Captain Beefheart: Not for the faint of heart
Thursday 12 October @ 10:22:01 |
  by MAX SPARBER
Prior to punk, there was no rock music that was harder to listen to than that of Captain Beefheart. Beefheart, born Don Van Vliet, had a taste for noisy, free-form compositions that featured odd shifts in time signatures and thoroughly atonal melodies. He often snarled his lyrics over his music, and, like his friend and former schoolmate Frank Zappa (who produced 1969’s Trout Mask Replica, Captain Beefheart’s best-known album), his lyrics were playfully savage, gleefully transgressive. Beefheart loved a grotesque turn of phrase, such as this couplet from “Dachau Blues,” a song from Trout Mask Replica: “Still cryin’ ‘bout the burnin’ back in world war two’s / One mad man six million lose.”
 Beefheart
made music between 1965 and 1982, and, save for some belching, Troggs-style
party blues he recorded at the start of his career (including a terrific 1966
version of Bo Diddley’s “Diddy Wah Diddy,” which remains a
favorite choice for garage band compilations), his work is decidedly noncommercial.
Beefheart’s early compositions were decried as “too negative”
by A&M Records, his first label, and they dropped him almost as fast as
they signed him. Beefheart’s records were music for a pessimistic mood,
filled with unfathomable, ranted lyrics that spilled out like a lunatic’s
version of beatnik poetry. His music was bristly, and, after his first few albums,
abandoned the playful psychedelic experimentation of the time. Instead, he stripped
down arrangements, and seemed to delight in exploring just how noisy an instrument
could be. The songs were usually played by the ever-changing lineup of Captain
Beefheart’s Magic Band, whom he often gave puzzling nicknames (bandmember
Bill Harkleroad, for example, is probably still best known as “Zoot Horn
Rollo”), but sometimes Beefheart would try his hand at saxophone and keyboards,
despite the fact that the only instrument he had any real capability with was
the harmonica.
This month, Astralwerks
records reissued Captain Beefheart’s two final albums, Doc at the Radar
Station, released in 1980, and Ice Cream for Crow, released in 1982.
Listening to them, it’s easy to see why Tom Waits points to his exposure
to Beefheart as a transformative moment in his musical career. Between 1982’s
soundtrack to “One from the Heart” and 1983’s Swordfishtrombones,
Tom Waits seems to have transformed into an entirely different artist. The former
is a lush country album, featuring strings and duets with Crystal Gale. The
latter shows little trace of Waits’ longstanding—and popular—beatnicky
bar piano player persona. Swordfishtombones is an experiment in noise
and abstract songwriting, and, in some instances, such as the song “Frank’s
Wild Years,” Waits actually sounds as though he is impersonating Beefheart’s
strange spoken delivery: half muttered, half spat out. But Waits’ album,
coming a year after Beefheart’s retirement, was nowhere near the noisy
creations of either Doc at the Radar Station or Ice Cream for Crow.
It’s appropriate that Astralwerks has released both albums simultaneously,
as they are so stylistically similar that, despite arriving two years apart,
they sound as though they comprise two halves of one extended album. Both feature
some of Beefheart’s most aggressively atonal compositions, such as the
instrumental “Light Reflected Off the Oceans of the Moon,” from
Crow, which features Beefheart’s manic saxophone soloing, sounding like
Ornette Coleman with a terrible headache.  Similarly,
Doc at the Radar Station has a number called “Brickbats,”
in which Beefheart babbles over a honking saxophone, his lyrics almost impossible
to make out, except in short, manic bursts (“My mind caught by the corner
/ Gradually decides it’s safe / Becomes a bat itself / Flexes its little
claws / Curse its leather wings”). It is, as A&M declared, negative
music, with songs like “Dirty Blue Gene,” about a woman who is “genetically
mean” and “’81’ Poop Hatch,” a rush of seemingly
random words that seems to conflate the creation of music with the expelling
of biological waste. Interestingly, many of the songs on these two albums were
composed decades early, during the making of Trout Mask Replica; in preparation
for his retirement, Beefheart had stopped composing new songs, instead drawing
from unrecorded earlier work. As a result, the two albums have a strange quality.
They’re not timeless, precisely, but they seem unmoored from time. Lyrically,
they’re very much a product of the darker side of the late ’60s,
a pessimism and poetic grotesqueness that has echoes in Zappa’s work,
as well as other bands of the era, such as the willfully obscene Fuggs, although
Beefheart abstracted these tendencies. His lyric writing sometimes seems the
aural equivalent of the nightmarish art of underground cartoonist S. Clay Wilson,
whose work shares a hallucinogenic sensibility, as well as an obsession with
degeneracy. And yet Doc at the Radar Station and Ice Cream for Crow
both have a raucous sophistication that removes them from the ’60s, placing
it closer to the works of atonal punk like The Birthday Party and Big Black,
who all claim Beefheart as an influence. As a result, the two albums have a
uniquely lost quality, a sense of displacement that adds to their strangeness.
They can’t be pigeonholed into a specific time and place; they don’t
seem to reflect any moment in history or recognizable cultural event. Instead,
they’re adrift, so alien that we might not even notice or recognize them
if they weren’t making as much noise as they possibly can. ||
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