TS: Captain Beefheart vs. Tom Waits

You need to take in mind historial context. Beefheart came around before Waits, which makes him, if not better, than less derivitive. While I'm sure Waits listened to Beefheart records, there's no way Beefheart listened to Waits records. So Beefheart wins, end of story. But God Love Waits, a true fucking original, in every way, and don't listen to these glib assholes who have never created jack shit and sit around pulling they're pud over who's better, who's best. Oh, wait, that's you. Never mind.

Love,

Some guy you don't know.

What makes you think Waits wasn't listening to Beefheart during the years he was making Small Change and Closing Time and the rest? I mean, there's just as much Harry Partch and Spike Jones in all the later records; the only explicitly Beef-ian album Waits has ever made, to my ear, is Bone Machine. And the singing voice is just as much Howlin' Wolf and Louie Armstrong as CB.

Quite apart from the obvious musical and other similarities that became evident from that point onwards, the fact that prior to recording Swordfishtrombones Tom had never made a point of eagerly trying to get to meet Don and anxiously seeking his approval for one of his recordings.

Of course he didn't get it.

Whom he met on the set of "One From The Heart", where she was working as a script editor at the time.

QED

Why should you care who discovered pennicilin, who was the first person to land on the moon, who discovered America or who was the first person to land on the moon?

I dunno, maybe so you don't look like an ignorant prick?

In spite of this, Columbus's discovery (or re-discovery, if you prefer) is rightly regarded as the most historically important, and will continue to be. That is because, unlike the others, Columbus inaugurated permanent large-scale two-way commerce between the Old World and the New. Previous discoveries were so little known that even the best educated Europeans were unaware of the existence of America prior to Columbus. The "Admiral of the Ocean Sea," unlike any of his predecessors, changed the world.

http://www1.minn.net/~keithp/discover.htm

Again, I hear lots of other people just as much as (if not more than) Beefheart in Waits's 1980s-and-onward music. The similarities may be "obvious" to you, but not nearly so much to me. I'm not saying they're not there, just that they're not as big a part of the total package as you seem to be asserting. (And Beefheart's massively overrated anyhow.)

I'm not disputing that - merely stating that the influence of Beefheart (and Harry Partch, who was himself an obvious influence on Beefheart) is very - and suddenly - evident in Tom's works from 1982 onwards.

"I'm not saying they're not there, just that they're not as big a part of the total package as you seem to be asserting."

I don't think I've give any indication of how much of an influence Beefheart was (I'm not sure I'm aware of any means of measuring "influence" in any case) merely that it's evident that Tom started adopting certain (I would suggest) unmistakeable Beefheartian traits (the name "Swordfishtombones" was conceived as a partial homage / reference to Trout Mask Replica) from that point onwards.

"(And Beefheart's massively overrated anyhow.)"

Massively overrated by whom? Tom Waits?

I've listened to Beefheart for years and while I'm more comfortable with what he did, I still am not quite sure what the bottom line is with that music. Probably a lot of it was John French and the way they organized that guitar playing around his particular style of drumming. So I don't know, I used to be such a Beefheart devotee, and I still think he's great, but maybe there are some unfinished ideas there, maybe some of it doesn't really work that well? But shit, he did it, got it done, and it seems quite an achievement to me, whereas Waits seems a bit more non-essential. I can listen to "Clear Spot" or some of the others in a casual mood; I can't say the same for Waits.

Critical consensus (apparently, Francis Davis excepted, though I haven't read the piece).

I agree with edd that Waits is working a persona - I talked about it at length in a Wire cover story in 2002.

Why should you care who discovered pennicilin, who was the first person to land on the moon, who discovered America or who was the first person to land on the moon?

I dunno, maybe so you don't look like an ignorant prick?

-- Stewart Osborne (stewart.osborn...), June 11th, 2005.

Um. Incorrect, and sorta out of line, in my opinion. For two reasons:

A) Background knowledge is not the be all and end all of the listening experience. Life would be pretty dull if we had to rank our musical tastes according to chronological order.

B) The who-influenced-who game is almost always inconclusive and subjective. We can all probably agree on who discovered pennicillin, but I doubt we can find agreement on most of the purported influences in music.

So I guess what I'm saying is that you can take pennicillin without knowing who invented it, and you can listen to Tom Waits (or whoever) without "knowing" what his influences are/aren't.

For the record, I love them both, but give a slight edge to Tom...although I'd rather not choose, to be honest.

B) The who-influenced-who game is almost always inconclusive and subjective. We can all probably agree on who discovered pennicillin, but I doubt we can find agreement on most of the purported influences in music.

I agree entirely on both counts - but why come onto a message board called "I Love Music" if you're not interested in examining such things and don't expect most of the other people on that board to be interested in such things? If we're not interested in where musicians / genres come from and how they inter-relate with other musicians/ genres, what do we have to discuss? In particular, is there not some sort of connection recognised and implicit - if not indeed a direct invitation to discuss that connection - in a thread with a title that invites people to "Take Sides" between two musicians?

"I agree with edd that Waits is working a persona"

Tom Waits is an actor.... don't most performers "work a persona" to some extent 'though, even that persona is only an exaggerated caricature of themselves?

And on the persona angle - OTM. The nature of performance is inherently linked to persona. I used to have constant arguments with one of my college radio co-dj's about this in relation to Pearl Jam. His take was that Eddie Vedder was utterly "genuine" (this was around the time of the first album, to give him credit). Mine was that that whole "genuine" schtick was just another stance, like Springsteen's everyman, etc.

x-post: Stormy, i'd be interested to know why you think Waits is a charlatan.

Me too John - I just don't understand what such people would think they'd be likely to get out of a board called I Love Music!

Don or Tom?

Don may be hungry....

Bingo!

"Beatle Bones 'N Smokin' Stones" did it for me, if you just want one song...if you don't like that, keep digging. It's worth it.

-- John Justen (johnjuste...), June 11th, 2005 7:27 PM.

i love beefheart, but i find waits voice to be annoying. *shrug* every time i hear his music i cringe. but it's not his skill or lack thereof, it's just his "waits-ness"

I am far from a fan of Tom Waits. It's more like I absolutely hate Captain Beefheart and his "music"

More like forcefully unlistenable (and that goes for the early R&B stuff as well)

"The roughest diamond in the mine, his musical inventions are made of bone and mud. Enter the strange matrix of his mind and lose yours. This is indispensable for the serious listener. An expedition into the centre of the earth, this is the high jump record that'll never be beat, it's a merlot reduction sauce. He takes da bait. Dante doing the buck and wing at a Skip James suku jump. Drink once and thirst no more."

Beefheart wins, but I'm a liar if I say I'm much of a Beefheart fan, either.

TW: That was my wife. She had the best record collection – she thought that I was going to have a really great record collection and was sorely disappointed. I hadn’t really listened to Captain Beefheart before, even though I worked with Zappa. I was such a one-man show – very isolated in what I allowed myself to be exposed to. I ‘was’ like an old man, stuck in my ways. She helped me rethink myself. Because my music up to that point was still in the box – I was still in the box; hadn’t unwrapped myself yet.She let me take my shoes off and loosen up – back then I was still wearing suits to the park. I think from that point on I really tried to grow. Growth is scary, because you’re a seed and you’re in the dark and you don’t know which way is up , and down might take you down further into a darker place, you know ? I felt like that: I don’t know which way to grow. I don’t know what to incorporate into myself. What do you take from your parents ? What did you come in with ? What did you find out when you got here ? I was sorting all that out.

It's a fine discussion point, it just has no bearing on who is 'better' or more worthwhile.

thanks for the welcome though, guy

While it maybe won't change your personal opinion on him, i think if any record you pick up has absolutely no refference points and leaves you stunned and thinking that you just listened to an entirely new kind of music, than it is de facto better than the record that comes out latter where you can pick it up and say "oh, this reminds of that record that blew my mind. enjoyable". Waits has always seemed like one of those high school senior bands that you pick up cuz you think it sounds really cool and difrent and you can listen to it while reading a collection of beat poetry and smoking ciggarrettes in a coffehouse. and then 2 years later you realize that he doesn't really write songs that well and there's only so many "shady character scetches" you can take squeezed into almost exactly the same framework over and over again. to me, Doc At The Radar Station is 100x more accesible than anything Waits ever did. Waits has no replay value for me for some reason.

As for a crash course for the Beefheart begginer, I would suggest just buying Trout Mask Replica and listening to it about 5 times in a row. Then go to sleep and listen to it 5 more times when you wake up. When I first heard that record I thought it was just gibberish, but by the 5 or 6 time it turned out the songs were actually getting stuck in my head. and then they didn't leave for about a month.

That's funny because the reason I've never been able to get into Waits is that I was introduced to him by a teacher of mine in high school (senior year too). A year later I discovered Beefheart and became a huge fan immediately but I still haven't ever bothered to pick up any Waits albums.

"and Geir's fandom seals the deal....
I am far from a fan of Tom Waits. It's more like I absolutely hate Captain Beefheart and his "music"

-- Geir Hongro (geirhon...), June 12th, 2005."

and then, I was brought back to reality. Thanks Geir!

see, this paragraph and its conceits pretty much sums up all the reasons i'm a bit wary of tom waits. but again, i should trust my friends' judgement and take the plunge.

I feel better now. Pabst Blue Ribbon will do that for a fella...

xpost

elvis costello (esp. "blood and chocolate") shows a big beefheart influence too, whatever you think of elvis costello. (i suspect many beefheart fans wouldn't like him.)

No problemo.

Thanks for introducing yourself in such a carefully considered, understated, unconfrontational and uncontroversial manner.

Which one was it? Trout Mask Replica?

What were 1st, 2nd, etc.?

I did indeed Stormy, I was merely trying, in my own strange way (and obviously unsuccessfully!), to point out that the same criticism ("too concerned in presenting as "weird" without actually being weird.") arguably could be / actually has been levelled at Don at times.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/omm/story/0,13887,1439272,00.html

but yes, beefheart has some easy ref points!

Bands that sound a bit like the magic band circa '68 - '70: some no-wave, esp ut (live, but NOT studio, material) and dna (the magic band sounds improvised though it wz rigorously thought over), and kenny process team.

I actually think this comment Christgau made a while back, reviewing the "Dust Blows Forward" best-of, was good--he compared the overall strategy to the Band, and I think that's fairly canny myself. And James Brown, in a way--two different ways of playing two guitars off each other, you know. I also thought Charlie Gillett's comment in an old review of "Decals" was good--Beef as some kind of clumsy old vaudeville blues guy.

Re Geir--well, I hear "Safe as Milk" and "Clear Spot" and "Spotlight Kid" as pretty accessible music; I have always told people to start with "Clear" and "Spotlight"--"Click Clack" is a pretty great starting point, fairly insane but you can hear what's going on there immediately. The analysis of that song in Mike Barnes's book was something that kinda alterted me to the fact that maybe Barnes wasn't really listening--he was confused by the time signature, the first part of that song's just in 3 that sounds like 4, which is ingenious as hell. And there's some melodic stuff tucked away in many of his songs that should, in theory, mollify Geir, but of course it ain't gonna.

So definitely BEEFHEART! BEEFHEART! BEEFHEART!

Ry Cooder (who worked with Beefheart on Safe As Milk) has described Don's vision at that time as being a desire to meld the blues with "that whole Ornette Coleman Free Jazz thing", and I reckon he was pretty much OTM - although there was more to it than that.

And indeed the Beefheart haters - all of which seems strange to me, as pretty much all the people I've encountered previously who have like one have seeemed to like the other to a greater or lesser degree - including the entire membership of the Fire Party, who voted Tom their second favourite "other act"; with only Frank Zappa (perhaps predictably) getting more votes.

http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~bgwaters/firepartyfavourites.html

I understand that one of The White Stripes' first releases was an EP called "Party Of Special Things To Do" (title lifted from Beefheart) on which they covered both "China Pig" and "Ashtray Heart".

beefheart is just so much more complex and interesting a character, a 'personality,' and that's even before you listen to his music. which, by the way, is not 'difficult' unless you're fucking stupid. this sentence:

And James Brown, in a way--two different ways of playing two guitars off each other, you know.

has a lot of truth to it. 'moonlight on vermont' off trout mask is outright funky, bros.

See, that's the thing -- I really don't hear free jazz (or, for that matter, Free Jazz) there! I mean, obviously what Don himself and The Mascara Snake were doing bears a superficial relationship to the most squiggly free, but I mean there isn't anything that sounds too directly like 60s Ornette, Cecil Taylor, or even like Ayler or Coltrane's Stellar Regions. In fact, I'd venture to say that there are occasions where Coleman has actually bitten Van Vliet, rather than the reverse; I've got Prime Time's Tone Dialing, and there are aspects of the band integration that really remind me of "Pachuco Cadaver".

Really? Apart from the obvious skronky sax blowing (which I agree with Edd, doesn't feel like a focus or an important part of the work) I still think there are some pretty obvious structural similarities between Beefheart and free jazz.

First of all, if you read interviews from that period, Don was talking about the idea of getting away from a the standard rock beat into something more rhythmically free. He put it in terms of getting away from Mama's heartbeat and I think even in the earliest bluesy Magic Band stuff you can hear a difference between the rhythmic freedom the band was starting to pursue and the strict, monotonous blues backbeat that some of their more traditionalist contemporaries. Not that they abandoned a pulse completely but then neither did Ornette in 90% of his work.

I think it's helpful to think of the earlier Ornette records which operated in more of a harmonically-out bop realm rather than an album like "Free Jazz." I think the relationship between "The Shape of Jazz to Come" and traditional bebop is similar to the relationship between pre-Decals Magic Band and traditional electric blues. A song like Kandy Korn takes a typical blues structure and begins to push it out toward more otherworldly melodies.

Finally, I think you can draw a parallel between some of the riffing and repeated motifs on Trout Mask and the repeated and permutated folk motifs used by Albert Ayler (and by extension Coltrane). To many listeners, Troutmask or Ayler might sound like complete chaos at first but the broad melodic motifs act as sort of a hook. The repeated lines also provide a loose harmonic framework in the absence of a fixed set of chord changes and work as a jumping off point for the freer (free-er?) improvisations. So while Ayler was drawing his melodic themes from gospel or folk sources, I think Beefheart did a similar thing with blues riffs and blues-rock cliches.

Pretty common from what I can tell.

most tom waits fans probably don't have much time for nick cave.

Probably true among certain folks. I think there's a fanbase/mindset out here that valorizes Waits as something separate from much else in general.

We've

there is some repeating riff on dancing in your head that bugs the hell out of me. i mean, it really annoys me. which is why i never play it. ornette was cool, but i was never really down with him. i'm actually pretty trad when it comes to jazz. i just wanna play dolphy (no, not that trad) and lee morgan rekkerds all day.

and yeah, the original Magic Band was unbeatable.