DOG SNORTS ‘N’ COMPUTER KEYS Captain Beefheart, R.I.P.
Dec 21, 2010
Paying tribute to his "terrorist's concoction of gut-shot blues, free jazz idealism, true folk purism and psychedelic delirium."
BY A.D. AMOROSI
No joke, there were two things that reminded me of Captain Beefheart this week before his passing.
An old tomato red suit in my back closet reminded me of when I met the Captain outside of a New Jersey club named Emerald City before a 1980 show. There for a sound check, he liked what I was wearing (a red suit, but not the red suit I recently found), called me "the red devil" asked me to come backstage and drew my image on a cocktail napkin with a red ink marker.
The next reminder of Beefheart was hearing that Tom Waits had been inducted in to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and thinking to myself, not only was Waits' latterday sound usually a brazen but beautiful Beefheart appropriation, if Waits had gotten in, why hadn't Captain Beefheart ever been named or nominated along with other solidly solitary musical avatars? It wasn't as if Beefheart needed what William S. Burroughs had called the paltry medals of societal accolades, but it was just a thought - how is it that the man whose work so deeply influenced so many (at least as many as had been influenced by the Velvet Underground or the Stooges) not be worthy of a Waldorf salad at the Waldorf Hotel (to crib a Tom Waits joke regarding his nomination)?
Either way my thoughts were with him last week, not far from where they usually are. The clutter of "Dachau Blues," "Electricity," "Tropical Hot Dog Night," the gentle and stark "Evening Bell," the haunted "Vampire Suite," the old time-y "The Dust Blows Forward 'N the Dust Blows Back" - these songs are always in my head like the clicking of computer keys or my dog's snorting.
That Captain Beefheart - Don Van Vliet - passed away December 17 at age 69 from
complications from MS was just that, a passage, a final slip behind the curtain.
Captain Beefheart's musical manifesto was a terrorist's concoction of gut-shot
blues, free jazz idealism, true folk purism and psychedelic delirium. His
squirrelly noise and Dadaist prose and muzzy avant-everything predated all
alternative music by 30 years, yet his influence is easily indelible. DEVO,
Public Image Limited., Half Japanese, Pere Ubu, The Fiery Furnaces, PJ Harvey
and other less abled acts have made his mad act theirs. Eric Drew Feldman,
Frank Zappa, Gary Lucas and Ry Cooder interacted with him. Yet, Beefheart was simply - is simply - a
lone wolf.
If Beefheart's mangled field recordings of 1969's Trout Mask Replica is, as many say, the bible of avant-rock, then Grow Fins 1965-1982 (a multi-disc box set of rarities on Revenant) is its preface, outline and epilogue, with two early, angular blues bombs - Safe As Milk and The Mirror Man - a sort-of pre-creation mud swamp soundtrack. There's also the blue-horror gem Clear Spot. This leaves a mewing, coughing Beefheart crawling through the wreckage of stuttering and silly latterday works 1978's #Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller), 1980's Doc at the Radar Station and 1982's Ice Cream for Crow to complete the overall rustic masterwork.
It's hard to deny that Beefheart can, at first, be repellent - the host of a difficult listening hour. Sinister and grotesque, dragging the blues tradition to the precipice of psychedelic skronk, his scarred Delta epics are unhinged live wires looking for muddy waters to settle in. But his primal scream, whether animalistic and artfully mannered - the sounds of whistling balloons with the spittle part of the honk - becomes part of you like standing in the wind of a beach on a sunny sandy day.
To understand how the 69-year-old Beefheart went from being a blues baby to an avant dandy, listen to Grow Fins' riotous outtakes and live tracks, made more vivid with CD-ROM video clips and taped discussions between Captain and Magic Band members like John "Drumbo" French, who contributes plenty of background information in the accompanying hardcover book. Beefheart created a commune-like setting in order for the Magic Band to breathe life into songs per his strict instructions, going over and over details carefully, and the process is as enveloping as the music. Listening to Fins is like watching Michelangelo sketch the Sistine Chapel with a broken pencil and a head cold. Notorious for not notating music, Beefheart moved musicians like crusty brushes onto a quickly moving cracked canvas of blue barn-burners like "Just Got Back From The City" and instrumentals like "Hair Pie Bake."
These tracks come off as fluid with sweet tonality. That's the shock of Beefheart. He and his sound is as jarring as he is beautiful. This is not an ad for the Fins box. I say find and buy out the collection. But if Fins does nothing else, it displays Beefheart's ferocious verbal acuity with songs that barely existed before its existence as well as offer kind words from friends and contributors.
Sounding like it was recorded in a phone booth somewhere between Haight-Ashbury and Hades, Captain rips items like "Black Snake Moan" from his heart onto vinyl. His traditional hellhound howl, peaked with a desert's swirling brand of adrenaline (found only there that energy -in the desert), is near-religious, a tongue-speaking preacher looking for the right words and coming up with those that came straight from his soul and his cryptic thought process.
In the liner notes, scribe David Fricke and Drumbo say Beefheart was nervous when it came to recording, holding back his voice as if he was holding onto his soul. In my mind though, Beefheart let everything go.
And in death, it's all gone in the breezes of the Mohave.
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame could never contain that weird spirit.
Read the Beefheart obituary here. Meanwhile, watch: (1) Captain Beefheart "on" American Bandstand, 1966; (2) Live w/the Magic Band in Belgium, 1969; (3) BBC-TV; and (4) David Letterman show 1982
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