Captain Beefheart: Grow Fins (review)
Mammoth 5 CD box of outtakes and live material stretch ing from 1965 to 1982. Includes CD Rom video material from four shows, including two cuts from the famous 1968 Magic Band performance on Cannes beach, many photos and essays from David Fricke and longest standing Magic Band member John French.
Seventeen years after his withdrawal from the music indus try, Captain Beefheart remains an enigmatic, contradictory fig ure: eco-freak, control freak, visionary, charlatan, ban dleader, painter, avant-garde hero, would be pop star, genre origi nator and mutator, the original high voltage man. His si lence has only added to a legend which rests less on culti vated mys tique than on the genuine affection in which he is held. Covering the full span of his recording career, “Grow Fins” shines the archival light on a figure who, for once, stands up to the glare.
Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band never translated their major innovations into record sales. In the sixties, Don Van Vliet learned and lived the rule book, then shredded it comprehensively: one result was a sequence of twelve albums that have had a musical and cultural influence disproportionate to their sales. Some of this came out during 1976 and 1977 – most notably in the early, rocking but discordant Pere Ubu singles, and the language used by Johnny Rotten with the Sex Pistols (‘old fart’, the ‘Japan is a dishpan’ dis in “New York”) – when a new generation was remaking rock from the ground up.
Van Vliet’s packaging as a full-blown psychedelic monster remains a bone of contention, viz the rock lore about the mix of “Strictly Personal” (for the record, I like the phas ing) and Zappa’s freak angle on “Trout Mask Replica”, but the simple fact was that it was a great boy hook. For those who wanted weird, Captain Beefheart was it: lots of mut terings, bush recordings, speaker-blowing vo cals, surreal poetry (as it was thought of at the time: now it just seems logical), perceptual and ecological con cerns, great lunging band performances, perfect one-liners. Still sounds pretty good to me, and most of the time, it does.
Weird is only part of the story, however. Let us not forget that the Captain was a recording artist within the heart of the West Coast music industry and that he, like anyone who deals with big companies, wanted the rewards of this often difficult interaction: pop success. And, yet, at the same time, he had these sounds in his head: something that would mix hard blues and R&B with free jazz, with enough space for him to say what was on his mind and play around with the way he looked. And, in 1965, pop was changing fast enough to grant outcasts like Don Van Vliet a platform, even a small taste of success.
The first five, early 1966 cuts here show the first Magic Band shedding their Brit Invasion influences: just listen to Them’s “Baby Please Don’t Go” (number 1 on KRLA in autumn 1965) and the way that Van Morrison sings ‘my baby’s leav ing…on the midnight train’ to hear confirmation that the Howlin’ Wolf growl could be transferred to white R&B. In fast, tricksy pieces like “Here I Am…” and “Triple Combination” you can hear the Beefheart of the future; “I’m Glad” shows an early mastery of the soul style, but the real find here is “Obeah Man” – an explicit homage to and im mersion within black American magic, mojo hands, con queroo and all.
Slipstreaming into the harder edged sounds of 1966, the Magic Band got teen attention and KRLA Beat press for their “Diddy Wah Diddy” 45, but the emerging San Fran ciscan scene offerred another opportunity to experiment, at once with harder blues – like “Tupelo” and Howlin’ Wolf’s “Evil” – and genre-busting stompers like their version of Wolf’s paranoid “Somebody In My Home”, the first sign of the monster blues drone that the Magic Band would chase over the next two years. And dig the Captain’s affected Brit In vasion accent as he insists, ‘doncha kneeew’.
Then it all came together. In his “San Francisco Nights”, Gene Sculatti describes the unveiling of the new Magic Band in late 1966: ‘in pre-New Wave plastic wraparound sunglasses, tassle-topped Shriner’s fez and a braided ban dleader’s corset straight out of “The Music Man”… Beefheart barked out an entire new repertoire whose only link to his earlier blues were the dissembled chords, shuddering and clashing in a brilliant…cacophony. The Captain Beefheart the world would know arrived in San Francisco then, nursery rhyming “Abba Zaba” and premiering “Kandy Korn” by pelting the audience with handful after handful of the yellow and orange candy’.
Recorded in 1966 and released in early 1967, “Safe As Milk” remains a towering achievement: an avant-garde pop masterpiece from the time when they had only just started to make them. Along with the first couple of Love and Mothers’ albums and ‘The Velvet Underground and Nico”, “Safe As Milk” had a huge impact in the UK, largely thanks to radio play by John Peel; don’t forget that it was hardly possible to get any actual San Franciscan albums until the end of 1967. It also helped to initiate the phe nomenon memorably described by Bob Christgau as ‘semipopular’ music: music that was meant to sell, didn’t so much, but which benefitted from a rapidly expanding music economy to find a strong niche. And that was where the Captain was privileged – and cursed – to remain.
Mainly, however, “Safe As Milk” rocks harder than al most any other contemporary record – the VU and the first Moby Grape album being the only other contenders. It still sounds totally now, one of the best albums ever made. The outtakes are rougher, bluesier, less produced than the finished record: only the 1965 “Call On Me” is radically different, with its delightfully ludicrous vocals and sappy Byrds style back-up prefiguring the Captain’s sweet, unjustly maligned “Unconditionally Guaranteed” phase. All have that yearn ing, breakthrough quality that could easily have found a wider audience if perversity and bad luck – detailed in John French’s notes – hadn’t nixed a projected Monterey appearance.
Disc 2 mostly features live material from 1968, when the third Magic Band were touring the “Strictly Personal” album and its (then) shadow twin, “Mirror Man”. (Those purists who want the non-phased “Strictly Personal” are directed to Sequel’s “I May Be Hungry But I Sure Ain’t Weird”.) This is the kind of epic blues drone drama that I could listen to all day: two different versions of “Electricity”, a four-minute “Kandy Korn”, “You’re Gonna Need Somebody On Your Bond” (a/k/a “Tarotplane Blues”) with a snatch of “Everybody Needs Somebody To Love”, a “Rollin’ N’ Tumblin’” not a moment too long at 11 minutes, and a real find – a pretty new “Mirror Man” outtake based on the modal bass for John Coltrane’s “India”, “Korn Ring Finger”, which celebrates ‘a funny old man smoking golden cane’.
Disillusioned by his three-time loser experience with record companies (A&M, Buddah, Blue Thumb), Van Vliet was determined to do it his way the next time. Re leased on Frank Zappa’s Straight label (along with Wild Man Fischer and the GTO’s), “Trout Mask Replica” makes it three (aesthetic) winners in a row: a wild-sound ing 28 track double album with no pop or psychedelic traces, its free jazz harshness held to gether by the force of Van Vliet’s outcast rants, undiluted for the first time. “Trout Mask” is a collaged masterpiece, with its field recordings, docu dialogue (‘fast and bul bous’, ‘that’s right, the Mascara Snake: also, a tinned teardrop’) and sonic source variety (like the cheap tape snap throughout “The Dust Blows For ward”).
In his book on his time as Zoot Horn Rollo, “Lunar Notes”, Bill Harkleroad describes the Magic Band methodology, organised and enforced by Van Vliet through relentless practice: ‘it was both polyphonic and polyrhythmic – with some repeated shapes. We would play in different time signatures, often at the same time….you’d hold on to your part for dear life against the thrust of what everybody else was doing.’ Nobody had done this before, although many have tried since, yet the scripted nature of this apparently chaotic music is reaffirmed by the ‘alternative’, first recording of the album on disc 3.
What you get here is 15 out of 28 cuts in a primarily in strumental form. With different edits of the documentary material used on the finished record, this “Trout Mask” sounds like one long run-through, with no editing, no recitals, and few Beefheart vocals. There’s some mildly amusing studio chat (‘Are we waiting for something ?’ ‘Us’ ‘Uh ?’ ‘Us. But it’s all right’) and some moments of sharp beauty but there’s also a lot of noodling – the kind of ‘anxious shrapnel’ reflecting Harkleroad’s bleak de scrip tion of the Trout House regime at this time. When the distorted blues tones of “China Pig” eventually come through, it’s a huge relief, although skronk fans will have revelled in the previous seventy or so minutes.
This and the 20 minute playback chat preserved on the audio portion of CD 4 take as given that “Trout Mask Replica” was the Captain Beefheart pinnacle: I admire its rigor and passion, but love “Safe As Milk” and “Strictly Personal” more. In some ways, “Trout Mask” was a disas trous commercial move, presenting Beefheart as a kind of GTO/ Wild Man Fischer oddity that, for all the trappings, he patently was not. Its severity proved unre peatable, and the next three Magic Band records show a dilution (if you’re a TMR booster) or a slow relaxation into the Captain’s previous blues drone/ spoken word modes, with the deliberately female friendly “Clear Spot” (Harkleroad: ‘Women do not listen to “Trout Mask Replica” – at least, very very few’) as the highlight.
With “Clear Spot”‘s comparative failure, the rest is wrong moves, missed cues, a partial return and eventual silence. The Captain’s reputation for weirdness returned to haunt him when he made the pop move on the Mercury albums, “Unconditionally Guaranteed” and “Bluejeans and Moon beams”, as many fans rejected their simpler, linear approach. Then a few collaborations with Zappa, and nothing until 1978′s consistent “Shiny Beast”, with its trombone driven summary of the several Beefheart strands thus far. “Doc At The Radar Station” and “Ice Cream For Crow” contin ued in this vein, with static returns – although “Doc”‘s “Sue Egypt” may well be the most electrifying three minutes of the Captain’s career available thus far.
The problem was highlighted by the famous promotional video for “Ice Cream For Crow”. Plenty of desert beauty, tumbleweed and the Captain, to be sure, but as you watched the wacky antics of the last Magic Band you couldn’t help but think that the worst had happened: weirdness was no longer an expression of outcast individ uality but had become a geek template. Self-conscious weirdness was, after all, a punk/ new wave staple. The Captain had been superseded by his children: in an industry which values a fixed image above all, he had become the prisoner of his strongest statement. Some of the later live cuts here highlight his deteroriating relationship with his audience: who wants to be a circus attraction when they could be painting in the desert ?
Disc 5 is a pretty great alternate run through these last ten or so years. A few early skronkers – audio versions of TV material available on the CD-ROM Disc 4, including a savage “Bellerin Plain” from Detroit in 1971 – segue into a collage of radio broadcasts, demos, and the occasional live performance. Bickershaw alumni will delight in the tough “Grow Fins” and terminally confrontational “Spitball Scalped A Baby”. “One Red Rose That I Mean” is a Durutti Column-like guitar instrumental from 1972, while “Click Clack”, from Paris in 1973, boogies to the max. Six of the seven radio shots are brief harmonica and ac capella pieces which show off Van Vliet’s humour and oc casional testiness. “That’s too nasty there’, he giggles at the end of a deep “Black Snake Moan 1″; ‘what key was it’, asks the DJ at the end of “Harp Boogie III”; ‘That was the key of…skeleton key’.
There is nothing here from the two Mercury albums, nor much here from the first version of “Shiny Beast”, 1976′s “Bat Chain Puller”, except two five minute run throughs of “Odd Jobs”: the full band version is a return to the gleaming, gliding textures of “Strictly Personal”. There’s a piano demo and a worktape version of the “Ice Cream For Crow” instrumental “Evening Bell”, a good early assembly of “Making Love to a Vampire with a Monkey On My Knee’), and a 1978 “Mellotron Improv” which is sabotaged by the noisy crowd: ‘If you’re gonna talk, forget it !’ A longer melltron improvisation from 1981 is no better received. ‘Sun Ra’, somebody yells, and the Captain erupts again: ‘shut yer mouth, boy !’. After a few more trills he demands: ‘Was that Liberace ?’
Best of all, and worth the price of admission alone is an astonishing version of “Orange Claw Hammer” where, backed simply by Zappa’s driving folk-blues 12-string, the Captain gives an impassioned sea shanty reading of the lyric’s hobo Odyssey/ fantasy (‘I’m the round house man: I once was yer father’). For once, these masters of the obtuse play it straight, and it really cuts through. With its Victorian melodrama and Depression emptiness, “Orange Claw Hammer” shows the Captain becoming what he always threatened to be: not an American weirdo but an American archetype.