

Dale’s last cou­ple decades were spent like too many oth­er peo­ple in the U.S. He couldn’t stop tour­ing, he said, “because I will die. Phys­i­cal­ly and lit­er­al­ly, I will die.” After his first recov­ery from col­orec­tal can­cer in 1965, he con­tin­ued to bat­tle the dis­ease,” writes The Wash­ing­ton Post. “Up until the end of his life, Dale was explic­it that he toured to fund his treat­ment” after his can­cer returned. He couldn’t retire even when his career rebound­ed, twice after his ear­ly six­ties’ hey­day: first in 1987 when he record­ed “Pipeline” (fur­ther up) with Ste­vie Ray Vaugh­an and again after Pulp Fic­tion.

His fans con­tin­ued to sup­port him not because he was a hip nos­tal­gia act, but, he said, because he grew and branched out as a gui­tar play­er and he was hon­est about his dif­fi­cul­ties, and peo­ple con­nect­ed. He was an Amer­i­can orig­i­nal. The son of Lebanese immi­grants, he took the music of his par­ents’ home coun­try, blend­ed it with coun­try swing and blues, and played it dirty, wet, and as loud as it could go, some­thing no one had quite done before and thou­sands have done since.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Quentin Taran­ti­no Explains The Art of the Music in His Films

The Beach Par­ty Film: A Short Appre­ci­a­tion of One of the Odd­est Sub­gen­res in Film His­to­ry

A His­to­ry of Rock ‘n’ Roll in 100 Riffs

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Steve Reich’s Clap­ping Music is one of the sim­plest scores of mod­ern clas­si­cal music, and as you might soon find out, one of the most dif­fi­cult to per­form. Writ­ten in 1972 while on a Euro­pean tour and after a night of mediocre fla­men­co, Clap­ping Music is for two play­ers. One claps a steady rhythm (tech­ni­cal­ly an African Bell Rhythm).

A sec­ond per­former claps in uni­son in the same pat­tern for eight bars. At the end of the eighth bar, the sec­ond per­former goes out of sync for one eighth note and after anoth­er eight bars, goes out of sync again. This con­tin­ues until both play­ers are back in uni­son. (The above video explains this tech­nique visu­al­ly).

For Reich it was a sim­pler evo­lu­tion of “phase” com­po­si­tions that he had been cre­at­ing since 1965. The ear­li­er exam­ple was “It’s Gonna Rain,” which used two tape loops of a Pen­te­costal street preacher’s rant going slow­ly out of sync with each oth­er, reveal­ing first an echo and then, as the two loops wind up 180 degrees out of sync, pure apoc­a­lyp­tic cacoph­o­ny.

The sync issues were due to the vagaries of the ana­log machines them­selves, but Reich moved on to recre­at­ing phase music with actu­al instru­ments. In 1967 he com­posed “Piano Phase,” in which a sim­ple melody is played by two musi­cians first in uni­son, and then slow­ly out of sync. Reich fol­lowed up with “Reed Phase” and “Vio­lin Phase,” the lat­ter of which was set to dance by Anne Tere­sa of Keers­maek­er.

Asked about per­form­ing “Clap­ping Music” live, Reich told Clas­sicFM:

It’s a piece that I’m always stand­ing up there doing, and it makes me ner­vous every time because you’re very exposed, as it’s just you and the oth­er guy. If you make one lit­tle hes­i­ta­tion you can find your­self at a place in the piece where you have to fig­ure out where you are to get things right. So it nev­er ceas­es to be a chal­lenge; it’s easy on one lev­el, but it’s chal­leng­ing on anoth­er.

If you’d like to have a go at Clap­ping Music, there is a free app from the Lon­don Sin­foni­et­ta and Touch­press that plays the steady loop while you try to go out of phase. (It tracks and rates your per­for­mance, with the hope you’ll per­fect it.) I haven’t had a chance myself to try it out, but if you have, let us know in the com­ments.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Steve Reich is Call­ing: A Min­i­mal­ist Ring­tone for the iPhone

Hear Steve Reich’s Min­i­mal­ist Com­po­si­tions in a 28-Hour Playlist: A Jour­ney Through His Influ­en­tial Record­ings

Watch Ani­mat­ed Scores to Music by Radio­head, Talk­ing Heads, LCD Soundsys­tem, Photek & Oth­er Elec­tron­ic/­Post-Punk/A­vant-Garde Musi­cians

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

In 1976, hun­dreds of diehard Bea­t­les fans became con­vinced that the mys­te­ri­ous album 3:47 EST by the band Klaatu was actu­al­ly a new release from The Bea­t­les in dis­guise, after a DJ in Prov­i­dence, Rhode Island played one of its songs on the radio. Short­ly after­ward, Steve Smith dis­cov­ered the album at the news­pa­per he worked for, Rhode Island’s The Prov­i­dence Jour­nal, lis­tened to it, and became imme­di­ate­ly intrigued.

The album con­tained no pho­tographs, no iden­ti­fy­ing infor­ma­tion at all, and the band’s The Day the Earth Stood Still ref­er­ence echoed the cov­er of Ringo Starr’s album Good­night Vien­na. Smith heard Starr’s drum­ming, Harrison’s gui­tars, Lennon and McCartney’s voic­es in the psy­che­del­ic songs. Though he wasn’t a music crit­ic or reporter him­self, he per­suad­ed the paper to pub­lish a fea­ture in which he sug­gest­ed Klaatu could be The Bea­t­les.

The “Klaatu Kon­spir­a­cy” spread. An Aus­tralian fan issued a 34-page book­let on the case. Exec­u­tives at Klaatu’s label, Cap­i­tal Records Cana­da, refused to con­firm or deny, enjoy­ing the pub­lic­i­ty, as Smith recalled in a 1997 inter­view.

More specif­i­cal­ly, “hedg­ing his bets,” writes Ken Raisa­nen for WOAS FM, Smith con­clud­ed that “the mys­tery band could be 1) The Bea­t­les. 2) A cou­ple of the Bea­t­les with oth­er peo­ple. 3) A Bea­t­les-backed band. 4) A com­plete­ly unknown but inge­nious and tal­ent­ed band.” If the Amer­i­can Smith had caught an episode of Kei­th Hampshire’s Music Machine on CBC two years ear­li­er, he would have seen the evi­dence of num­ber four (see the real Klaatu play “Cal­i­for­nia Jam” in 1974, above). But the band oth­er­wise made an effort to obscure their iden­ti­ty.

As Klaatu bassist Jon Woloshuck told Gold­mine mag­a­zine in 2013, one rea­son for the air of mys­tery they cul­ti­vat­ed is that “we were just three guys from Toron­to.” They want­ed the music to speak for itself, and “nobody knew who were any­way.” They were amused by the rumor. “It caught us by sur­prise,” says drum­mer Ter­ry Drap­er, but they “didn’t think much of it at the time…. We were all big Bea­t­les fans, and we were hop­ing they would reunite. At the time, the idea of a reunit­ed Bea­t­les wasn’t all that far-fetched at all.”

These atti­tudes may have been preva­lent, but Klaatu was­n’t delib­er­ate­ly set­ting out to tap into them, they say, but to “do music that was on par” with “late ‘60s pro­gres­sive bands like King Crim­son and The Moody Blues.” They’re clear­ly also chan­nel­ing The Bea­t­les, whether they admit it or not. Still the “rumor did us as much harm as good,” says gui­tarist Dee Long. “It got us noticed, which was great, but also led to a sit­u­a­tion where we could not ever real­ly mea­sure up to expec­ta­tions.” Hear what Bea­t­les fans and Klaatu con­spir­acists heard in 1976 in the song “Sub Rosa Sub­way” above from 3:47 EST, and learn more about the Klaatu con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry in the Poly­phon­ic video at the top.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the “Paul McCart­ney is Dead” Hoax Start­ed at an Amer­i­can Col­lege News­pa­per and Went Viral (1969)

Did Lennon or McCart­ney Write the Bea­t­les 1965 Song “In My Life”? A Math Pro­fes­sor, Using Sta­tis­tics, Solves the Decades-Old Mys­tery

A 17-Hour Chrono­log­i­cal Playlist of Bea­t­les Songs: 338 Tracks Let You Hear the Musi­cal Evo­lu­tion of the Icon­ic Band

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

The Sound­walk Col­lec­tive has made music art out of found sounds since 2004. They record­ed 2012’s Medea while tra­vers­ing the Black Sea and fish­ing for sounds using a scan­ner and high pow­ered aer­i­al anten­nas; 2014’s Last Beat used con­tact micro­phones on the archi­tec­ture of a music club to col­lect vibra­tions instead of music; 2017’s Before Music There Is Blood col­laged deep echo­ing record­ings of clas­si­cal music played in var­i­ous halls. This time, in their upcom­ing The Pey­ote Dance, they have brought in poet and rock god­dess Pat­ti Smith for a trip into Mex­i­co.

The above track “The New Rev­e­la­tions of Being” is a pre­view of what’s to come. The album title comes from a book by Antonin Artaud, the avant-garde the­ater direc­tor and author, who trav­eled to Mex­i­co to explore rev­e­la­to­ry visions with the Rará­muri peo­ple in 1936. Artaud was hop­ing that pey­ote would shake his opi­oid addic­tion. When he lat­er returned to France, Artaud stayed and remained in an insane asy­lum, receiv­ing elec­tric shock ther­a­py. His time with the Rará­muri stayed a touch­stone of hap­pi­ness dur­ing his dark­est days.

With a shared belief that trav­el expands the mind, the Sound­walk Col­lec­tive trav­eled to the same Sier­ra Tarahu­marar region of Mex­i­co as Artaud, vis­it­ed the same places he stayed, and indeed also took pey­ote. They record­ed instru­ments and sound­scapes, and then back in the States, Pat­ti Smith wrote and record­ed poems based on Artaud’s book, his oth­er works, and her own respons­es to the sound fields.

“The poets enter the blood­stream, they enter the cells. For a moment, one is Artaud,” Smith said about the record­ing. “You can’t ask for it, you can’t buy it, you can’t take drugs for it to be authen­tic. It just has to hap­pen, you have to be cho­sen as well as choose.”

The album is the first in a tril­o­gy with Smith about poets and trav­el. The oth­er two albums will be based on works and jour­neys by Arthur Rim­baud and René Dau­mal, and fea­ture sounds record­ed at the Abyssin­ian val­ley of Ethiopia and the Himalayan Sum­mit of India respec­tive­ly.

This not the first time the group has col­lab­o­rat­ed with Pat­ti Smith. In 2016, they released Killer Road a trib­ute to Nico and her final days on the island of Ibiza, where the singer plunged to her death on a bicy­cle ride. The album also fea­tured vocals by Smith’s daugh­ter Jessie Paris Smith.

Sound­walk Col­lec­tive mem­ber Stephan Cras­nean­sc­ki first met Pat­ti Smith, fit­ting­ly, at an air­port in Paris, as the two were return­ing from sep­a­rate artis­tic trav­els: Cras­nean­sc­ki from East­ern Europe and Rus­sia, Smith from French Guiana and Tang­iers.

The Pey­ote Dance will be released May 31 on Bel­la Union.

via Lithub

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pat­ti Smith’s List of Favorite Books: From Rim­baud to Susan Son­tag

Pat­ti Smith’s Award-Win­ning Mem­oir, Just Kids, Now Avail­able in a New Illus­trat­ed Edi­tion
Hear Antonin Artaud’s Cen­sored, Nev­er-Aired Radio Play: To Have Done With The Judg­ment of God (1947)

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.