Bob Dorough Dogs Analysis

When listening to ‘Dog’ by Bob Dorough from the album ‘Jazz Canto – Volume 1’ before listening to the track ‘Ella Guru’ from Trout Mask Replica, there are a number of comparisons to be drawn, specifically with the lyrics and vocal delivery. More than anything, it’s the fast cadence and playful style, when Dorough delivers lines such as “The dog trots freely in the street, and what he sees is reality, and the things he sees are bigger than himself, and the things he sees are his reality”, in many ways, Dorough is describing an otherwise quite complex idea with words that are as simple as they can possibly be, while at the same time it could’ve been described in less words, though had it been, a lot of the poetry of it would’ve been lost. Beefheart’s style is similar in ‘Ella Guru’ where – before the first chorus – he sings “She do what she mean

and she do what she do, she’s got something for me, got something for you”. It’s the overuse of words that becomes a part of the character of the lyrics: the way Dorough repeatedly speaks about ‘the things he sees’ and ‘reality’ from multiple angles is identical to how Beefheart does the same when saying what ‘she do’ and how ‘she’s got something’. There’s also a broader comparison which an be made about how prominent the use of characters such as ‘The Dog’ and ‘Congressman Doyle’ as well as ‘Ella Guru’ and ‘The Mascara Snake’ become in the music in order to create a world which is full of all kinds of interesting people and talking animals for the lyrics to exist in. Beefheart takes this idea a stretch further by having the characters recur throughout the album on different tracks.

When listening to the album, one could skip to any random point in its duration and reliably land on moments that provide a good example of just how dissonant Beefheart’s entirely piano-originated compositions can get. The atonality of the instrumentals is ubiquitous on the album from start of finish. However, one of the key factors that makes this album incredibly interesting to listen to is that - at any point – there could be a brief moment where the instruments harmonise coherently in a traditional sense, almost as though Beefheart paid a sudden amount of extra attention to the musicality of the notes he was playing rather than the immediate feel of them. Even at the very start of the album, there is a solid 12 seconds at the start of the song ‘Frownland’ in which the song manages to remain entirely in G Mixolydian before it eventually tails off into chaos (it’s entirely possible that the reason for both starting and remaining in this particular scale for as much as 12 seconds is that all the notes in the scale of G Mixolydian are white keys on a piano, making it much easier for Beefheart to find parts which harmonise properly with each other before switching to an atonal scale by adding black keys to the mix). There are many moments of sudden tonality that appear as if from nowhere - only to then exit just as suddenly - throughout the album; it’s not unusual to hear Beefheart jump suddenly and briefly into one scale before going through an interlude of dissonance before arriving at another scale for yet another brief moment. This is very much similar to how Beefheart wanted the album to sound when referring to hearing buttons being pushed on a radio in time to the beat of the music.

Drums were usually the last element to be added to tracks on the album.

An often-used technique for creating rhythm sections of Beefheart’s - which actually dates back to Safe As Milk and the song ‘Electricity’ – is to mirror melodic elements of the track with the drums. When working on Electricity, Beefheart approached drummer John French, and asked him if he could play the guitar riff of the track on his drums, to which French complied. They would then set about making a drum part, which identically matched the rhythm of the guitar riff. For the Trout Mask Replica sessions, French’s involvement with the compositions became much more intense as he was the one that Beefheart would rely on to score the instrumental parts (this is why the drum parts would have to be left until after everything else). Examples of John French’s rhythmic ‘mirroring’ exist all over the album. The track ‘My Human Gets Me Blues’ starts with a simple (but still dissonant) two-note bassline, which is directly twinned with French’s drums, and examples of interplay between the two elements exist throughout the track as it goes through different

sections.

After recording Trout Mask Replica, it has gone on to become Captain Beefheart’s most highly-regarded album, being cited by many creatives and musicians alike as one of the greatest of all time. The album has been featured on numerous ‘Greatest Albums of All Time’ lists from music publications such as Rolling Stone and Mojo, often being rewarded more for it’s innovation than it’s level of popularity. The album wasn’t successful in America, however, mostly thanks to the support of legendary radio DJ John Peel, the album peaked at #21 in the UK albums chart for a week. Beefheart & The Magic Band followed Trout Mask Replica with the 1970 album ‘Lick My Decals Off Baby’; regarded by many to be a continuation of the direction he took on Trout Mask. Lick My Decals Off Baby is often cited as a favourite to many Beefheart fans, though it is also just as often looked at as being a failure to find any new ground after what was regarded as his boldest statement yet. The album was recorded with the same basic setup, though with some minor tweaks to the bands line-up. The run of albums that would follow for Beefheart could be described as hit and miss; whereas albums such as ‘Clear Spot’ and ‘Doc at the Radar Station’ are looked at as yet another couple of albums which further explored the level of creativity exhibited on Trout Mask, albums such as ‘The Spotlight Kid’ and ‘Unconditionally Guaranteed’ are remembered as being too straightforward by comparison. Overall, during the course of Beefheart’s 70’s output, his reputation as a revolutionary was already being firmly cemented, and by 1982, Beefheart was already about to bow out from the music industry completely, but not before releasing ‘Doc At The Radar Station’ and ‘Ice Cream For Crow’. With these final two albums, Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band exited the music industry gracefully by recapturing the creativity and uniqueness of Trout Mask. After this Don Van Vliet turned his main artistic focus to painting, having been exhausted by the music industry and the amount of legal and creative differences he found along the way. Prominent Punk and Avant-Garde musicians such as John Lydon and Tom Waits often cite Beefheart as a huge influence on their sound, as well as bands the likes of Sonic Youth, Nirvana and Radiohead, who are all known to have played with musical dissonance at various points over their career.