The strange and wonderful Captain Beefheart has been on my mind recently. He certainly could
have fit with the artists in my book Great Spirits but, although, did see him perform once in the late Seventies, I really had no other personal encounter with him or people in his circle. His personal eccentricities and outlandish artistic vision spawned media attention (he was on the cover of Rolling Stone and even appeared on Late Night With David Letterman in the Eighties) disproportionate to his record sales. Yet those who embraced his music did so with great fascination and devotion. Many of those folks's interest was ignited by his landmark 1969 recording entitled Trout Mask Replica, a two-LP set of sprawling creativity encompassing jagged blues jams overlaid with free jazz outbursts, acappella surrealistic poetry, stuttering, spastic electric guitar-framed balladry and more. It is not uncommon for folks to say that the first few times they listened to the album they couldn't make any sense out of it. At some point, it would come into focus for them, and then they felt it was a monumental artistic statement. Rolling Stone placed it on the list of great rock albums of all time.
Trout Mask was my introduction to Beefheart (real name Don Van Vliet). I'd heard a little bit
of the garage-band rock of his earlier "Safe As Milk" album but Trout Mask was something entirely different. It created its own universe, with characters named Ella Guru, Big Joan and The Old Fart.
The rhythms were unique and the harmonic structure of the music was startling, often deliberately
dissonant, sometimes in two or three different keys simultaneously. My initial reaction was fascination.
I didn't necessarily love it but was intrigued. Some tracks immediately stood out. "Dachau Blues" was
a strange, haunting meditation on the Holocaust, underlined by desperately sad bass clarinet meshing with Beefhearts vibrating moans with lyrics such as " Dachau Blues....those poor Jews....one mad man...six million lose." The striking, painterly (Van Vliet was also a painter) imagery of poems such as "Oranger Claw Hammer" was instantly indelible. The music lurched and jumped; sections would have structure and then those sections would be abruptly sabotaged.
Then there was Beefheart's voice, breathlessly described in the press as possessing an eight-octave range. He might have been able to produce sounds at the extremes of eight octaves but the truth is that Beefheart declaimed more than he sang, often in a yodeling bellow, other times in a pinched growl
that owed a lot to Howling Wolf with a bit of Wolfman Jack in there.
Much of Beefheart's music is challenging to listen to and Trout Mask is among the most challenging of his work. To appreciate it, it is best to suspend your usual standards of music appreciation and just
open yourself to the roller-coaster of sounds, rhythms and words that at their best evoke and explore the twists and turns of the human condition.
My thoughts about Beefheart were stimulated by my receipt of a gift copy of drummer John French's
book about his years playing (under the nom-de-plume Drumbo) with Beefheart. It recounts his experiences in almost excruciating detail--remarkable that he can remember to such a small scale.
French places Beefheart in the context of the socio-culture of the desert town of Lancaster, California, which gave rise to a music scene that yielded not only Beefheart but the great Frank Zappa, among others. French comes off as amazingly normal in what was one of the weirdist musical ensembles of all time. He debunks the media -generated myth that Van Vliet wrote all the material for Trout Mask Replica in eight hours. In fact, it was French and the other musicians who spent countless hours assembling fragments of random inspiration from Van Vliet into some sort of musical coherence.
The book led me to pull out my CD of Clear Spot an album released a few years after Trout Mask Replica and was generally considered at the time to be a simpler, more easily-digestible, even deliberately "commercial" version of Beefheart. Clear Spot is indeed far easier to listen to than Trout Mask but though it may lack the same wild, dizzying flights of inspiration it makes up for that with
a welcome coherence. Though tame compared to Trout Mask, Clear Spot has many moments of brilliance and compared to most popular music is still plenty edgy. There is the quirky, hyperactive, cowbell-driven "Nowdays A Woman's Gotta Hit A Man", for instance, the raw boogie blues of "Long Neck Bottles", the slinky funk of "Low Yo Yo" amongst genuinely pretty tunes such as "Her Eyes Are A Blue Million Miles" and the Memphis-soul homage "Too Much Time." The album's high point comes with "Big Eyed Beans From Venus" which takes the off-the-wall rhythms and simultaneously funny yet cosmic lyrics of much of Trout Mask and contains them in a tight, logical, brilliantly-played structure. As the music pauses, Beefheart intones "Mr. Zoot Horn Rollo...hit that long, lunar note...and let it float", whereupon the slide guitarist hits a low, tremolo chord that sustains into quavering feedback.
Beefheart might not be the musical genius that his greatest admirers claim he is but he
is an artist with original, provocative vision who created sound sculptures--not static sculptures but ones that danced and twisted and leaped. There has not been anything quite like it before or since and
with Van Vliet retired from music-making, it is not likely to come again.
further listening: Trout Mask Replica, Safe As Milk, Clear Spot, Doc At The Radar Station
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