0916. Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band
Trout Mask Replica

The band sounds as if tuning their instruments before the gig, Beefheart rambles stuff that would make Tom Waits scratch his head (he's a fan, so you just know it happened too) and it's an hour seventeen minutes long.

China Pig is possibly the first track that actually sounds like a real song (Ella Guru misses that award by just an inch or so).

While they actually had a six hour session recording instrumentals they'd been rehearsing for eight months (or did they? the accounts differ), much of the time it sounds as if they had a 4-track in the living room and just decided to press record at random times and never do a re-take (like Orange Claw Hammer, where the Captain stutters and corrects his ad-libbed(?) poetry for a while).

A piece of highly influential art that sounds utter crap for the first spins, I'm beginning to see this as meta-music. It gets me thinking a bit about how I define music, but even though produced by Zappa (who also makes some appearences) it's some ways from being a Freak Out!.