Best track on Trout Mask Replica

whats the one on side 3 with the sick bassline

ant man bee?

ah! it's Fallin Ditch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WePYZnUt0s

'All of them, at the same time' is the correct answer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9FprYu3gy4

The earliest individual bit I can pick out from that mix is the slide guitar from "Moonlight on Vermont" at 1:45.

This was the first album I spent months searching for, in the summer of '87. It runs the gamut from amazing ("Pachuco Cadaver") to terrible ("Wild Life"), I don't accept the idea that appreciating it is all-or-nothing (even if you listen to it all at the same time).

not sure i can tell the difference between amazing and terrible here. "wild life" rules

I don't dispute with anybody who happens to like every song, just the idea that the album has to be swallowed whole or not at all.

Pretty sure this is my only poll ever.

... ah no, wait a minute there, I did a poll based on the Stu Francis single, "Ooh I Could Crush a Grape".

Of course, the album as a whole is an great achievement. What I dislike about "Wild Life" is the riffs sound like leftovers, the lyric is dumb and repetitive, and the sax is particularly aimless.

Wild life, along with my wife...

I like that anecdote Jim O'Rourke told recently, about someone coming up to Henry Kaiser and asking him what time signature a certain Beefheart song was in, and Kaiser replying "They're all one"

this album would be great if it was instrumental but the captain's beat/bluesman minstrelsy shtick is insufferable and sinks the whole project

Do you actualy like anything?

Not just music, but in general.

lol, I knew before I opened it that Left was just taking a dump in the thread.

Yes, Trout Mask Replica would have been better sung by Joan Baez.

Talking of insufferable singers.

i have talked about a lot of stuff i like on ilm. i like ornette's "dancing in your head" which has been compared to beefheart but is much better

not baez but maybe catherine ribiero

*ribeiro

i even said i like the instrumentals

It's funny to me when someone uses Ornette to put down Beefheart. Christgau and the TMR chapter in the book Kill Your Idols both did this. I love them both, so it's weird when someone is like, "when you grow up, you can forget that silly Beefheart nonsense and have some wholesome Ornette".

Yeah, it's dumb. I don't even equate the two, they each did their own thing.

Hey, when you Captain Beefheart fans are done with your ba-bas and blankies, y'all can join the grownups and check out the real shit from m'man Tom Waits.

Yes, I don't hear much of a resemblance. "Minstrelsy" is a nice touch though, I must say.

But predictable as ever.

they don't really sound alike to me until ornette goes electric & even then then not by much. they are different enough that liking one & not the other shouldn't be strange. i only mention ornette because it seems like every beefheart profile brings him up, much like & presumably for similar reasons that every zappa profile mentions varese

i have similar problems with tom waits, obviously. this isn't some new criticism i just made up myself

I don't like Tom Waits either. It seems Ornette and Beefheart were quite friendly, Ornette gave him a shehnai, which he proceeded to blow all over the Mirror Man sessions. But I think Ornette also gave Nico her harmonium?

Generous chap!

by all accounts he was extremely generous to other musicians

anyway so best track - at least one of the hair pies is instrumental i think? that one

Good quote from Beefheart, "I'm not trying to put my name beside Ornette Coleman, because you can't put your name beside Ornette Coleman."

An ungenerous listener might call the Captain's sax playing "minstrelsy" in relation to jazz, though.

call me generous because that doesn't bother me so much. maybe it should

Think we might need to tighten up our definition of 'minstrelsy' just a smidge

yah no shit

it's not a coincidence that a huge number of white rock vocalists sang or sing the way they do and it's not something without historical precedent. listen to the aerosmith's "honkin' on bobo" and tell me it's a) racially unproblematic and b) totally different from what beefheart was doing (yes he did more interesting things with it, that's not the point)

this is pretty basic history-of-rock stuff, it doesn't mean you have to burn your records but denial shouldn't be an option either

sir there's nothing you can tell me about honkin on bobo that I don't already know

the minstrel show has plenty of influence through a lot of (if not all) popular music, not only that made by white people, and not in any way confined to blues/rock singers

of course. but there are specific ways certain tropes surface in white rock (broadly speaking) that are sort of acknowledged and handwaved away at the same time

I'd wager that most people on this board are well aware that the entire concept of rock and roll was pretty much swiped wholesale from underacknowledged Black musicians. That fact alone doesn't exactly clear the way for referring to music you dislike as 'minstrelsy' because it reminds you of the work of Black artists.

yeah it's not that anyone doesn't acknowledge all that, left, i'm not discounting it at all - just, to quote, you rhetorical style is often "the closest weapon at hand"

I mean, there are certainly plenty of problematic aspects to white electric blues (the Blueshammer problem, you might call it) but I would source them to racist interpretations of 1930s delta blues, rather than to the minstrel show. This is a world where actual minstrel show songs or "c**n songs" (Hello! Ma Baby, Bill Bailey, Mighty Lak a Rose, Swanee) are still remembered in the lineage of the Great American Songbook.

listen to the aerosmith's "honkin' on bobo"

This thread has become one to watch, investing early could pay big dividends

lol, got to that part of Left's post and was like 'that's a hard no'

Listening to Aerosmith's "Honkin' on Bobo" seems to have had a trauamtic effect, so I'll pass.

When I listened to it I wound up honking all over my bobo, took me an hour to clean up

this album would be great if it was instrumental but the captain's beat/bluesman minstrelsy shtick is insufferable and sinks the whole project

You should check this out:
https://cuneiformrecords.bandcamp.com/album/pork-chop-blue-around-the-rind