3. Captain BeefheartTrout Mask Replica

I remember hearing this for the first time and thinking: ‘Is there something wrong? What is wrong?‘ They seemed really confused, and it didn’t seem like music.

I dropped out of high school when I was 15, and I bought that cassette tape for a trip out to Tucson, Arizona, that was a two and a half day bus ride. I listened to that tape the entire time, it was the only tape I had. By the end of the trip, the tape itself it slipped over backwards, and I continued listening, it was still incredible, backwards, forwards, didn’t really matter.

It was the wildest thing I had listened to up till that point. Before I heard Trout Mask, I’d heard The Velvet Underground, but even that was a lot smoother. Sure, there was noise, guitar noise that made sense to me, I wanted to hear that psychedelic freak out. Then I got Trout Mask, but it was not what I was used to when I thought of psychedelic freak-outs. It sounded like they ate a really bad fish or something, literally.