captain beefheart is a miracle

fuck revenant and their overpriced, overpackaged box sets.

the only cd-rom i have is the chris marker one, "immemory." it's charming in its outdatedness, but the slowness of it is not very charming.

the revenant box--of course, yeah, i plunked down 80 bucks or whatever for the damned thing. glad i have it, the early demos are quite nice and the "inhouse" recordings of trout mask material sans vocals are pretty cool.

the invincibles, eh? i'll have to track down that song. i believe it--obviously beefheart's ideas came from somewhere. i've listened to his stuff for so long that it sounds normal to me...never understood how it is that people all worked up over rush or yes or that prog stuff don't hear the greatness of something like "dirty blue gene." guess 'cause he wasn't singing about "acceptably" fey subjects? i dunno. i return to "click clack" often, that's a great example of what is basically a simple idea taken to absurdly great heights. remember reading mike barnes' book on the captain and barnes talking about the impossible rhythmic complexity of that song. uh, count 1-2-3 and you got it there. those musical ideas are just plain fucking solid.

costello-beefheart: ok, i don't hear this myself, am! so explain...

Funny you should mention that: [Well, not 'YOU'...] I always thought that EC's "Uncomplicated" sounded like it coulda been on Doc At The Radar Station. Just something about the way the band plays it, grinding away at that one chord, the drums playing that one simple figure over and over. Plus that staccato railroad-spike percussion that was in the original mix, but not on the version I own (from Girls Girls Girls).

I know of no other Beefheartian aspects among EC's works, but I've never been a big Elvis fan. (Unfamiliar with 2/3 of his catalogue.)

(a) the drum sound of many post-mid-80s costello records
(b) the guitar sound of same
(c) elvis's vocal approach when it comes to rootsy material

not to say they sound essentially alike, or that this isn't but a small part of costello's work (the bacharach thing, for example, shows no trace of beefheart that i can tell).

There are several tracks of the harmonica/singing only stuff that he did for radio interviews in CD 5 of that boxset. I've said before on another thread but - I like the inhouse recordings but its not quite as exciting as hearing it with the captain's voice. I really should pull it out again.

'i return to "click clack" often, that's a great example of what is basically a simple idea taken to absurdly great heights. remember reading mike barnes' book on the captain and barnes talking about the impossible rhythmic complexity of that song. uh, count 1-2-3 and you got it there. those musical ideas are just plain fucking solid.'

The live version of that had me in fkn hysterics - I have footage of that from the John Peel doc on beefheart - the versh on the 'spotlight kid' is so much tamer I couldn't believe! I like 'Big joan sets up' on trout mask but again, the versh on that CD of 'grow fins' has finer sax playing (or its more 'free' ho ho, more balls on show maybe).

Also Minutemen owe lots to beefheart, not only Boon's undistorted guitar sound, but the way the band plays together. Also Kenny process team!!! gd on sasha for releasing their stuff.

I don't hear any Beefheart in the Tom waits I've heard apart from the voice - same with any Nick cave or PJ Harvey I've heard.

Agreed Julio--PJ gets something from Don but it's the *loudness* of her vocals. Waits--well, I've always been on the fence about Tom and his excursions into rhythm. He's good but I think even Waits would admit he's no Van Vliet.

its ornette in the way the band is arranged, right?

Loudness and vocals - howlin' wolf?

Really? "Swordfishtrombones"? Even the title's a rip-off/hommage. Beefheart was familiar with "Free Jazz" but the way he produced his music and the way it sounds are totally different from Ornette's.

(I really should get mike barnes' book on beefheart, maybe there's some info there)

I'll pull out the tom waits I have someday...

Acording to Zappa, Don refused to wear headphones, "hearing only vague leakage through the studio walls thus rendering him only slightly in sync with the actual track".

According to Don however, Zappa was asleep under the desk throughout the session, waking only at the end to be told, to his astonishment, "The record's finished, Frank".

Which one - if either - of these world-class self-mythologisers you choose to believe is, of course, entirely up to you.

For some reason, when I heared this, I thought it did not fit the rest of the album, varied as the album is. It was mike barnes' book that told me why...

When I said "produced" I didn't mean as in sound production but the way he created it

I think the strangest thing about The Blimp is that both Roy Estrada and Artie Tripp - the two members of the Mothers Of Invention who were jamming in Zappa's studio at the time (rehearsing a song called Charles Ives) while Jeff Cotton was reading those lyrics to Zappa over the 'phone and Zappa was recoring them - subsequently ended up in The Magic Band, where they were then able to occasionally reproduce the song live.

That may be so, but even if it is, Don must be one of an extremely small number of people to whom Frank might be compared in order to arive at this conclusion!

"Man, I worked for two of the worst people in the business - Zappa and that fucker, Vliet"

I think too that Beefheart's relationship to Ornette and to jazz in general is somewhat problematic. Van V had an essentially rock and roll attitude toward that music; he obviously took something from it but he took far more from the Impressions, from blues and from r&b in general. Part of the Beefheart myth is that his music had little to do with what came before, and again obviously he's in the line of Richard Berry, and pachuco rock and roll. There's some second-line on "Clear Spot," and "Safe as Milk" is an LA response to the rock of its time and to soul music. Thing is, the more I learn about music the more I see Beefheart as having affinities with the Meters or someone and not so much with Ornette. Van Vee's sax playing is loud and fun but as on what might well be the greatest screwed-up production of his career, the great "Flash Gordon's Ape," the sax playing pretty much ruins that track. The harmonica playing is another matter--he's about as good as anyone actually.

Art Tripp lives (well, as of late '01), on the Miss. Gulf Coast and is comfortable with male/female roles in the south, hoo boy:

Patrick Peterson 8/13/00 Biloxi, Miss. Sun Herald
Chiropractor from California has a song in his heart

A refugee from California has landed on the Coast.
Arthur Tripp, a chiropractor, fled Humboldt County in March and moved his business to Gulfport to avoid the inspections, regulations and political correctness that became oppressive.
"I couldn't take it another week," said Tripp, 55. "The government controls everything about your personal property."
In the 1960s, California had a reputation as a haven for personal expression, but the state has matured into a crowded, over-orderly and stifling society, Tripp said.
"You can't go anyplace in California and be free," he said. "The inmates are running the asylum."
Tripp owned 10 acres of undeveloped land 300 miles north of San Francisco and complained that he couldn't cut a tree or dig a hole without permission from the local government. After a complaint from a former tenant, government inspectors demanded that he pay for expensive tests on his water system, which he said were unnecessary.
"I had ownership, but the state had control," he said.
Since moving to the Coast, Tripp has run across few regulations to complicate his business or personal life. Coast residents, he said, still enjoy their personal freedom and aren't paranoid.
"It seems like people have more sense of liberty here," he said. "People are busy with their own lives. They're not worried about protecting themselves."
Tripp arrived on the Coast with a fascinating resume. Before he became a chiropractor in 1983, he was a percussionist with a symphony and a drummer with several avant-garde rock bands of the 1960s.
Tripp started music school in 1962 and played with the Cincinnati Symphony as a student. After moving to New York City, he met Frank Zappa and began playing with Zappa's band of classically trained rock musicians.
"There was a lot of improvisation," Tripp said. "I thought I'd died and gone to heaven."
The music business led Tripp to California, where he played with Captain Beefheart for four years. While Tripp was musically successful, he found that the business failed to offer financial stability. He briefly tried to work in his father's insurance business in Pittsburgh, but returned to California, where he eventually gave up music and entered chiropractor school while in his mid-30s.
"I just lost interest in music," he said.
After nearly 20 years working as a chiropractor in California, Tripp visited Gulfport about 18 months ago and found he liked the Coast because the residents and the government were willing to let him be.
Tripp also found the South's more traditional roles for men and women are more comfortable than liberated California lifestyles.
"Out there, men and women don't know what they're supposed to do," he said. "Everybody's offended about something."
After setting up his business in May, he began advertising and networking to build a practice. Patients often are surprised to learn of his musical background. He explains that while he no longer plays percussion instruments, the manual dexterity that built his musical career also helps him succeed as a chiropractor.
Said Tripp, "If you can play a xylophone, you can work on a spine."

Yet he was notorious for having no sense of timing!

just checking, pachuco => outsider rock n roll?

(also see "George Fell Into His French Horn," which unsurprisingly didn't make it to the new shiny SMiLE, but which also indicates how Wilson managed to "do Sun Ra" without trying to be Sun Ra, as such; though the low brass harmonies could be considered as Bob Graettinger via Stravinsky's symphonies)

Yes! I heard a Elvis Costello (not normally a fan) song on the radio that sounded a lot like Cap'n Beefheart recently. I need to find out what song it was.

One of these days, I wish I could get ambitious and write a huge essay all about that central paradox, how Trout Mask Replica's greatest achievement is its tragic flaw - how it'd be easier to like if it were easier to listen to. But there's not much chance of that, since critical consensus has been against TMR for many years now, and also because I'm no writer! Even tho it really REALLY is my favourite Beefheart, and one of my alltime top five. (I've said this before, so again: "Decals" would be #1 if it had the two-guitar lineup.)

Frank otoh would carefully and painstakingly re-write history so as to show Frank in a more favourable light.

So inarguably Don told "bigger" lies - but I think I'd be more inclined to trust him than Frank, because I think it is / would far easier to spot his wild fabrications than Frank's revisions.

I don't think I'd really want to have worked for either of the bastards 'though.

Isn't that the footage from Paris Bataclan '73 which is included on Disc 4 of the Grow Fins boxset?

you're right! I don't know how I missed that. it's been a few years since I really gave that box a going over.

thanks very, very much.

now I want the whole show.

listening to Best Batch Yet bootleg from 1981 -- towards the end of his performing career -- but omg it is smoking. so so so great. captain beefheart is a miracle.
www.themidnightcafe.org/?p=3554

thx for the tip - will listen in sometime.

Has this been posted here before? (And if not, why not?)

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

Don't think I've ever read an appraisal of any sort of Beefheart's saxophone-playing skillXOrs you know..

John French is v v dismissive of Beefheart's sax playing in his memoir - personally I love it, totally distinctive sound that FITS the music perfectly

I just looked and its 800 pages+! That aside, did you like the memoir? I hadn't heard of it.

Yeah I like his playing, has an odd feel, like cardboard cutout free playing in the way I suppose Beefheart references the Blue in the sound from his band and the voice his voice references Howlin' Wolf.

As you might guess from the page count, the French book badly needed an editor, and at times it's dispiriting to realise how little French and others failed to 'get' Beefheart's music ("If only Don had been just a little bit more commercial" is a pretty constant refrain). The Bill Harkelrod bk was a more approachable exposition of the basic theme - ie Don was really horrible to us - imho.

Sorry for my garbled 2nd sentence: trying to say there was perhaps a plasticky feel to some of his playing and vocals and sound of his band, yet all those elements also manage to sound organically worked through and interlocked together.

That's a shame re: French book. Saw him in a BBC doc and he seemed to enjoy Beefheart's music, and actually sounded quite proud of having been part of it. But it was an edited interview in a one-hour programme.

Guessing from some of Beefheart's albs from the mid-70s that the Don had his own struggles with his approachability to others too.

John French is v v dismissive of Beefheart's sax playing in his memoir

I thought everyone was!

Zoot Horn Rollo said that, of course, he had no idea what he was playing but that it worked very well on some tracks nonetheless, that seems fair. Also I remember Evan Parker being played a Beefheart drum/sax duo as part of an Invisible Jukebox thing in Wire and he didn't seem to notice that he was listening to a blithering amateur who was merely blowing air through holes (as Beefheart's playing was once described), not that he liked it, he said it was post-Ayler.

Was he, though?

I get the impression he'd been playing the sax for a very long time.

No, I don't think he started playing till 1968 (or possibly late '67)

(btw I like his playing - most of the time - "Ant Man Bee" is esp. good and does sound like he knows what he's doing)

Yeah, I think French sez that Beefheart only picked up the sax for the first time post-Safe As Milk.

I wish more people just picked up the sax and started "blowing air through holes". I mean, people do it with guitars all the time!

I certainly would if I had access to a sax

In my (untutored) experience, it is MUCH more difficult getting any kind of sound out a sax than it is is a guitar - my guess wld be that what Beefheart lacked in experience/knowledge he made up for in pure raw lung power.

ward's description of french's memoir is otm. it's an enjoyable but frustrating read - a large chunk of those 800 pages could have been edited out.

Strictly Personal is so great, phasing/whatever and all. "You gotta let the dying die/Let the lying lie"