Taking Sides : Trout Mask Replica vs Clear Spot

There are two versions of the song about - a "dirty" one and a "clean" one which excises that naught F word.

Oh, and on the TS front, Clear Spot all the way. TMR really gives me a headache, apart from Well.

1. Trout Mask Replica
2. Safe As Milk
3. Shiny Beast
4.= Doc At The Radar Station
4.= Lick My Decals Off Baby
6. Clear Spot
7. Ice Cream For Crow
8. Spotlight Kid
9. Mirror Man
10. Strictly Personal
11. Unconditionally Guaranteed
12. Blue Jeans & Moonbeams

If you want to include the unreleased original Bat Chain Puller it would go between Clear Spot and Ice Cream For Crow and if you want to include The A&M Sessions it would go between Spotlight Kid and Mirror Man.

Not that I've ever given this much thought you understand.

This is what I think of the Unconditionally Guaranteed and Bluejeans & Moonbeams

Over the weekend, a long journey with a compilation tape, and now the kids love "Yellow Brick Road"...

It's a shame they aren't selling Abba Zabba bars (any more?) in this country - we could have had whole generations of school children growing up singing Beefheart!

I'd take TMR out of the two, I think that when it rocks, it rocks harder.

(I still look younger than he did on Trout Mask, in my opinion)

He'd have been 41 +/- a year so < eek! > I'm around the same age myself!

Well, apart from the fact that (unless there's something you're not telling me) we haven't actually recorded a dozen-or-so extraordinarily wonderful, innovative and highly respected albums and haven't established our credentials as artists to the extent that we now have highly lucrative careers ahead of us, obviously.

Well, not so far.

(With a newly recorded version of a song with new girlfriend's name in it...)

Now I'm not sure whether to hope that it is a lot better than the CD ('cos that'll mean I haven't wasted my money) or that it isn't ('cos that'll mean I'm going to have to fork out for Clear Spot on vinyl in case that's better than the CD too).

I listen to Clear Spot and Doc more than any of the others. Decals is the best overall but I am not always in the mood for Flash Gordon's Ape. I took the saxes off that one once just for fun, and without them it's quite possibly the single most amazing thing they ever did.

Safe as Milk and Trout Mask kind of stand outside the rest of his work, in my opinion; the former is a great '60s pop album; the latter is, I'm not sure what that is to this day. The best of TMR is so incredible as an example of controlled hysteria that I'm always tempted to put it at the top of my list. Clear Spot is not all that normal; I've always wondered if soul musicians ever listened to it. What would Allen Toussaint think about it? I once put in Clear Spot and Lee Dorsey's Yes We Can in the changer--very similar records actually, altho Lee does sing better. Too bad the Captain couldn't have gotten the Meters after the Magic Band broke up.

And right, the CD mastering on Spotlight/Spot is horrible, and the liner notes, ditto.

I'm over my allowed limit so it's going to be gone fairly soon...

Indeed, it is wonderful

(have to remove by end of today)