I guess we should explain the topic, which is improvisation - regarding groups versus individuals...

You mean as a solo player?

Yeah, versus working within a group.

Interesting that you're choosing me.

Is that not a good category?

The reason I'm asking is because all the Captain Beefheart stuff was not improvised, none of it was.

So how did that work, starting with ‘trout mask replica’.

80% of it was done by him kind of beating the shit out of a piano, in a rhythmic sense, and having no idea what any of those black and white things were on the piano. And John French, the drummer, transcribed it, notated it all, and would dole out the parts to the players. So he had a concept of being away from tonality, but using rhythm as the main input, because that's what he had to offer, right, being a non-musician. So John would transcribe it, and then in the process of us working with John to get the parts - you know, when there were seven notes, you'd scratch your head and say, 'Well, how do I do seven notes with six strings?' - so then we would invert things and mess around, and try to keep it as close to what he played. For what reason, to tell you the truth, I'm not sure, because he didn't know what he played after he played it.

So when you were working on the parts, was he there, or did he just sort of...

No, he would bang the parts out and go to bed and sleep.

So you would figure out how to do it, and then he would come back, and then you would all record it?

No, then we would practice it for nine months.

So would he come around and tell you if you were on the right track?

Not as clean as that. Again, we're dealing with a strange person, coming from a place of being a sculptor/painter, using music as this idiom. He was getting more into that part of who he was, as opposed to this blues singer, okay? So you're asking the right question, but it's not an easy answer, right? It's not a normal situation. We would get these parts, and they would string together. Usually the tempo would be consistent, because he would be writing parts to go together, so that the pulse at least, three against four, or whatever the rhythm was, would be similar. I don't know if you've listened to that album enough to know how the parts would go. Like, you would play your part four times, go to the next section, the next may be three, or whatever. Usually, we would figure that out. He was not a part of that process at all; he waited until there was a whole thing there, and then he would kind of sculpt it afterwards. But if my part took three times to repeat and your part took five times until we touched down again, that's how long you played the part, or you would cut it in half, if it came out cool, or whatever - but he was not a part of that process. The whole band just kind of did whatever, to have it come out right. At that point, then you would go into the next section and work it out. Any of the tunes that had repeats in them, he would go, 'Oh, that's cool! Let's do it here again.' He might whistle a line - he was an expert whistler. Just awesome. He could sit there and blow smoke rings while he was whistling.

Wow.

It was like a magic show (laughs). But Imean - be-be-du-be-de-du-be-de-ba-da-du-ba-da-du-ba-da-du, I mean he would just whistle like that. Pretty cool. So we would work off the whistling lines for single-line melodies and things like that, but the parts were all just chiseled out. Again, about 80% of it, because there were a lot of other accidental things, like just a blues tune with a cassette deck like this, and he just started looking through poetry, creating songs.

So then when you went to play live, did you just try to play what you had worked on?

We did more than try, we did. Exactly the same thing, every night. Very much so, we were amazingly the same every time. The only thing that would change was, however nervous we were, the tempos would go up, of course. In that time of the band, it was rote.

Did that change during the time you were with him?

It evolved through all the albums, yeah. Each album it changed. So if we were to take Trout Mask Replica, that's how it happened, other than the phone call, where he did 'The Blimp'. I don't know if you're familiar with that.

Yeah.

Okay, that was from Roy Estrada and Art Tripp, who were part of the Mothers of Invention. And what it was was Frank Zappa in the studio, working on a track, and then Don called up and had Jeff Cotton recite the poem, and Frank was smart enough to go and record it. And that was [similar to] the song 'Hair Pie: Bake One', where we're practicing in the living room, thinking that we're rehearsing, and they're out in the weeds playing the horn. 'Oh! That's a take!.' So, those tunes were accidents, but for twenty-one or twenty-two of them we went in and did all first takes, except maybe a couple of false starts, in the studio. On the second album, Lick My Decals Off, Baby, I was the guy who took all of the parts off the tape deck, wrangled them around, fixed them up a little, and fucked with them, and a couple of times played them backwards, just to see if anybody would pick up on it. Nobody did (laughs).

So was it a situation where he just slowly gave up control?

No, changed. He had total control. Of course, where he didn't know he had control or wasn't there to control it, it would be changed to make it playable. But each album, the process changed. If you listen to the total out there-ness of Trout Mask Replica, like free-form, but memorized free-form, to reproduce that weird experiment every time... The next one was a little more coherent, The Spotlight Kid was, 'Okay, we want to make more money, we need better record deals, so now we're gonna do this blues stuff.' That was the most horrible time in the band, by far. If you listen to it, the structure of the tunes were all good ideas; he stood out. But the tempos - he had gotten these things, these tunes going without ever playing with us. So when it came down to us playing with the vocal, he couldn't get it together, so the tempos got down to this zombie state. I mean, I hate that album. It sucks. But, if you were away from it, maybe some of the tunes had some real creativity to them. I'm sure they did. If you listen to the laborious - do you remember the Night of the Living Dead? 'Morgan, Morgan!' (in zombie-like tone) - that's what it was like. If you listen to it, it was very zombie-like, we were just beat to shit.

So, before he came into the studio, all those songs were much more up-tempo?

No, no. In the process of doing that album, it was, 'Slow down, I want to have time to do my lyrics.' If you listen to that album, the voice is here, and there's this little, tiny band behind it somewhere. His ego got even bigger at that point, which is fine. I mean, it was his show. I'm not putting him down for it, but it was excruciating to live with the day-to-day stuff. And the big concept, I understood that, but him trying to get us to do that, and still not letting us play more free-form things. I was really saying, 'Well, let me just play some stuff there', 'No, you'll play dee-nee-nee-nee'. You know, the parts were really kind of cheesy in a lot of places. So, he controlled that, and really... We're gonna play more coherent music, and the tempos are gonna be down. And he got what he wanted, to a drastic degree. The concept of the tunes is pretty cool, you know - 'Blabber 'N' Smoke', and all these different things, 'Grow Fins'. I mean, that's cool stuff. Those are cool images, his poetry is strong. But as far as the questions you're asking me, the album sucked.

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