Vikings & Beekeepers

The cliché for most of these “Check Your Blind Spots” entries is that the artist in question was someone I just missed out on due to my age or simply refused to embrace due to some bulshitty backlash of my own creation.

Metallica is a bit of both. Metallica’s fourth album, …And Justice For All  came out when I was six, several years before something like metal would be a viable genre to listen to (at the time, my idea of metal was “Ballroom Blitz” – close, but not quite). By the time I was of age (let’s say 14 or 15), pop punk was my drug of choice and Metallica (circa Garage Inc.) was considered to be the enemy. That’s not to say that I wasn’t exposed to Metallica at the time, but they were a band associated with a certain kind of person in my town and I tried to keep my encounters with those dirtstach’d and mulleted heshers to a minimum. No one wants to have his bike stolen, especially by some skinny burnout in an AC/DC tour shirt.

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It’s a curious case about Captain Beefheart’s (aka Don Van Vliet) Trout Mask Replica. On the one hand, it’s one of those iconic albums with its immediately recognizable album art and its token position as the lone “out” album on any middlebrow magazine’s greatest records of all time list. On the other hand – quick, name me one song off the album! OK, that might not be fair, but I’ve had many first-hand experiences where self-professed Beefheart fans say, “Trout Mask? Ehhhh, it’s overrated.”

On one side of the spectrum, Trout Mask Replica is the “If you only own one Captain Beefheart album…”, while on the other side it’ often considered a mere lesser light in a storied and celebrated career or simply one of those albums that Just. Doesn’t. Hold. Up.

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