Play a Strawberry

Don Van Vliet, who performed as Captain Beefheart, made one of the strangest records in rock. Trout Mask Replica, 1969, produced by his childhood friend Frank Zappa, twenty-eight songs of interlocking guitar that critics still rank among the greatest albums ever made. He could not read or write music. He whistled the parts.

The whistling, it turned out, was the easy bit.

He moved the Magic Band into a rented house at 4295 Ensenada Drive and kept them there for eight months. They rehearsed fourteen hours a day. They ate a small cup of soybeans a day for a month, were arrested shoplifting groceries, and had to be bailed out by Zappa. The drummer, John French — renamed Drumbo — sat at the piano transcribing seven-note chords his captain banged out. French arranged most of the album. What the neighbours made of the noise is not recorded.

One afternoon Van Vliet told French to play a strawberry. French played something. Van Vliet did not like it. He grabbed him by the shirt and threw him down the stairs.

"Take a walk," he said.

When the record came out, French's name was not on it. Neither was his face in the photograph.