Captain Beefheart

Should read: "Trout Mask Replica" still SOUNDS like a ROCK album, it's produced to SOUND like a rock album not something esoteric and avant-garde.

(Freudian Slip)

Anyway, I even quite like "Unconditionally Guaranteed" and "Bluejeans and Moonbeams" - so what do I know?

"Bellerin' Plain" is another electricfying track.

hahaha!

yup.

must get doc as well. its criminal that i haven't heard this yet.

I rank the Beefheart albums thusly:

1) Decals
2) Trout Mask
3) Strictly Personal
3) Clear Spot
4) Doc
5) Crow
6) Safe as Milk
7) Spotlight Kid
8) Mirror Man

I haven't heard "Unconditionally Guaranteed" or "Bluejeans and Moonbeams." I suspect they're not nearly as bad as everyone says, but I won't mind being wrong on that score.

Whoever said that "Decals" doesn't rock is insane. "Doctor Dark" is one of the rockinist songs EVAH. Plus the title track? Come ON! I do love TMR, but it's hard for me to swallow in one go. Plus, some of the instrumental 'house' versions of the TMR songs available on the "Grow Fins" boxset are more groovin' than the Zappa studio versions, particularly "Hobo Chang Ba."

Trout Mask .. genious, masterpice, etc.. but I think it sounds like a late 60's psychedelic album (which it is...) .But I mean, it sounds dated & sounds like he was trying to be weird.. Decals seems more *?sincere?* (not sure if that's the word I want...)

...Al Johnson of U.S. Maple.

Stuff like 'Doc' on the other hand incorporated the weirdness much better, taking the music somewhere else, instead of putting the weirdness into music. I dunno - maybe it stems from my total disinterest in da bluuues, whereas I dig Doc's contemporay rock base, on an atonal tip

the time signatures in beefheart are not 4/4 like in blues but they are not quite the same. the way the instruments 'grate' against one another in TMR aren't like in a blues record. that's even before you get to the field recording shit.

the blues is at the heart of TMR but to call it simply a blues rec is to kind of simplify things a bit.

So amend my list to add "Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller)" at #9.

'shiny beast' are the half-hearted attempts to re-record everything and I'll agree it's a bit tame, but the original 'bat chain puller' has moments that rival anything. 'brickbats' alone.

'Doc at the Radar Station', with its leaner more polished sound, still has a very angular feel but seems more informed by Zappa's take on XX century atonal music than Coleman style free-jazz (just listen to those instrumentals on Doc)

Yeah, like Zappa informed Beefheart's music one iota.

hey colin not logged in: fair enuff so why did you say that ''It's all blues'' (I mean from what you're saying it is blues + x something).

I rank them:
1-Decals
2-Doc
3-TMR
4-Clear Spot
5-Safe as Milk
6-Ice Cream
7-Spotlight Kid
8-Shiny Beast
9-Strictly Personal
10-Mirror Man
11-Bluejeans & Moonbeams
12-Unconditionally

I've listened to him a lot and I couldn't tell you what it is or what it isn't. There is something incomplete about a lot of it, which isn't a bad thing; the production is almost always bad, except on the last 3 and "Clear Spot." "Decals" really suffers from the shitty bass and drum sound, since the bass and drum playing on that one is amazing. I regard "Decals" as the best because it's the most concise and focused. "Doc" sounds flat (esp. on the Caroline CD I have) but "Dirty Blue Gene" pretty sums up what I like about Beefheart, and overall I think the words on that one are his best by far. Only thing that makes it less than perfect is his voice--he's still funny but the old power and range just ain't there any more.
Zappa once said that CB had a bad sense of rhythm. FZ generally makes me urp but he's right in this case. The weird thing about Beef is the way the music works against itself; there's something horribly thwarted in a lot of it and you sense he's just impatient. The thing that saves it, usually, is the sense as well that he's aware of it but can do nothing about it except to mock his own impulses, constantly, and only occasionally does something really unifed and fairly un-neurotic emerge, like "Click Clack" or the "Clear Spot" album or the great "Best Batch Yet." But Beef's bad rhythm is not really bad in the sense that ordinary folks have bad rhythm--it's more like Howlin' Wolf's slightly off sense of what's happening, metrically, and I've always thought that Beef internalized some of this, and actually did a very strange and cool thing by internalizing all the wrong and oblique aspects of "blues" and came out with what he came out with.

-- J

No--I like it a lot too and it's cool as a response to various things happening at the same time (Beatles, blues revival shit, etc.). In many ways it's his most rockin' album before "Clear Spot."

sounds OK to me.

I actually didn't realize he was in such poor physical health by the time I knew his music (i.e. around the turn of the century). I knew he had health issues, but I finally saw this film from 1993, apparently his last public appearance of sorts, and it's clear he wasn't going to return to performing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwytKykXbpM

iirc he quit performing (and music) specifically to devote his time to painting, irregardless of his health. the gallery that sold his work told him that if he wanted to be taken seriously as an artist he would need to do it exclusively.

I think it had a lot to do with his health. Wasn't his condition why he lived out in the desert, as he would be more comfortable in that kind of heat?

I think Richard Strange had a similar thing, I recall him saying the only time he felt comfortable was in a phone box in the middle of a heatwave.

He lived in coastal northern California in his later years, not the desert.

wiki:

He exhibited only few of his paintings because he immediately destroyed any that did not satisfy him.

and yeah he died in Arcata! as wet as it gets.

Well, when he quit music after "Ice cream for crow" that's when I meant

Once the money from the art started coming in he moved to the coast basically.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/c16htc/50_years_ago_today_captain_beefheart_and_his/ercoua6/?context=3

"I cared for Don Van Vliet during my clinical rotation as a nursing student in the hospital the week before he passed away at Mad River Hospital. It was a surreal experience to wash his junk. I was the only person who knew who he was while he was a patient."

holy shit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1bqBXfrxio

Newly discovered footage from a 72 Beefheart show in Paris. Looks like Elliot Ingbar, Bill Harkelroad, and Mark Boston on guitars, Roy Estrada on bass, and Art Tripp on drums.

Nice angles!

The Magic Band are wearing the same outfits as from the German TV appearance:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpHgG4jILa0

How many other drummers have worn a monocle?

...or panties as a doo-rag?

...or panties as a doo-rag?

― imperial frfr (Steve Shasta)

it's actually pretty common in japanese media

anyway glad to see some footage of this gig show up

the audio from their '72 "pop deux" appearance has circulated for a while... i had a tape of it back in the '90s. "click clack" from the broadcast has also circulated on video for a long-ass time.

the tracklist on my audio copy:

"don speaks" (0:11)
hair pie: bake iii (mark boston solo) (0:51)
alice in blunderland (3:36)
abba zaba (3:00)
interview (part 1) (1:56)
click clack (2:54)
my human gets me blues (1:22, only end section - not cut, this is just all they played for whatever reason)
interview (part 2) (1:47)
i'm gonna booglarize you baby (3:14)
interview (part 3) (2:38)
spitball scalped a baby (drum-sax duet) (1:14)
golden birdies (2:08)

the interviews are overdubbed in french and weren't on the copy i originally had on tape

would be nice to see the whole video show up some day... whenever INA gets around to posting it i guess. INA does a really good job of taking care of their archive, so i'm sure the whole thing is around.

that "Click Clack" video was on the Grow Fins box (and it totally rules ofc)

in other exciting Beefheart news, thanks to tyler for hipping me to this stunning new remaster/"demix" of Safe As Milk, plus tons of bonus tracks including some I had never heard before.

https://www.profstoned.com/2025/04/captain-beefheart-his-magic-band-safe.html

oh nice, i don't often keep track of prof stoned's stuff but they do good work