Captain Beefheart
By Nick Tosches
"The Chatanooga Choo-Choo careens headlong into the hub of an
exploding galaxy. The cadavers of 19 raped and strangled astronauts
float de-pants'd froggish in the zero-g, midbrains housing alien
logic radio-waves. A jukebox wafts by, 'beedle um bum.' And 7 light
years away a dainty earthling peeks over a grassy knoll and screams.
Drink up."
– Edna St. Vincent Millay
Captain Beefheart was ne Don Van Vliet in 1941 in Glendale, California, the site of Forest Lawn Memorial Park, kitsch capital of the world. In 1954, the thirteen-year-old Van Vliet, who had taken to sculpting and nature studies, received a fine arts scholarshlp from a European institute, whereupon his people quickly informed him that all sculptors and other muff-divers of the muse were Percy-pants homies, and, deciding that a change of scenery would snuff their offspring's weirder proclivities, packed up the Van Vliet household, Don included, and relocated in the ashen honkopolis of Lancaster.
It was in Lancaster, within the musty halls of Antelope Valley High School, that Don was to befriend fellow aeonic hepcat Frank Zappa. The young zit-beladden Zappa (a guitarist for The Blackouts at the time) enthusiastically joined Don in extensive squack-patrol cruise maneuvers in the latter's Olds and lengthy country blues and vocal group aura-marathons during their brief, commencory liaison in Lancaster.
It was also in that arid Southern California stage-set that Van Vliet's initial venture as a musician pinned the grid, the first in a series of proto-Beefheartian failures to communicate, i.e., musical anachronisms along the lines of Sam Jaffe's performance of the closing bars of Ornette Coleman's "Empty Foxhole" on a bugle as he's being shot down atop the Temple of Kali in Gunga Din, and Lucille Ball's quotation on a tenor saxophone of an excerpt from the opening of John Coltrane's "Manifestation" on an early I Love Lucy episode. It seems that Don had brought a newly-acquired alto sax to a practice session of The Omens, a local r&b group, and, as he later explained, "They told me to get out. They said that I wasn't playing, that I was just moving my fingers." [1]
He gave sculpture one more shot in 1959 at Antelope Valley College but soon forsook that hallowed bastion of academe for a solitary study of things musical. During the next few years, as avant-gardy jazz grew more intensive, he made his living in the fields of commercial art and retail management. In the early 60's he split to Cucamonga to hang around with Zappa, who was producing films and futzing around with some musical ideas there. It was during this period that the two men consorted upon all manner of unspeakable aesthetic conspiracies and kultur putschs, of which only the words "Captain Beefheart" ever saw the light of day. In 1963 Zappa moved to Los Angeles and Van Vliet returned to Lancaster, the former to next be seen as head stomper of The Mothers, the latter as that of Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band.
With nigh nil amount of public exposure, the group accrued a geekish brand of notoriety which spread from Lancaster through much of Southern California and landed them a minor-league recording contract with A&M Records that resulted in muchos a&r antagonism and two obscure singles, which is where the discology of the Captain's musick begins.
Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band's first record, released in 1964, was a 45, "Diddy Wah Diddy" b/w "Who Do You Think You're Fooling?," the A-side of which (originally recorded by Bo Diddley, who co-cleffed the tune with Willie Dixon, in 1956 on the Checker label) is a mesmerizing grotesquerie dominated by a fantastically overwhelming ffff basso ostinato surpassed on the banality graph only by Beefheart's total shit harmonica phrases which consist entirely of hand vibrato. As a matter of fact, of Beefheart's first four cuts – the above and his next and last single, "Frying Pan" b/w "Moonchild" – the only thing that still maintains any validity after six years is Jerry Handley's walrus-fuck of a bass line on "Diddy Wah Diddy."
Safe As Milk, the first Beefheart lp, released by Buddah (their first also) in 1965, has likewise proved itself to have been a timely statement on the whole. I realize that there are a gang of cerebrum queens and genius fetishists stalking the sets who, due to the weirdo emotional/psychological aspect of artist-recipient relationships in rock, become totally non-selective and non-qualitative in the appraisal of their chosen idol's spewings, but if something's not so hot, no flowering barrage of adjectival/metaphorical grapeshot is going to keep it from going under in the long run. Granted Beefheart is a genius of sorts, but this first album, like much of what seemed neato-keeno in 1965, is no big thing today.
A few songs from the first lp, however, transcend the overall quality, most notably the great "Sure 'Nuff 'N' Yes I Do," which was given musical boosters by Ry Cooder's arrangement and bootlenecking, wherein the Captain spouts, in total Delta blues chest register burlesque, his narrative morsels of absolute incongruity, each line composed of a dyad of contradictory phrases exhibiting a total disregard for such niceties as two of our more agreed upon realities, geography ("I was born on a desert, came up from New Orleans") and meteorology ("Came up on a tornado, sunlight in the sky"). "Sure 'nuff, sure 'nuff 'n' yes I do."
Beefheart's version of Robert Pete Williams' "I've Grown So Ugly," copied from the Takoma version of the song (an earlier and far better rendition exists on Williams' extremely rare Prestige/Bluesville lp, Free Again), succeeds mainly, as does "Sure 'Nuff 'N' Yes I Do," on account of Ryland Cooder's arrangement and snappy neckwork. That there is a strong tinge of superfluity about this performance can't be denied. An integral factor of Williams' greatness was that every line he ever wrote/sang was seeped in emotion wrought from first-hand experience. And when he sang "I left Angola, 1964/ Go walking down my street/ Knock upon my baby's door/ My baby comes out/ She asks me who I am/ And I said, 'Honey, honey, don't you know your man?'/ She said, 'My baby's gone since 1942/ And I tell you, Mister Ugly, he don't look like you,'" he was a sixty-year-old mess who'd just finished a stint at Angola State for murder and was recounting some semi-traumatic shit. Here the song is drained and belittled by the underlying status quo. Fortunately, Beefheart abandoned this type of mimetic spiff soon afterwards, long before it was to become such a monstrous facet of rock, and, beginning with "Ah Feel Like Ahcid'' (from the second lp), went on to create some of the most remarkable electromagnetic-age cosmic brain-nova blues of our times, a legacy that will remain long after the collective historical consciousness has forgotten the image of 1400 tease-haired ofays circle-jerking their egos in the chapel of melanin.
In "Autumn's Child" ("Go back ten years ago/ Gonna be my wife she said/ Go back ten years ago") and "Electricity," an infrasound chanson featuring an amazing 15Hz vocal by the Captain, Beefheart's advanced mind can be seen in his use of, musically, modulations sans pivot chords (which were soon to become a major element in his music), a totally futuristic gimmick when taken in the context of mid-Sixties rock music, and, instrumentally, the utilization of an ondes musicales, a close cousin of the theremin, an electrophonic oscillator contraption that was invented in the 1920's by Ruskie scientist Leon Theremin as a scrambling device to combat mind destroyer radio waves that were waiting in from an extra-galactic race of reptilian psychopaths.
Leaving such bullshit as "Call On Me" and "I'm Glad," a poor sugar-coated, bubblegum Greek stereotype, for the lions, what's left in the asset column are "Where There's Woman," a mesmerizing piece with some heavy mytho-anthropological yonic throb magnet poetics, and "Yellow Brick Road," where the manic contcast in feeling between the lyrics and the refrain create a tuff stroboscope of ambivalence. In terms of historical-type stuff, Beefheart's harmonica skills are vastly improved on over his "Diddy Wah Diddy" days as witness his playing on "Plastic Factory," where he also shows a talent for sounding pretty much exactly like Howlin' Wolf, vocal-wise.
Getting involved in a brief time-warp scene for a second here, we have a recently-released but anteriorly-recorded platter yclept Mirror Man, which was cut circa Safe As Milk (1965), evaluated by the powers that be as too unmarketably eldritch, slammed into the Buddah crypts, and resurrected this year by the mammonic magi in the wake of the Captain's rise to public recognition. Mirror Man, sounding quite like the 1968 Strictly Personal but waxed back in '65, stands as a document of Beefheart and the boys' total temporal precocity/neato aesthetix. "Mirror Man," the platter's title tune (a slightly more sedate version of this song can be found on Strictly Personal, as part of the "Ah Feel Like Ahcid"/"Son of Mirror Man – Mere Man" threnody), is a flowing, invocatory river. A river. Total stasis yet everything flows; Beefheart's own kalotropic vision, omnes ex nihilo and the infinite matrix of the holy asshole universe. Listen tight. And you can dance to it – you can dance to it real crazy, daddy-o. This is all a serpentine tone, to ride upon like a blood rush, from "Terroplane" (which has lots of "You're Gonna Need Somebody On Your Bond," Jules Verne, flying saucers landing in Mesopotamia 437 B.C. in it), which has the Captain snaking fifths on a musette (an 18th century frog bagpipe) and drooling seduction babble to some infra-psyche chthonic jailbait, to the ultimate ne plus ultra rock 'n' roll song, "Kandy Korn" (the rendition of which is wonderfully better than that included on the later Strictly Personal). Re align the way-back machine, lo.
With his second (released) lp, Strictly Personal, Beefheart's work behooves description as an independent entity, simply because there are no reference points, especially not in known music, rock or otherwise. There are none of the usual John Coltrane parallels, even though the late genius's name is inevitably brought into play whenever Beefheart's music (or that of any other rock 'n' roller who so much as takes a baby step off the beaten path of contemporary music's contextually-antiquated tightassed time signatures) is described. There's no common demoninator, save a disgust for energy-negating bullshit. Coltrane, as are practically all modern jazz innovators, was multi-directional; Beefheart is non-directional, the only jass-bos of the same ilk being Sun-Ra circa Heliocentric World and, in his post-Free Jazz/early Sixties period, Ornette Coleman. Though there is more surface affinity in the Captain's music to the present-day classicist people, those boys have never learned how to "play," only to show-off, to be bad boys from the conservatory engaging in a more-atonal-than-thou status syndrome. Beefheart has pioneered preliterate communication. He has resensitized himself on a meta-intellectual level to the uterine and early childhood symbolic/emotional matrices of semi-conscious feel-sound-word juxtapositions, the non-cerebral explosions of crisis and epiphany that are driven under by "education" like the mysteries of Thoth and Eleusis.
The great dead kraut logoi-pug Gottfried Leibniz, in one of his
infamous beer visions, once defined absolute music as "eine arithmetical
activity in which der subconscious counts unaware dot it is counting."
On a subliminal level Beefheart's music defies those underlying
theorems of our ids' durational and temporal "arithmetic'' bases.
He (and, in their various ways, a lot of other classical-jazz-rock
psychonauts) threatens our inner control systems. As King Street
Smith would say, he doesn't care a feather or a fig for time and
meter because he's transcended the intermediary "planning stage"
gaff jive that is instilled during the post-childhood sophistication
process. He isn't caught up in the ego rush muck of contriving nifty
time signatures; his musick comes direct, untampered, uncut, uncured,
and safe as milk, and when his atemporal, ametrical alpha-wave poesies
shatter the primordial circadian rhythms of the collective 1970
Judeo-Honk emotional/neural brainmidden, the reactive feeling is
initially one of discomfort – his music carries the same horrific
intimidation to defense-oriented conditioning that a three-year-old
kid playing with his shit in a toilet bowl does. Beefheart and his
troupe of 21st Century Quakers (the Captain was once arrested at
London
Airport for identifying himself as "a pilgrim from the 21st Century")
are not "musicians." Captain Beefheart has said, "None of us in
the band can read or write music and I like it that way."
[2] Written
music comes up as controlled plan and I can't see it. I want to
play as if I were a child ... you know, p-l-a-y, like children,
before being taught how to play restricted, without the concept
of the written line ... I haven't worked in five years – I play."
Pinning Beefheart down as a "musician" is just another symptom of
defensiveness of getting in touch with one's own discomfort when
in contact with the music, just like labeling someone as "avant-garde"
or "crazy." Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band aren't involved
in an art scenario – they're a healthy, life-energy force toying
with their shit.
Strictly Personal, marketed in the latter part of 1968, contained, on the outside, a remarkably scary etchtone photo by Guy Webster that looks like the cover of a phenothiazine prospectus, and, on the inside, what is, with the possible exception of some Reed/Cale Underground stuff, for 1968, the furthest musical advancement in the rock field. Sure, The Mothers and others were really into things then too, but, for instance, The Mothers were just virtuoso-types operating around a Satie/Webern/Stravinsky/Kirk modal steal gimmick, never making any pure musical advancements but, rather, bringing alien elements into rock, the "newness" of which was merely the effect of fresh context and juxtaposition. Beefheart, on the other hand, was producing, with Strictly Personal, a musical genre that, though not without roots, was certainly not to be found elsewhere. The Captain himself complains that the final master was fucked-up beyond tomorrow by Bob Krasnow, who had the original tracks phased to shit via tape signal mutations, and various Scullyoid electro-distortion tomfoolery. Beefheart's Wagnerian indignity aside, Strictly Personal, from the manio-electronicized ghoul moan chorale (slightly reminiscent of Stockhausen's Momente, only Beefheart doesn't justify it with graphs and cosine progression grids) and ghastly polygot death scatting of "Trust Us" to the French-St. Claire electrosonic drum expressionism and Hawaiian steel barred guitar of "Safe As Milk," represented the most succesful attempt by an electric combo to achieve culminant carnal union with the ethnoastronomical mesh of the Okeanic sludge. The absolute hi-lite of the lp is "Ah Feel Like Ahcid"/"Son of Mirror Man – Mere Man" (although the songs are separated by two other tracks they were originally one continuous recording), the former piece, which has Beefheart doing some incredible brain-warp Rice Williams harpwork, is a perfect pointallistic arrangement (most affective in Alex St. Claire's guitar stuff) constructed around some of the most spookily psychotic lyrics to ever jolt a fella's mental equilibrium. After an amplified heartbeat fade-out, Beefheart's voice returns in full vibratone regalia in "Son of Mirror Man" to interpolate the Frankenstein funk rhythms of what is actually one single vibratory tone. Tuff stuff.
Beefheart, who had constricted his choice of ax in the past to a Hohner Marine Band, has in his later works expanded his livery to include tenor and alto saxophones, bass clarinet and, on Lick My Decals Off, Baby, a Hohner Chromonica (which he has utilized better than Little Walter or any of the other chromatic harp masters on "I Love You, You Big Dummy"). He has pioneered in the bass clarinet's middle register field by utilizing it as a second, simultimbrous voice.
In bridging the gap from Strictly Personal to Trout Mask Replica and Lick My Decals Off, Baby, we land in an hermetic swamp where there are no words appropriate to the artsy-craftsy flora and fauna therein, figurativewise. These, Beefheart's latest, most grand efforts are so zoot as to wee-wee on the noblest aesthetic ventures of mice and men. This is space-age shit, pure and simple. Not onfy has Beefheart become totally at ease with his Heraclitean anti-chromaticism, but he has also come up with some of the most powerfully beautiful poetics, sleaze-wise, since the French surrealist fuckbook writers of the 1920's. The Captain has charted a post-ritual river of raunch and skin, a pornography of myth and icon, sort of like whackingoff in space with a picture of a dead Earthling luv. The Plutonian smut of "Pachuco Cadaver," "My Human Gets Me Blues" and "When Big Joan Sets Up" ("Her hands are too small/ [...]/ They laugh at her body") has created in such hieratics as "Mama, mama, here come Doctor Dark/ [ ... ]/ Black leather lady Lord/ [ ... ]/ Black lady/ Black leather lady" ("Doctor Dark") and "Rather than I wanna hold your hand/ I wanna swallow you whole/ 'N I wanna lick you everywhere it's pink/ [...]/ Lick my decals off, baby" ("Lick My Decals Off, Baby"). Also witness the protopathic musical/lyrical power of "Pena" (from Trout Mask) and "I Love You, You Big Dummy" (Lick My Decals Off); Beeheart is, with such songs, developing the electromagnetic age brain-splatter blues, that shall bacome the heritage of the era. The human race is evolving onto a space-traveling species and anyone, black or white, sitting around singing about lemon squeezing or whatever is a romanticist and an anachronism.
I think that in time Beefheart will come to be considered the Buddy Bolden of the post-Quark age. The more you listen to his stuff, the more melodious it gets, the more fulfilling; at the same time, it becomes more and more indescribable, like a Zen Mounds Bar. To examine the poetics of his recent work's would be too voluminous and to dissect it musically (which is definitely beyond my abilities) would be too complex a chore. It would be dumb too. Listen to him a lot and avoid the great psychobiologicaf washout of the early 21st Century. Or something like that.
ALBUMS:
Safe As Milk (1965; Buddah 5001 re-issued in 1970
as Buddah 5063)
Strictly Personal (1968: Blue Thumb 1)
Trout Mask Replica (1969; Reprise/Straight 1053)
Lick My Decals Off, Baby (1970; Reprise/Straight
6420)
Mirror Man (1971; Buddah 5077; recorded in 1965)
EPHEMERA:
Captain Beefheart sings lead on "Willie the Pimp" from Zappa's
Hot Rats (1970; Reprise/Bizarre 6356).
All four sides of the two Beefheart singles ("Diddy Wah Diddy" b/w
"Who Do You Think You're Fooltng?" (1964; A&M 794) and "Frying
Pan" b/w "Moonchild" (1964; A&M 818)) are included (with a higher
qualty sound) on Bootleg Album (1970; A&M;
no catalogue number, commercially unavailable, limited edition).
COMING ATTRACTIONS:
The next Beelheart & The Magic Band lp, The Spotlight
Kid, is slated for release sometime this spring.
The Captain is also working on an album with Rockette Morton, entitled
Big Sir Sweet.
Forthcoming by the Captain are Old Fart At Play,
a novel, and Singing Ink, a book of poesies.
A film of the current Beefheart/Cooder tour is presently being filmed
by Warner Bros.
Next autumn, entire nebulae will giggle "Stop it, fresh!" as an
extensive European/American tour of Ornette Coleman with
Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band commences.
1. Edmonds, Ben. "I Wouldn't Call It Dada Rock Exactly. What It Is, Is ... ," Creem, Vol. 2, No. 13 (May, 1970).
2. Ed Marimba, formerly Art Tripp, late of Mothers fame, has since joined the group, thus qualifying somewhat the Captain's plea of virginity.