Captain Beefheart

The NME liked Captain Beefheart a lot and declared that Trout Mask Replica (1969) was a solid gold masterpiece and one of the best records ever made. Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) (1978) and Doc at the Radar Station (1980) were released during the period I religiously bought and devoured the NME, from roughly January 1977 to December 1981, and each NME review of these albums was pretty much ecstatic. I never bought these records or even heard anything from them at the time. Perhaps they were not even available in Stellenbosch but I probably would never have shelled out good money for them because the impressionistic reviews made the music sound rather uncompromisingly weird in a way I wasn’t keen to experience if it meant taking a chance on paying full price for the records. No Beefheart album ever showed up in any bargain bin I trawled through.

Over time, and mostly from pieces in the NME, I got to know the pertinent facts of the Beefheart backstory and I was quite chuffed when my mate Dan Lombard lent me the Zappa / Beefheart / Mothers live album Bongo Fury (1975) with several tracks recorded on a tour Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart undertook, ostensibly to give Beefheart some income at a time when he was locked in contractual litigation that prevented him from recording or performing under his own auspices.

Apparently, Beefheart believed, for this tour, that Zappa had the best lead vocalist he’d ever had. I would tend to agree with this statement. The title track and the two spoken word pieces “Sam with the Scalp Showing Flat Top” and “Man with The Woman Head,” plus the other Beefheart vocals, were astonishingly different to anything I’d ever heard and in their weird oddness are superior to even Zappa’s eccentricities.  I have never been a Zappaphile and if this were a world where one had to choose between Zappa and Beefheart I would wholeheartedly and unreservedly be a Beefheart man.

I taped Bongo Fury and listened to it often enough to count Beefheart as an influence on my attempts to develop a singing voice. I cannot really sing and thought  that I could camouflage my inadequacies with a Beefheartian growl. Later in life people thought I was imitating Tom Waits when I was really trying to channel Captain Beefheart. I guess their frames of reference were divergent from mine.  I came to Tom Waits only in the Nineties, at least 12 years after my first exposure to Captain Beefheart, and only because an ex-girlfriend became enamoured of Raindogs (1985), a record she’d heard  at the house of her then current lover, and played it to me.

I never heard anything else by Captain Beefheart until mid-1983, when I had an opportunity to listen to Trout Mask Replica in Windhoek, Namibia, of all places. Peter Le Mottée, one of my Army buddies in Windhoek, shared digs on the outskirts of the city with some young working civilian who was apparently quite religious, as was Peter, yet had an interesting and eclectic record collection. I visited Peter at his home once and, as was my wont when in other people’s homes for the first time, I checked out the guy’s record collection to get a grip on where his mind was. I have no particular recollection of the general content of the collection except for the astonishing fact that he owned Trout Mask Replica and professed to be fond of it. Peter was not keen on the record he described as cacophonous.  Peter played one side of it for me and the songs on that side did sound confused and cacophonous and rather shrill and trebly with disjointed rhythms and spidery slide guitar. There was never an opportunity to listen to the whole double album. This brief introduction also did not motivate me to seek out the record, which (given it’s cult status and left-field reputation) was probably not readily available, at least not in Windhoek, and not in Stellenbosch or Cape Town when I returned after the end of National Service.

Matters rested there until the late Nineties when I found a cheap CD copy of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band’s debut album Safe As Milk (1967). To be perfectly accurate, the CD was called something else entirely (I think it’s Zig Zag Wanderer, after one of the track) and the cover photograph was of Beefheart in the late Seventies, instead of the original album cover, but from looking it up in the Rolling Stone Record Guide, the track listing of this budget priced CD indicated that it was a repackaged version of Safe As Milk.  

Safe As Milk is just a tad unconventional but no weirder than most late Sixties psychedelia.  Ry Cooder plays slide guitar on it and the sound and feel is oddball blues and psychedelic pop rather than avant garde freak out. Safe As Milk has good tunes, pop smarts, wit, blues power and a subtle strangeness all at once and there seems to be no reason why it could not have been as successful as any other psychedelic record released in 1967. When I listen to Safe As Milk, I cannot believe that it would not have formed a small yet perfectly compatible piece of the mosaic of the summer of love in San Francisco.

I was still not motivated to seek out any Beefheart product until May 2014 when I happened on a BBC documentary about Captain Beefheart on YouTube, narrated by the late great British DJ John Peel.  Not only was it a fresh, more informative take on the biography but the documentary featured several old video and audio clips of Magic Band and solo Beefheart performances. Some of the immediately most interesting tracks are the more or less straight blues-style recordings of the Magic Band before Safe As Milk. Beefheart did have the power and intensity of Howlin’ Wolf and I would be prepared to pay good money to own those songs or perhaps just find then on YouTube.

After hearing excerpts from Trout Mask Replica in the documentary, I sought it out on YouTube and listened to it in full.  Perhaps I’d gotten used to Beefheart by then but this album does not sound anything like the otherwordly cosmic shrieks I recollect from that one brief listen in Windhoek. Frankly, very little on this album sounds that unconventional now. My musical experience and tastes must have matured and expanded considerably since 1983.  

Yes, there are humorous skits and off-kilter musical shapes but on the whole, there’s internal logic in the world view and the fascinating fusion of gut bucket blues and ostensibly free form jams that were in fact carefully rehearsed chaos. The skits sound spontaneous but could well have been as carefully prepared as the tunes. Beefheart was the kind of control freak that would want improv to be rehearsed.  Trout Mask Replica might have been as mind blowing as Sgt Pepper apparently was back in the day, yet nowadays both sound interesting but not quite revolutionary. There is nothing here that cannot be understood or comprehended within the context of Beefheart or simply as part of several decades of free from freak out.  Trout Mask Replica is not, to my ears, free form, even at its most loose and rickety. The album closer “Veterans Day Poppy” is about as conventional a blues rocker as you can get.

Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) (1978), Doc at the Radar Station (1980) and Ice Cream for Crow (1982) are the final trio of Beefheart studio albums and, for me, and perhaps because my musical tastes have become more sophisticated and also because it’s always different experience when you listen to a once revolutionary record many years after its release, rather than when it has a  contemporary shock effect, but these three albums didn’t chock, surprise or particularly enthral me when I listened to them recently. I like the music and the albums would have fitted nicely into my eclectic record collection, yet I also don’t know whether I’d want to own them now. Fortunately, the records are readily available on music streaming services for that moment when you crave Beefheart. The best part is that all the authorised albums plus many other outtakes, oddities bootlegs and rarities, are also freely available for the Beefheart superfan and completist.  

The Beefheart music career came to an end with Ice Cream for Crow, whereafter Don van Vliet concentrated on painting and probably became more famous in the rarified world of art than he ever had been in the mainstream world of popular music. Captain Beefheart was a cult figure then and he is a cult figure now.