I suppose I've been a fan of Captain Beefheart for 35 years. I listened to him for the first time at Mike and Dallis's house at the Lido in 1974 and then I bought a copy of Trout Mask Replica in India. The covers of LPs in India were made from thick card, sometimes the records didn't even come with a plastic sleeve.
When you have few records you play them over and over and you mine them for all the meaning you can find. All too often, I used to discover only gravel under the shallow top layer of rhythm and melody. But with Captain Beefheart I could dig deep and when I had gone as deep as I could into the music of Trout Mask Replica I would find nothing artificial, only more black loam.
Dachau Blues
Old Fart at Play
Veteran's Day Poppy
Pachuco Cadaver
Fallin' Ditch
Dali's Car
China Pig
My Human Gets me Blues
Ella Guru
Bill's Corpse
Neon Meat Dream of a Octofish
Hobo Cha Ba
Steal Softly through Snow
Hair Pie
The Blimp
Sweet Sweet Bulbs
She's too much for my mirror
Frownland
Moonlight on Vermont
Ant Man Be
When Big Joan Sets up
Sugar and Spikes
Orange Claw Hammer
Well
Wild Life
The virtuosity of Beefheart's musicians in chaotic syncopation was richly vegetable, mineral and animal.
My family was very patient I must say. I played the album loud and over and over again. I danced to it. Once I was dancing crazily in my room and looked out through the screen window across the courtyard to the screen covered window on the other side where the dining room was and saw my family all looking back at me.
What helped me to understand Beefheart was the study of Indian music. I noticed that some people were stuck rigidly in cages of harmony. They just weren't educated to enjoy quarter tones, an eight of a tone, a sixteenth. They refused to assign meaning to the gliding of Indian music from one note to the other in a sort of colour blindness. The tonal distinctions between each sound colour were lost. Western popular music, with the exception of its experimenters and Jazz, seemed to rely solely on effect of marking time with vibrating resonances set up between fixed and recogniseable notes.
Of course I knew nothing of Stockhausen or Stravinsky. I knew very little about how composers, once they had sucked the vibrancy they found out from European folk music, went on to plunder all music: Indian, Chinese and Middle Eastern music. Jazz and blues. The very sounds of industry and nature. . Just as Picasso and his contemporaries plagiarised West African art. The syncretism of western music experimented, gnawed and consumed.
Speaking of which, later on I read a little book of articles and poems by Beefheart in the UK and I remember two things he said, not that they are very significant. One thing Don van Vleit said was that almost everything that Dylan wrote was derivative. Dylan was a great actor and re-mouther. Since I read this I have noticed Beefheart had a point. I found an old English folksong Dylan used lock stock and barrel and it is now one of his most famous songs.
The other thing he said was that musicians needed lots of good food to make good music. A recognition of the fleshy and human rather than the transcendental. Certainly not Bach, but not negating Bach either.
I can't listen to Beefheart now. I listened to his albums all too often. There is little left in them for me after all these years. Your tastes change. Beefheart was bitter sour like a pint of TangleFoot. You like sweet things, then sour things, then salt, then bitter, then hot, then astringent. That is why no one should live forever in a human body. What is there after astringency in life? Nothing. Poison.
Perhaps that's why he took up art and left stopped making his kind of music. Now he's dead.
Rest in the natural, Don van Vleit, rest in the natural.
Phil Hall
Captain Beefheart documentary by John Peel 1 2 3 4 5 6
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