In the spring of 1969, the inauspicious release of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band's Trout Mask Replica, a double-album featuring 28 stream-of-consciousness songs filled with abstract rhythms and guttural bellows, dramatically altered the pop landscape. This book illustrates how Trout Mask Replica, far from being an arcane specimen of the avant-garde, was instead a defiantly original declaration of the American imagination.