features in: Album Chart of 1969 ● Album Chart of the Decade: 1960s ● 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die ![]() |

The line up at the time of release in June, 1968 was Don van Vliet (28, vocals, tenor saxophone, soprano saxophone, bass clarinet, musette, simran horn, hunting horn, jingle bells) and his captive band of impressionable housebound slaves: John 'Drumbo' French (20, drums, percussion), Jeff 'Antennae Jimmy Semens' Cotton (20, guitar, steel guitar, flesh horn), Bill 'Zoot Horn Rollo' Harkleroad (20, guitar, slide guitar, flute), Mark 'Rockette Morton' Boston (19, bass guitar), Victor 'The Mascara Snake' Hayden (19, bass clarinet). Coming into this album - had I lived the period - my position would have been that I trusted Beefheart completely; he had proven himself to have the right feel for the blues, and his appetite for messing around with genre-defying techniques was a healthy one. I'm guessing that nothing quite prepared fans for what they actually received when they picked up their copies of “Trout Mask Replica”; a surreal sensory onslaught, decidedly avant-garde, wilfully beyond genre, a world away from what had gone before. As far as my subjective feeling goes, it's extraordinarily good in places, but I've never experienced a whole sitting which I'd class as thoroughly enjoyable; it seems to irritate and delight me in equal measure. Just when I’m getting into a bit of it, the band are off on another nightmarish freeform-jazz-attack, and that’s me alienated. I should point out that my dislike of this form is borderline pathological, so you can make of that what you will. He's intense, I'll give him that. And had I been around at the time I'd have been exceedingly curious to find out what on earth he was going to do next…
The Jukebox Rebel
23–Mar–2007
Tracklist |
A1 | [01:41] ![]() |
A2 | [01:53] ![]() |
A3 | [02:21] ![]() |
A4 | [02:26] ![]() |
A5 | [04:58] ![]() |
A6 | [03:59] ![]() |
B1 | [04:40] ![]() |
B2 | [01:48] ![]() |
B3 | [02:21] ![]() |
B4 | [02:25] ![]() |
B5 | [04:02] ![]() |
B6 | [02:46] ![]() |
B7 | [01:26] ![]() |
C1 | [02:23] ![]() |
C2 | [02:33] ![]() |
C3 | [02:07] ![]() |
C4 | [05:18] ![]() |
C5 | [02:08] ![]() |
C6 | [02:30] ![]() |
C7 | [03:57] ![]() |
D1 | [03:34] ![]() |
D2 | [03:09] ![]() |
D3 | [01:40] ![]() |
D4 | [02:02] ![]() |
D5 | [02:04] ![]() |
D6 | [02:18] ![]() |
D7 | [01:51] ![]() |
D8 | [04:31] ![]() |