High Voltage Man Kisses Night:
A Deathblog for Captain Beefheart
(1941-2010)

What a week – first Jean Rollin, now this. A bad few days for artists who pursued their unique visions about as far as is humanly possible irrespective of the rules governing their chosen form. In both cases, it strikes me that these were men who realised their creations not through the conventional means of deliberate thought, imagination and hard work, but simply because their particular inspiration tumbled out of them so strongly, they were incapable of not realising them.

Rarely has the phrase “we will not see his like again” seemed so massively appropriate twice within the space of a few days.

What could I possibly find to say about Don Van Vliet that wouldn’t sound hackneyed, obvious or absurd? Well I tell you what, let’s take a trip through some of my favourite moments of Beefheart-age, and maybe we can figure something out along the way…


Electricity



Imagine hearing this in 1966! God knows, it still sounds pretty “what the fuck was THAT?!” the best part of fifty years later. Just a stunning, unprecedented record in every respect. If I didn’t know otherwise, I’d swear blind that no rock band couldn’t possibly have recorded something like this before about the late ‘70s. It must have been a particularly alarming revelation, or so I should imagine, for the handful of innocent French people in the famous video linked above, who’d presumably just wandered down to the beach for a swim or whatever.

I remember reading somewhere or other that The Captain got a lot of shit off some people for using a theremin on the recorded version of this tune, an addition which was thought to be ‘silly’. SILLY? I’d like to have a record of those same people’s reactions to what transpired a few years later.

The rougher live version of the song embedded above is particularly useful in demonstrating the fact that “Electricity”, like just about every other song on “Safe As Milk”, has a terrifying wrecking ball dance floor swing behind it - something that the later, more experimental, incarnations of The Magic Band sadly lost as they transformed from a somewhat eccentric example of a working club band into a fully-fledged counter-cultural ‘freak act’. An observation which leads us neatly on to…


Dropout Boogie



Fuck, I love this tune. Probably one of the most musically simplistic numbers ever recorded by an incarnation of The Magic Band, perhaps it’s very minimalism is the reason it’s ghost seems to pop up unheeded beneath the grime of a million subsequent garage/punk/hard rock thud-fests… that and the fact it grooves like a fucking bastard, I suppose. “You love her, ADAPT ‘er, ADAPTER ADAPTER, but whatabout afterthat?” – John Lee Hooker goes to hell.


Frownland



I think it’s probably about a decade since I bought a copy of “Trout Mask Replica” – hoovered up back when I was hitting HMV sales, grabbing anything and everything that the pre/post-punk-centric music press tastemakers of the day decreed that I might wanna check out. I’ve listened to it on and off on a pretty much continuous basis since then, and I still don’t feel as if I’ve pexplored even a fraction of its mysteries.

“Trout Mask..” would be one of my first choices for a ‘desert island album’ I think. Not because it’s one of my favourites, but just because any one quarter of it’s vast sprawl contains enough compressed information and crazed inspiration to last a regular person a whole lifetime.

More than any other record in the, er, ‘rock canon’, internalising “Trout Mask..” is a long and gruelling process. The first obstacle that must be overcome is the common misconception that this album is primarily a load of hat-wearing, hurdy-gurdyin’ Tom Waitsian bullshit. It may initially sound like that on the surface, and indeed many (most?) Beefheart fans are harvested from those who are drawn to his work by the overriding, ostentatious “weirdness” of the whole venture. But that is not what “Trout Mask..” is about. I’m not usually one to tell people how they should or shouldn’t listen to music, but please: if you count yourself as a Beefheart fan because he has weird outfits and facial hair and sings songs called stuff like “Tropical Hot Dog Night” in a crazy blooz voice with parping horns and weird, undanceable time signatures then GO DIRECTLY TO JAIL. No not pass Go, and do not collect £200. Maybe you will meet that band Man Man there – I’m sure they’re still making records you might enjoy.

Sure, there is an element of that kind of pastiche that creeps in at times, and I could live a perfectly happy life if I never had to sit through “Hobo Chang Ba” again, but the clear-eyed, spinning genus of “Trout Mask..” lies in the way that it reveals itself to be the exact opposite of what the ostentatious weirdness contingent assume it to be. Rather than being deliberately strange and obtuse and alien-sounding for the purposes of differentiating itself from ‘regular’ society and giving self-defined ‘freaks’ some kind of horrendous-sounding exclusionary shit they can hang their silly-looking hats on, Beefheart’s songs from this period are in fact almost always extremely direct, even earnest, in their emotional intent – pure communication, unfettered by the impressionistic short-cuts and simplifications usually employed in song-writing. They are mundane and rational responses to the experience of living in an insane and overwhelmingly beautiful world – daring attempts to invest ‘singer & backing band’ popular music with the same powers of direct expression that Parker and Coltrane brought to instrumental jazz. And more to the point, frighteningly successful attempts that no one has ever dared try to repeat.

Just listen to “Frownland”, perhaps my favourite track on the whole of “Trout Mask..”, in which Beefheart seems to take on the role of a hen-pecked husband, escaped from the clutches of his partner and/or society’s “frownland”, merrily crashing through the undergrowth, dreaming of the land where “man can stand by another man without an ego-le flying”, and no doubt where he can carouse with Ella Guru and Big Joan too.

A minor piece maybe in light of what follows, but a group of musicians could practice for a thousand years and not manage to repeat the kind of precision un-collapse The Magic Band are doing here.

It is simply incredible.


Orange Claw Hammer



Not the album version, this a radio session thing with Frank Zappa playing guitar (and actually doing a good job - keeping it in his pants for once). I’m pretty sure this is actually the first Beefheart track I ever heard – on an NME covermount CD, if you can believe that. I used to listen to it a lot, and no wonder – it’s really great. The a-cappella album version gets a bit much, but re-cast as a sort of guitar n’ vocals folk odyssey, it is endlessly enjoyable, this strange hyper-imaginative tale of a pegleg father traversing a phantasmagorical silent era cartoon/acid trip landscape to buy his lost daughter a cherry phosphate. It is a testament to Beefheart’s genius I think that he manages to sing about being “shanghaied by hi-hat beaver moustache man, and his pirate friend”, and not only makes you refrain from turning the song off in disgust at such lunatic blather, but actually sounds like he knows exactly what the fuck he’s talking about, and communicates to us well the significance this wild and unfortunate happenstance. How many times did Jeff Mangum listen to this recording as an idle youth, I wonder…


Pachuco Cadaver



Much has been said by this point to undermine Don Van Vliet’s oft-repeated claim that he personally composed every single note on “Trout Mask Replica”. Certainly, John ‘Drumbo’ French’s contention that the band practiced obsessively without Van Vliet, spinning endless jams into what became the songs on the albums, inspired only by occasional surrealistic demands and stylistic suggestions from the Captain, who would then fit his words around the music accordingly, seems a lot more convincing. But even so, this should not denigrate in any sense the genius of Van Vliet’s central role in the creation of this music, of his corralling the talent of the musicians into the form of something completely new. Even assuming he did just blurt out his lyrics over the top on impulse, the lightning speed combinations of words and music on the album are nothing short of telepathic in their precision. What may initially sound like chaos reveals hidden meanings, endless collisions of imagery and mood that speak of a near insane attention to detail.

And the Captain’s words are simply breathtaking on this album – again, there’s nothing I can say to communicate their overall effect. If you can get all the aforementioned hurdy-gurdyness out of your system, then I think the stretch from “Pachuco Cadaver” through to “Human Gets Me Blues” can be seen to represent to represent some kind of utter apotheosis of beat poetry / free jazz inspired expression.

And it’s all so funny, and so joyous and absurdly horny too – every time I listen, some new line knocks me sideways, makes me laugh out loud. (“Here she comes walking / looking like a zoo”, “Her lovin’ make me so happy / if I smile I’ll crack my chin”, “her skin as smooth as a daisy / her teeth as clean as holes where the bees go in”).


I Love You You Big Dummy
Lo Yo Yo Stuff
Nowadays A Woman’s Gotta Hit A Man





As every fool know, “Lick My Decals Off Baby” and “Clear Spot” are freakin’ incredible albums too, even if I’m too exhausted by this point to really say much about them.


A Carrot Is As Close As A Rabbit Gets To a Diamond



Counter to what I said earlier about The Captain’s lack of compositional involvement in “Trout Mask..”, let it be said that some of my favourite tracks on the latter day Beefheart albums are the short, idiosyncratic, carefully structured instrumentals like this one.

I don’t know where you’d choose to file something like this if it stood alone from the more conventionally Beefheartian stuff on “Doc at the Radar Station”, but hopefully we can at least agree that it’s absolutely lovely.


Captain Beefheart’s 10 Commandments For Guitar Players

Ok, so clearly not a song as such, but this little internet perennial never ceases to amaze. Stuff like rule #9 is such a perfect example of unique, sideways thought patterns that inform Beefheart’s music. I mean, it just makes so much sense on a purely instinctive level, y’know? I always feel kinda bad for my guitar for not following that rule, crazy as it may seem. Like, on some level I’m sure it would benefit both of us if I put put in the effort to keep it comfortable.

I entirely respect and understand his ‘pressure cooker’ theory of hat-wearing too, for the record, and can see how essential such a method is to extracting pure Beefheartian fervour from a musician, even if my own preferred conception of musicianship favours the lazier, more relaxed and free-flowing pleasures of the uncovered head.

The rule about the ‘church key’ is great too. I use that phrase all the time (in my head).


My Head Is My Only House Unless It Rains



For all I’ve said above, this is probably my favourite Beefheart song. Such a simple, elegant, cosmic love song and hymn to the imagination. Ah Captain, ya big softy. Every time I put on “Clear Spot”, either this one or “Her Eyes Are a Blue Million Miles” makes me shed a tear.

Think of it as your reward for getting to the end of this post – well done everybody.

So long Don, and may your spirit live long.

Labels: Captain Beefheart, deathblog, The Magic Band, videos