Free Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica by Kevin Courrier

formally structured, Beefheart was becoming more lyrically expressionistic. The group started to weave its way illustriously through the soundscapes emerging spontaneously out of these improvisations. “The guitars are not so much underpinned as jostled by French,whose drumming was becoming more individual—incisive accents incorporated into rolling, roaming tom-tom, snare, and hi-hat patterns,” observed Mike Barnes.
    After recording these tracks, Bob Krasnow sent the band on tour in Europe. It was hardly the second coming of Beatlemania. The first stop was in Germany, at a record convention, where they flopped due to poor sound brought on by lousy equipment. In London, because of a lack of work permits, they spent a night in a detention hall before finally playing on John Peel’s BBC sessions. From there, it was Cannes, France, where they attended the MIDEM Music Festival, met Paul McCartney (who was there to receive an award), and played a set on the beach to some bewildered industry folks who safely kept their distance. When the band got home, there was still no release date on the new album. But should anyone be surprised that the label who put out the 1910 Fruitgum Co.’s “Chewy, Chewy” would respond so unfavorably to songs like “Tarotplane” and “Beatle Bones ’N’ Smokin’ Stones?” Krasnow assured them he’d work it out. He did so by disingenuously misfiling their Buddha contract so that the option wouldn’t be picked up and he could sign them to another label. That label, Blue Thumb Records, an offshoot of Kama Sutra, was one that Krasnow created himself. Krasnow used the move to Blue Thumb to bankroll the recording sessions that would ultimately become
Strictly Personal
. (The material intended for the abandoned
Brown Wrapper
record would later in 1971 be released as
Mirror Man
.)
    The
Strictly Personal
sessions got underway over eight days between April and May 1968. Some of the material intended for
Wrapper
found its way onto
Strictly Personal
,such as “Beatle Bones ’N’ Smokin’ Stones,” “Trust Us,” and “Safe as Milk.” The new songs further developed the inventive blues model the group was already experimenting with. They recast Son House’s “Death Letter Blues,” a passionate song of grief over receiving a correspondence about a girl’s passing, into “Ah Feel Like Ahcid.” In the song, a surreal blues holler, the singer licks the LSD from a stamp and hallucinates her return as a duck/chicken “flapping” merrily down his street. The track was eventually cut into pieces and used as a leitmotif threading its way throughout the finished album. “Son of Mirror Man—Mere Man” became a more distilled version of “Mirror Man.”
    With the recording finished, the band hit the road. While on tour, however, Krasnow (in a state of stoned bliss on acid) secretly took the master tapes for
Strictly Personal
and littered them with various electronic phasing effects plus other psychedelic clamour to make the album more trendy and saleable—without getting permission from the group. In London, the band received a visit from Krasnow, eager to play them their newly remixed opus, as if he were Santa Claus coming to town. On first listen, John French was quite taken with all the murky compression used on the tracks. “We sat there in London, listening to it on this big sound system, and I kind of liked the way it sounded,” French said excitingly. “I thought, well it’s
contemporary
. It’ll work for now.” For Beefheart, on the other hand, it didn’t work at all. He was so outraged that he immediately disowned it, even telling French that the effects sounded like “psychedelic bromo seltzer.”
    By June 1968, the tour was immediately aborted and the band was again in disarray. Although
Strictly Personal
arrived in stores by the fall, the musicians were starting to fall out. Some of them didn’t care for the new direction the music was taking—despite the bromo seltzer.