Monday, 20 December 2010
Musician, singer-songwriter and artist (15 January 1941 – 17 December 2010), born Don Glen Vliet
Captain Beefheart
The press statement released by the Michael Werner Gallery announcing the passing of Don Van Vliet, better known to the musical cognoscenti as Captain Beefheart referred to a truly rare and unique vision, which is, one suspects, a fairly substantial understatement.
When it comes to artists who can deliver serious far out street cred, there aren't many that can empty a room quite as fast as the Trout Mask Replica-era Beefheart. While his subsequent work was scattered at various points on a continuum between way out there beyond where the buses don't run and uncomfortably close to the middle of the road, anyone looking to investigate his work would be best advised to start with his earliest work and keep a finger on the shuffle button once you've passed the vicinity of Strictly Personal.
Acknowledged status as a Beefheart fan might deliver you hip credibility but it's not the sort of thing you put on when a couple of friends drop by for a quiet drink.
Unless they're that sort of friend, of course.
In those circumstances it’s probably not going to be a quiet drink, and you can probably expect subsequent difficulties with the neighbours.
Somewhere along the course of Hughesy's various writing projects I'll probably get around to considering the suburban origins of some of the furthest out there artists, but you'd probably be pushed to come up with a more unlikely environment than Antelope Valley High School in Lancaster California, the alma mater that gave us Frank Zappa and Don Van Vliet.
That sort of weirdo, one would have imagined, would most likely spring from the basements of the hippest quarter of some city with underground and countercultural credibility. You'd probably have been imagining these guys would emerge fully formed from Soho, Greenwich Village, Haight Ashbury or Laurel Canyon.
That's where many of them ended up, of course, but when you delve into their origins it's not where most of them came from.
Beefheart, on the other hand seems to have spent his lifetime lurking in the suburban undergrowth, proving, I guess, that things aren't what they seem, not, in the words of Dr Strangely Strange, what they would appear.
I was aware of Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band a fair while before I actually heard the music, thanks, if I recall correctly, to an article about the origins of some of the further out band names.
The introduction, when it came, was in the form of Safe As Milk, which remains, some forty-three years after I first heard it, an all-time favourite.
Those intrigued by the contrast between that album and Beefheart's subsequent efforts should note that those songs were largely cobbled together and arranged by a certain Ry Cooder, who was briefly a member of the Magic Band until circumstances surrounding a concert appearance a week before the Monterey Pop Festival (at which Beefheart was scheduled to play) had Ry walking out on the grounds that Beefheart was impossible to work with. Details here.
An awareness that John Lennon allegedly owned two copies of Safe As Milk and the knowledge that Beefheart was being actively touted by the iconic underground DJ John Peel added to the cachet, but from the opening notes of Sure 'Nuff 'n Yes I Do Hughesy was hooked.
There's the odd less than stellar track lurking there, but through Zig Zag Wanderer, Dropout Boogie, Electricity, Yellow Brick Road, Abba Zabba, Plastic Factory, Where There's Woman and Grown So Ugly there's a wealth of swirling, churning, rolling and tumbling guitars, wailing mouth harp and vocals that soar and plummet between the basement and the penthouse. It's really a quite remarkable album, and one that I'll be exploring more thoroughly in an in progress Rear View here.
That's still a work in progress, and in the meantime the obituaries, of course, will deliver far more detail, so here are links to:
The Washington Post
Entertainment Weekly
Pitchfork
The Guardian and again and yet again
MTV
Rolling Stone and from further back:
a tribute from guitarist Gary Lucas and drummer John “Drumbo” French.
Lester Bangs on Beefheart (Who’s Lester Bangs?)
a tribute from NPR in the USA
and some YouTube footage, including Part 1 of a six part documentary (links to the other episodes in the side bar)
Beefheart recites poetry
and his art work.
