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Captain Beefheart
Captain Beefheart
Without Captain Beefheart (born Don Van Vliet), you don’t get Tom Waits, Nick Cave, and arguably Jack White. He had an impact on new wave, punk, and alternative. His magna opus was 1969’s Trout Mask Replica. He once said in an interview, “I don’t know anything about music.” That is what it is all about. Kill your rock stars. Burn your music theory. It is all about what is inside you and what needs to come out. Describing Captain Beefheart’s music is difficult to describe as he borrowed from multiple genres and utilized multiple instruments pushing boundaries and breaking musical rules as he went. All of this was combined with a wide vocal range and bizarre lyrics that added to a musical experience that was different than anything else going on around him. Those who have listened to his music usually follow in two camps; those who become fans instantly and those who are shaking their heads trying to figure out what exactly they just heard. Although numerous musicians cite him as influential, trying to calculate that influence often proves to be difficult. Beefheart was frustrated with his first two albums, Safe as Milk from 1967 and Strictly Personal from the following year were inventive blues-rock records, but Beefheart had bigger ambitions. At that point, his group the Magic Band were a mostly democratic collective, and since Beefheart had less musical expertise than his colleagues, his odder suggestions were vetoed as too unconventional. “That really pissed him off,” said bassist Gary Marker. “[Because] he had all these ideas in his head and he had no way of getting them across to people.” To gain the control he needed to express his vision, Beefheart morphed the Magic Band into a kind of musical cult. Beefheart put a piano in the house the band was rehearsing in- despite not knowing how to play the piano- and banged out ideas, which a band member would then transcribe and assemble into tunes. The resulting pieces were more like puzzles than songs, giving different instruments conflicting time signatures and varying part lengths that had to somehow meet at specific points. French compared it to building a solid wall with bricks of unequal size. This unorthodox complexity forced the Magic Band to rehearse 12 hours or more a day, usually without Beefheart. Unfortunately, the captain passed away in 2010. His last album with the Magic Band, Ice Cream for Crow, which came out 38 years ago. So it's a little shocking to realize he was only 69, and spent so much of his life in musical silence. So if you want to learn about the Captain Beefheart story, there are lots of ways to do so. That's even truer since his passing, which has inspired many informative obituaries (try The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Village Voice for starters). Beefheart's structural innovations found its way into new branches of art-punk, while in the 90s, bands found Beefheart's skewed song structures and wry humor and made it their own. Recent examples are less abundant, though his growl persists in the White Stripes (who recorded covers for a 2000 Sub Pop single), his rhythmic density in Deerhoof's angular songs, and his slamming together of styles in Fiery Furnaces' hectic compositions. But as Barnes put it in his Beefheart primer for The Wire, "For someone so influential, his mark is usually only detectable in superficial traces in the music of his admirers. The paths he mapped towards a new musical language have rarely been explored and lie largely neglected." Grow Fins, the 1999 5-CD box of rarities and demos is a good place to dig deep. Otherwise I would point to the aforementioned Trout Mask Replica, his 1975 collaborative album with Frank Zappa titled Bongo Fury, or the "This Is Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band" playlist on Spotify.
Top Five Favorite Captain Beefheart Songs
5. Abba Zaba
4. Ashtray Heart
3. Her Eyes Are A Blue Million Miles
2. Mirror Man
1. China Pig
Captain Beefheart
Captain Beefheart
Without Captain Beefheart (born Don Van Vliet), you don’t get Tom Waits, Nick Cave, and arguably Jack White. He had an impact on new wave, punk, and alternative. His magna opus was 1969’s Trout Mask Replica. He once said in an interview, “I don’t know anything about music.” That is what it is all about. Kill your rock stars. Burn your music theory. It is all about what is inside you and what needs to come out. Describing Captain Beefheart’s music is difficult to describe as he borrowed from multiple genres and utilized multiple instruments pushing boundaries and breaking musical rules as he went. All of this was combined with a wide vocal range and bizarre lyrics that added to a musical experience that was different than anything else going on around him. Those who have listened to his music usually follow in two camps; those who become fans instantly and those who are shaking their heads trying to figure out what exactly they just heard. Although numerous musicians cite him as influential, trying to calculate that influence often proves to be difficult. Beefheart was frustrated with his first two albums, Safe as Milk from 1967 and Strictly Personal from the following year were inventive blues-rock records, but Beefheart had bigger ambitions. At that point, his group the Magic Band were a mostly democratic collective, and since Beefheart had less musical expertise than his colleagues, his odder suggestions were vetoed as too unconventional. “That really pissed him off,” said bassist Gary Marker. “[Because] he had all these ideas in his head and he had no way of getting them across to people.” To gain the control he needed to express his vision, Beefheart morphed the Magic Band into a kind of musical cult. Beefheart put a piano in the house the band was rehearsing in- despite not knowing how to play the piano- and banged out ideas, which a band member would then transcribe and assemble into tunes. The resulting pieces were more like puzzles than songs, giving different instruments conflicting time signatures and varying part lengths that had to somehow meet at specific points. French compared it to building a solid wall with bricks of unequal size. This unorthodox complexity forced the Magic Band to rehearse 12 hours or more a day, usually without Beefheart. Unfortunately, the captain passed away in 2010. His last album with the Magic Band, Ice Cream for Crow, which came out 38 years ago. So it's a little shocking to realize he was only 69, and spent so much of his life in musical silence. So if you want to learn about the Captain Beefheart story, there are lots of ways to do so. That's even truer since his passing, which has inspired many informative obituaries (try The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Village Voice for starters). Beefheart's structural innovations found its way into new branches of art-punk, while in the 90s, bands found Beefheart's skewed song structures and wry humor and made it their own. Recent examples are less abundant, though his growl persists in the White Stripes (who recorded covers for a 2000 Sub Pop single), his rhythmic density in Deerhoof's angular songs, and his slamming together of styles in Fiery Furnaces' hectic compositions. But as Barnes put it in his Beefheart primer for The Wire, "For someone so influential, his mark is usually only detectable in superficial traces in the music of his admirers. The paths he mapped towards a new musical language have rarely been explored and lie largely neglected." Grow Fins, the 1999 5-CD box of rarities and demos is a good place to dig deep. Otherwise I would point to the aforementioned Trout Mask Replica, his 1975 collaborative album with Frank Zappa titled Bongo Fury, or the "This Is Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band" playlist on Spotify.
Top Five Favorite Captain Beefheart Songs
5. Abba Zaba
4. Ashtray Heart
3. Her Eyes Are A Blue Million Miles
2. Mirror Man
1. China Pig
Even more impressive is how
Beefheart's approach persisted through lineup changes and stylistic detours.
The Magic Band actually started as a blues-rock outfit, scoring a West Coast
hit with a cover of Bo Diddley's "Diddy
Wah Diddy" and following it up with a 1967 debut LP, Safe as Milk that hinted at more
adventurous territory. That territory exploded into a universe of its own on
the band's most famous record, 1969's Trout Mask Replica, and the darker
follow-up, 1970's Lick My Decals Off, Baby. Beefheart leaned back to the commercial plane in the 70s, with results both
successful (1972's Clear Spot and The Spotlight Kid) and not
(1974's Bluejeans and Moonbeams and Unconditionally Guaranteed,
both suffering from the defections of the classic Magic Band lineup). But he
ended as strong as he began, with two 80s records (Doc at the Radar Station
and Ice Cream for Crow) that touched on the best of all eras, and
welcomed originals back into the fray. He made
unconventional art while steering clear of the studied and highbrow, priding
himself in being self-taught. His methods
were primitive too-- his preferred songwriting routine was to bang out abstract
ideas on a piano or sing them into a tape recorder, then enlist a band member
to transcribe the results and mold them into a song. On a capella Beefheart classics like "Orange
Claw Hammer" and "The Dust Blows Forward 'n the Dust Blows Back",
you hear Van Vliet hitting pause on the tape recorder and starting lines over
again. One signature Trout Mask Replica moment best demonstrates this
dynamic (see: "Pena"). If you've ever watched a band devolve into abstraction only to
suddenly shift into tight, complex focus-- from Faust to Boredoms to Animal
Collective-- well, they've probably listened to Beefheart.
It's...
Captain Beefheart
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