Beer and football VIII — playoffs, week four (bye)

The beer: Great Divide Hibernation English-Style Old Ale
The commentary: An excerpt from the—by god—forthcoming "Don't gimme no affliction: 25 years of 'Moonlight on Vermont' and other bush recordings."

During the Summer of 1993, which fell between my freshman and sophomore years of college and would prove to be the final extended stretch of time I'd call my childhood home "home," some high school friends—Ivan, Oskar, Pierre and others I've forgotten—and I piled into someone's mother's minivan for a trip to Canobie Lake Park. It was the nearest "big" amusement park, certainly larger than Whalom Park, which was soon to be closed and condemned—the decaying clown mural on the back of its potato-sack slide loomed over Route 12 like a horrific death's head for years afterward. So it was Canobie. It was always Canobie.

Oskar used to make mix tapes for the rest of us from his own and his brother's fantastic collection of Touch and Go, Amphetamine Reptile, Sub Pop and other releases: Tad, Love Battery, Big Black, even big-timers like Nirvana and Ice Cube. It was great stuff—these were formative years and I would not be the know-it-all purveyor of taste I am today without those tapes—and even if I didn't love every song I either came to love them over time or found new songs to like instead. With few exceptions they covered from, say, 1985 on. He gave me four such tapes over the course of eighteen months or so and the thire was produced and delivered ahead of the trip to Canobie. We popped that shit right into the deck as I listened from the seatless back of the van, a handsome and serviceable spare tire.

Following an indeterminate indie-rock set, which was the style at the time, out of nowhere comes "bum-ba-de-bum, bum-ba-de-bum," the Drumbo brilliance that opens Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band's "Moonlight on Vermont." Then the guitar, that riff, that strangled untuned riff! And here's the Captain, an impaled Howlin' Wolf on (battery) acid, "Ooonlaht on Ver-maw-uhh… fektid errehbody, eee-ven…" Even me! Especially me. No one else seemed to care for the song and even Oskar apologized for its inclusion. "No," I responded. "I… like it?"

I don't remember much else about the day, how many of us there were, how many times we rode the Turkish Twist… what else was even on the tape—sadly it, the other three and my own mixes, Interrupting Cow Blues included, are among the missing. (I do remember earning a proper seat for the ride home.) But I listened to it a lot on my own, hearing "Moonlight on Vermont" over and over, and sometime later I walked to Newbury Comics (remember when they sold music?) in search of the Trout Mask Replica source. It was a naive impulse in the "Maybe it all sounds like that" vein, given that most of my sixties exposure was limited to the Doors, the Who, the Animals, Led Zeppelin and Steppenwolf, excellent bands that nonetheless did little to innovate or reform themselves—Beefheart surely had no chance and my sonic adventure was doomed to fail. I simply wasn't ready.

The following weekend or thereabouts—likely emerging from a haze of Saran-wrapped mushrooms, several Southern Comfort/pink lemonade cocktails and a Beavis and Butt-Head marathon—buyer's remorse stood before the stereo and ejected the error halfway through in favor of something crowd-friendly like Meddle or A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing. My college friends, unable to rank Teriyaki Asthma and Dope, Guns and Fucking in the Streets releases like the snobs in that van, each fell somewhere along a decidedly more mainstream spectrum of Alice in Chains, Bob Mould, the Grateful Dead and fucking Snow and so my evolving catalog was often met with the blank stares and/or vocal derision that often accompany "weirdo shit." They predictably offered no "Stick with it!" encouragement or "Who cares what we think?" wisdom—the disc remained in my collection for novelty reasons, its overlooked red spine fading to pink in the Boston glare. Drag.

For years, Trout Mask Replica was reduced from a double album to an unsupported single. The enlightened advice of "It's not too late for you if it's not too late for me" from the opening "Frownland" was aggressively avoided in place of biased muscle memory: Insert disc/Press play/Skip immediately to track six/Listen for four minutes/Stop-fast-stop-now! (The "squid eating dough…" introduction to "Pachuco Cadaver" served a purpose as the outgoing message on our answering machine for a period—I'm sure my roommates and their calling parents loved it—and was only acknowledged in the first place because, as track seven, my Stop! finger must have been slow one day.) Even the album cover was strange, the good Captain sporting a trout mask, replica or otherwise, that covered only half his face. And the illustrations? The illustrations! What had my new credit card gotten us into?

As a late-nineties nine-to-fiver with a reverse commute I was at last open to music beyond my Unwound/Blues Explosion/Six Finger Satellite comfort zone, embracing mid- to late-period Coltrane and lesser-known English interpretations of American blues and assembling them (with the help of WZBC's "Psychotic Reactions" show and the Nuggets II boxed set) into a full-body orgasm of psychedelia that is well represented in the playlists at right (starting with Volume 2). Trout Mask Replica, fortunately, had held fast to its real estate between Cake Like's Delicious (1994) and Cat Power's Moon Pix (1998)—pigeons do enjoy their holes!—and my generous patience with an ugly relic was rewarded. The delayed appreciation of a masterpiece had begun.

Up next: Sanctimonious bastards love income inequality. Go Pats!