The Mascara Snake 🤟

 

I've seen this photo posted about a dozen times on Beefheart sites over the years, and it's ALWAYS reversed.

You can see my white Premier kick drum behind him on the right.  Victor Hayden (Haydon) was the only child of Jack and Charlene Hayden.  I don't know which spelling was the family name, but his parents were Don's Aunt and Uncle; Jack and Charlene. Charlene being his mother's sister.  The "Ch" is Charlene was always a hard "Ch" sound like in "Charles." Using a photo program, I turned the photo around so that now, finally, the hands are placed on the bass clarinet properly.  I recognize this as the laundry shed behind the house at the Trout House property.  I spent a bit of time in here working on the parts for TMR.  I'd haul my drum kit out here from the house so as to have a bit of privacy and not disturb the others.  I always envied the guitarists, who could practice anywhere -- in the living room, the bathroom, the downstairs bedroom, outside on nice days.  Drums are very loud acoustically, and so very brash when being practiced upon.  I eventually put cardboard on the entire set, which allowed me to at least work on the coordination of the parts, even though there was absolutely no stick rebound because of the drum heads being covered.  The "style" I developed to play to the unorthodox music was more of an independence issue (hands a feet), with little actual standard technique used  -- like rolls, fills.  In the little time I was able to cull from my daily duties of transcribing / re-transcribing the guitar and bass parts for the others, I would first write, and then attempt to play, rather complex parts.  I used to jokingly refer to them as "stick twisters." The first part I worked on that I would place in that category was for "Hair Pie."  It took me four hours of painstaking concentrated work to actually achieve the coordination to play this part along with the band -- and it only was played FOUR TIMES!  Four measures of music on the whole album...  Wow.  Jeff, Bill, and Mark all played very complex parts, which they then had to synchronize with each other, and my job was to sort of provide a common pulse while staying out of their way and not causing a train wreck.  Victor, who had NO knowledge of the bass clarinet, was brought in by Don to freely play whatever he wanted -- in the last six weeks or less before we went into the studio.  He was never really at a rehearsal, but was just inserted into the band after all the months of work were nearly over.  We all had a bit of resentment over this.  Bill challenged this idea even more than the rest of us.  I remember him having Victor come over one day and challenging him to play the same note as Bill played on guitar.  Jeff, who had played clarinet in band as a kid, showed him the fingering ( as he also showed Don the fingering on the sax -- because all the woodwinds are loosely related in technique).  Victor would struggle and then, eventually, be barely able to play the note.  I think Don was under the impression that, because Vic was an artist, that he could just "paint with sound" intuitively.  Well, I suppose that, with the foundation the four of us ( Jeff, Bill, Mark and I) were laying down, that the abstract sounds injected over the top would be considered "valid."  To my knowledge, the only playing Victor did on the entire album was Hair Pie Bake I (the 'bush recording').  Victor's friend, Jeff Burchell, was a non-musician as well.  He was chosen by Don to play drums as my replacement.  Don knew almost nothing about musical technique, though he had a great intuitive / creative sense of what he wanted, creating a finished piece required the input of others.  Certain pieces, such as "Ant Man Bee" had a lot of input from Don, but mostly, he was out of the room, or gone somewhere and the composition of the parts Don created was left to me.  Victor's character, "The Mascara Snake," became well known, as did "Rockette Morton," because of the verbal snippets on Trout Mask Replica.

A BIG thank you to John Drumbo French for the above insight 

💫💎🙏💫