In the spring of 1969, the inauspicious release of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band's Trout Mask Replica, a double-album featuring 28 stream-of-consciousness songs filled with abstract rhythms and guttural bellows, dramatically altered the pop landscape.
Yet even if the album did cast its radical vision over the future of music, much of the record's artistic strength is actually drawn from the past. This book examines how Beefheart's incomparable opus, an album that divided (rather than) united a pop audience, is informed by a variety of diverse sources. Trout Mask Replica is a hybrid of poetic declarations inspired by both Walt Whitman and the beat poets, the field hollers of the Delta Blues, the urban blues of Howlin' Wolf, the gospel blues of Blind Willie Johnson, and the free jazz of Ornette Coleman. This book illustrates how Trout Mask Replica was not so much an arcane specimen of the avant-garde, but rather a defiantly original declaration of the American imagination.

Prologue: The Truth Has No Patterns
Chapter One: A Desert Island of the Mind
Chapter Two: A Different Fish
Chapter Three: Jumping Out of School
Chapter Four: A Little Paranoia is a Good Propeller
Chapter Five: Music From the Other Side of the Fence
Chapter Six: Fast 'N Bulbous
Epilogue: Everyone Drinks From the Same Pond

Kevin Courrier is the author of several books, including Dangerous Kitchen: The Subversive World of Zappa, and Randy Newman's American Dreams. He has been a writer/broadcaster and film critic for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) since 1990.

KEVIN COURRIER is a writer/broadcaster and film critic at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He worked for eight years as co-host of the interview program On the Arts for CJRT-FM in Toronto, and also contributed movie reviews to Boxoffice Magazine in Los Angeles until 2007. He has written about film and popular culture for The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Sta. Courrier is the author of four other published books, Law & Order: The Unofficial Companion, with Susan Green (1997), which is now in its second edition, Dangerous Kitchen: The Subversive World of Zappa (2002), which won the Finalist Prize for Best Biography at the 2003 Independent Publisher's Awards, Randy Newman's American Dreams, which also won Finalist Prize for Best Biography at the 2006 Independent Publisher's Awards, and Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica (2007). Courrier teaches part-time film courses through the LIFE Institute at Ryerson University in Toronto.