In the 1980s, American researchers found that the average album was played 1.6 times. Given the new practice of impatiently scouring a CD for one or two highlights and then discarding it, the iPod age has presumably seen that figure tumble, but the basic point remains: most of the music we buy lies pretty much unplayed - either because it is rubbish, or because it says a lot more about our vanity than what we actually like. On the latter score, history's most shining example may be Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, an allegedly classic album that must surely sit undisturbed in thousands of households. Playing it - or rather, attempting to - is a bit like being in one of those cartoons in which the principal characters cagily open a door, only to find all hell - elephants, possibly, or a speeding train - breaking loose behind it, whereupon they slam it shut again. Its opening moments let you know what you're in for: a discordant racket, all biscuit-tin drums and guitars that alternately clang and squall, eventually joined - apparently by accident - by a growling man complaining that he "cannot go back to your land of gloom". Skipping through the remaining 27 tracks does not throw up anything much more uplifting. Indeed, one song finds the same voice rather distastefully evoking the Holocaust: "Dachau blues, those poor Jews/ Dachau blues, those poor Jews/ One mad man, six million lose."
When this kind of experience happens to a rock critic, it can easily bring on a chill feeling of inadequacy. After all, Beefheart - those in the know rarely use the "Captain" - remains a gigantic influence on so much rock music that has claimed to stand as something more than mere entertainment, from the post-punk likes of Pere Ubu, Talking Heads, Gang of Four and Public Image Limited, through names as varied as Tom Waits and Happy Mondays, and on to such talents as PJ Harvey, Franz Ferdinand and the White Stripes. Equally importantly, he is a crucial part of the gnomic culture through which those people (men, mostly) whose lives have been hopelessly afflicted by music commune with one another. It's not in the film, but the Jack Black character in High Fidelity was surely a Beefheart obsessive.
A quick bit of history, then. Captain Beefheart was/is the stage-name of Don Van Vliet, a Californian born in 1941. In the wake of his relatively straight 1967 album Safe As Milk, he set out on a quest to combine (and this is crude, but bear with me) his Howlin' Wolf-esque vocals with rock music that drew on the spirit of free jazz. Trout Mask Replica - produced by Frank Zappa, and supposedly made with the assistance of musicians who were 1) subject to psychological warfare, and 2) on a lot of drugs - remains his most loved album, though it was succeeded by eight more - two of which formed a rum mid-1970s interlude when he attempted to go mainstream and singularly failed.
Having rediscovered his brand of bluesy avant-gardery, Van Vliet ceased his musical work in 1982 and began a new life as a painter. Since the mid-1990s, he has gone very quiet; his ex-colleagues seem to be united in the impression that he is ill, and he is rumoured to be suffering from multiple sclerosis. This month sees an upsurge in his profile, though he is not directly involved in the re-release of his extremely variable last run of records, from 1974's famously hopeless Unconditionally Guaranteed to 1982's much better Ice Cream for Crow.
Charged with the job of going back to my handful of unplayed Beefheart CDs and navigating through his music anew, I start off by contacting Gary Lucas, the New York-based musician latterly famed for his work with Jeff Buckley, but also noted for his stint as Beefheart's guitar player and manager.
I explain my serial problems with Beefheart's music, and he responds with a torrent of tributes to his former boss, drawing my attention to his "Dionysiac qualities" and the fact that his art amounts "to the roots of music deconstructed and flung back at you like an action painting". Trout Mask Replica, he tells me, is "like Finnegans Wake or Ulysses".
My next move is to renew my acquaintance with Andy Partridge, the sometime chief of XTC, songwriter, and major Beefheart fan. The idea is to leaven Lucas's florid adjectives and grand claims with the more straightforward counsel of a man still resident in his native Swindon. Amazingly, this works: I am quickly transported to Wiltshire circa 1969, where the young Partridge had become dimly aware of an American act a friend mistakenly termed "Captain Beefy and his Beefs".
"I had another friend called Spud," Partridge recalls, "and he used to send off, via mail order, for the most out-there, avant-garde records you could get. I liked quite straight pop music, but he was listening to [free jazz legends] Albert Ayler and Sun Ra. He had this crusade to kind of force them on me.
"At some point, he said, 'You've got to try Trout Mask Replica.' And I put it on and just thought, 'What the fuck is this? They're mucking about! They can't even play their instruments: they're all out of tune, the drummer can't drum in time, the singer's not even singing, he's just growling.' But Spud said, 'No, no - stick with it. You will get it.' And I eventually had a road-to-Damascus experience: this sudden revelation. It just clicked."
That sounds very simple, I tell him. The problem is, after six plays, Trout Mask Replica still sounds fucking awful.
"Oh, it sounds like a ball of rusty barbed wire," he says. "It sounds like a piece of the Somme, lifted up and put in an art gallery."
Partridge's analogies at least start to whet my appetite. A song called Ella Guru, he tells me, is akin to a "metal sock", while the experience of getting lost in Trout Mask is described as follows: "You're running around stairs and gangways and gantries - things are swinging across, and you've got to grab them to get to the next level. It's like being trapped in a mad, giant watch. Do you know what I mean?"
Thus far, I don't. But going back through my interview with Gary Lucas, I find one promising bit of advice. "The way in, I think, is via Clear Spot," he tells me. "That's the most commercial album that still retains the essence of Beefheart's humour and weirdness. There are groove songs that really rock, and a bit of the old polyrhythm and dissonance, but generally it's hot playing and singing, with really funny lyrics - it's all there."
The next day, I am driving along a rural back-road with a double-play CD on the stereo. It is split between Beefheart's 1972 album The Spotlight Kid, which combines jerky blues-rock with the plonking sound of a marimba and rather does my head in, and the album Lucas has recommended. And lo! Just as I am passing a disused service station outside Leominster, something happens: the title track, an opaque tale of spending the night close to a swamp, reveals itself to be impossibly great: a groove somehow being turned inside-out, with twin guitar parts that lock together like two sets of teeth. Soon enough, the entire album has me in its spell, and for the next three days, I go back to it time and again.
Now, I think, I may be ready for the difficult stuff. I play Trout Mask three more times, but its wonders stubbornly fail to reveal themselves, though I am more comforted by the arrival of the aforementioned reissues - replete, bizarrely, with adverts for Beefheart ringtones. I have also received an email from Franz Ferdinand's Alex Kapranos, who has tapped out his Beefheart thoughts while on tour in Japan. He is particularly keen to extol the wonders of 1980's Doc at the Radar Station, which was apparently a big influence on FF's last album (and you can tell: for proof, play its opening track, Hothead, next to FF's Do You Want To).
Kapranos tells me that he and his colleagues have been in the habit of playing a "bootleg DVD with various live performances on it. It was so exciting, we watched it on repeat. He was locked-in and dangerous - he does a weird thing with his hand, like a medicine man casting a spell. That record is the antithesis of his other rambling LPs after Clear Spot. The riffs are all rhythm and jerk; hypnotic and lean." By way of a route-map into Beefheart's music, Kapranos cuts to the quick: "1) Hothead. 2) Electricity [from Safe As Milk]. 3) Some good grass. 4) Trout Mask Replica."
The next day, I set off for London, where I hope I might find a copy of the 1971 album Lick My Decals Off, Baby, suggested by Gary Lucas as the logical next step after Clear Spot, but unavailable on CD. At Notting Hill's Record & Tape Exchange, I meet Michael, a Beefheart enthusiast who is very knowledgeable and helpful, though - perhaps because he works in a shop like this - his advice comes with the whiff of gentle one-upmanship, particularly when I ask him how many plays it took him to crack Trout Mask.
"I got it the first time," he says. "I like free jazz, you see." This makes me feel like a member of McFly. On the train home, I defiantly keep my Beefheart CDs in their cases and listen instead to Wings.
But fair play to Michael. As it turns out, the LP he sold me is in the same prickly vein as Trout Mask, but it's a little bit more bass-heavy, and free of the air of desperation that puts me off some of Beefheart's supposedly seminal work. Listening to a song called Wow-Is-Uh-Me-Bop, everything coheres, and I actually start to get it. I thus go back to Trout Mask, and despite the fact that the really difficult stuff is still vexing me, it palpably begins to open up. I now understand: it is not about verse-chorus-verse or any of that prosaic nonsense. At its most extreme, I am not sure I even like it as music. What matters is the fact that it pulses with energy and ideas, the strange way the spluttering instruments meld together, and those lyrics.
So, everything is moving in the right direction. By next week, perhaps I will be jumping around the lounge to such hitherto unlistenable songs as Neon Meate Dream of a Octafish and Hobo Chang Ba. On a whim, I put in one more call to Andy Partridge and ask him a question, this time out of genuine curiosity rather than journalistic duty: has he ever met the great god himself?
"I nearly met him once," he tells me. "XTC were staying at the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York, and I was drinking at the bar, and somebody came in and said, 'Beefheart's staying here.' I said, 'I've got to do radio interviews in the morning, so I can't wait around to see if he comes in. I'll go to bed, but if you see him, tell him I'm a huge fan and give him my room number.' Apparently he did come in, very drunk, and they sent him up, but he forgot the number, wandered around for a while and went to bed.
"And then Colin Moulding, our bass player, saw him the next morning buying porn from the little concession stand in the hotel. I quite liked that. It's good to know he has earthly needs."
· Remastered editions of Captain Beefheart's Bluejeans & Moonbeams, Doc at the Radar Station, Ice Cream for Crow, Live: London 74, Unconditionally Guaranteed and Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) are out on August 7 on EMI/Virgin.