By:
On:
In: The Spotlight Kid
With: 0 Comments

“Said the Mama to the baby in the corn/’You are my first-born/That shall hereon in be known/As the Spotlight Kid.’” That’s how the title song of this album begins, and one glance at the picture on the cover — Cap natty in Las Vegas jacket, with a knowing almost-smile on his face — reveals a man with the self-understanding and self-confidence to bill himself as a new-generational hero with no false pride. And make no mistake, it is definitely to the new audience, the ones that teethed on feedback and boogie, that Captain Beefheart belongs. He has been called everything in the past from aRead More →

By:
On:
In: The Spotlight Kid
With: 0 Comments

Who’s the greatest white blues singer in America today? Shame on you if you said John Hammond or Dave Van Ronk or maybe Kate Taylor. If you said Van Morrison, you get half credit ’cause he used to be (or maybe quarter credit since he’s only an honorary American). Half credit for Ry Cooder too, cause he’s working on it. If you said David Clayton-Thomas, bite your tongue. Hard. If you got really weird and came up with somebody like Bernie Pearl, kindly stop reading this publication at once. And no, it’s not Sammy Davis, Jr., and if somebody out there is clinging to theRead More →

By:
On:
In: Lick My Decals Off Baby
With: 1 Comment

1970 US Original on Straight RS 6420 Gatefold lyric insert has full credits rather than on sleeve. 1970 White Label Promo PROMOTION NOT FOR SALE printed on centre label and Playing time/track timings. Centre label states STRAIGHT RECORDS. A DIVISION OF BIZARRE INC., 5455 WILSHIRE BLVD., SUITE 1700, LOS ANGELES, 90036 around bottom edge. 1971 UK Original on Straight STS 1063 Pretty much the same as the US issue but without the lyric sheet (again!). Made and distributed by CBS 1973 UK Reissue on Reprise K44244 (Tan) Cover only has the “Straight” thought-bubble logo. 1970 (?) German issue on Straight(?) or EMI(?) 1 C 062-92Read More →

By:
On:
In: Lick My Decals Off Baby, Music articles and interviews
With: 0 Comments

[youtube video_id=”LRlmTzDyw7s”] A black and white 60-second television commercial for Captain Beefheart’s latest album on Straight/Reprise, Lick My Decals Off, Baby, was refused recently by KTTV in Los Angeles for airing on any of the station’s programs. When asked by the record company as to reasons for not accepting the spot, KTTV station manager Charles Young said, “I just don’t like it. I think it’s crude and don’t want it on my air.” [His air?!] “Let’s say I find the commercial unacceptable and let it go at that.” When asked for a specific reason, Young declared the album title is “obscene.” Time had been scheduledRead More →

By:
On:
In: Lick My Decals Off Baby
With: 0 Comments

The broom tongue on The Buggy Boogie Woogie evidently has whisk-fringes. The alchemist-shaman-genius-wizard-freak-medicine man is always a fringe figure. Never part of the conventional social structure. In order to listen to the shuttling, whispering ancient language of energy (long faint sighs across the millennia) you have to shut out the gray noise of the market place. Unglue the lids of the nuclei and release the pure white phosphene stuff inside. “Music” is form. At the higher levels of energy, beyond even the electronic, there is no form. Form is pure energy limiting itself. Form is error. A forest creature approaches the protein vats. He dipsRead More →

By:
On:
In: Lick My Decals Off Baby
With: 0 Comments

Gazing across pop music’s stale horizons, past all the cynical ineptitude, pseudo-intellectual solemnity, neurotic regression and dismal deadends for great bands, there is one figure who stands above the murk forging an art at once adventurous and human: Don Van Vliet, known to a culture he’s making anachronistic as Captain Beefheart. Though there are still lots of people around who just don’t read the Cap at all, who think his music is some kind of private joke or failed experiment (or as a local teen band told me, “Most of that’s the kind of stuff musicians do when they’re just fucking around”) or merely aRead More →

By:
On:
In: Lick My Decals Off Baby
With: 0 Comments

Already, I’m thinking that this is the Captain’s most satisfying album to date. “Safe As Milk” was a very good, every-so-slightly spacey rock album; “Strictly Personal” was ruined by phasing; and “Trout Mask Replica” tended to be a little unwieldy, despite several flashes of brilliance. But from the first note, “Decals” discovers and maintains a balance which rarely wavers, right up to the final reed squeak of “Flash Gordon’s Ape”. It’s difficult to decide whether the unnamed musicians are geniuses or complete beginners, but from the evidence of several tortuous unison passages I’m inclined to believe that they’re the former. Much of the playing consistsRead More →

By:
On:
In: Lick My Decals Off Baby
With: 0 Comments

In a twilight region which separates laughter from terror and precision from chaos, five men walk along a musical path with a purpose they disclose only in their smiles. Zoot Horn Rollo, a fortunate refugee from the Land of Drugs, carries his lead guitar between a thumb and one glass finger. He speaks through his instrument with a voice of gentleness, restraint and lyricism. To a large extent the success of this expedition rests on his shoulders. For it is Rollo’s job to catch the melodies which the Captain throws out, transform them into definite musical statements and to teach them to the others inRead More →

By:
On:
In: Lick My Decals Off Baby
With: 0 Comments

When I first heard Trout Mask Replica, I about puked. What is this shit, I thought. People I met talked about it in glowing terms — not just anybody, mind you, but people I genuinely respected when it came to their musical tastes. Well, I figured, everybody has their own little watchimacallits. And then came Lick My Decals Off, Baby. Its reputation preceded it, and a preview of its music at a concert, I was told, would make it all clear. And you know what? It did. You know, those guys actually stood up there and played that music. And when it was over, IRead More →

By:
On:
In: Lick My Decals Off Baby
With: 0 Comments

It’s probably a tribute to the literary conscience of Reprise Records that they decided to include a copy of Beefheart’s lyrics. Within a year, some lovely young thing with a doctorate in English will have transformed Beefheart into a demiurge, thereby glorifying herself to a freshman comp class at a state institution. Fortunately, the sheet of lyrics can be overlooked; no great feat, because the sense that comes out of them tends to rearrange itself with all the life of the infinte number of monkeys in the old joke about the infinite number of old typewriters. If anything, Beefheart’s word-collection is just as anti-lyrical asRead More →

By:
On:
In: Lick My Decals Off Baby
With: 1 Comment

Recording details Date – Summer 1970 Studio – United Recording Corp., Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood Producer – Don van Vliet Engineer – Phil Schier Musicians Don van Vliet – vocals, harmonica, sax Bill Harkleroad – guitar Art Tripp – drums, marimba, broom Mark Boston – bass John French – drums Track list Lick My Decals Off, Baby Doctor Dark I Love You, You Big Dummy Peon Bellerin’ Plain Woe-is-uh-Me-Bop Japan in a Dishpan I Wanna Find a Woman That’ll Hold My Big Toe Till I Have To Go Petrified Forest One Red Rose That I Mean The Buggy Boogie Woogie The Smithsonian Institute Blues (or theRead More →

By:
On:
In: Music articles and interviews
With: 1 Comment

IT’S THE BLIMP, IT’S THE BLIMP… And how. Beefheart is the blimp. The Captain is unique. No band in the world could manage what he and his magic men achieve. They tear and slash at the guts of their music, ripping its lungs out, grinding and crushing the bones, then pull it all together in a couple of bars. Their songs both lyrics and rhythms – destroy the tired-out bullshit conventions of every contemporary musical field. Saxes jag in and out among rasping guitars, the drumming is what ‘heavy’ used to mean, and Beefheart hasn’t managed a drink or a screw since he climbed outRead More →

By:
On:
In: Music articles and interviews
With: 0 Comments

In this day of dubious miracles, when lucky new arrivals on the rock scene are spotted, slated for super-stardom, and hyped to oblivion, all in a matter of a year or so; when the ability of the American Kulture-Complex to absorb revolutionary ideas and turn them into profit reaches weird osmotic states, the enlightened listener tends to become somewhat cynical when confronted with the term ‘underground music.’ We all know what the underground is; we can read about it in ads for Columbia Records: The Man Can’t Bust Our Music or Know Who Your Friends Are. Who are our friends? Who is the man? AsRead More →

By:
On:
In: Trout Mask Replica
With: 5 Comments

1969 US Original on Straight STS 1053 (double) Released on 16th June 1969. Stunning cover shot by Cal Schenkel of Don in full regalia holding a carp’s head. Gatefold sleeve with lyric sheet insert Label pictured below courtesy of David Naughton. 1969 UK Original on Straight STS 1053 (double) Released in early November 1969. Distributed by CBS. No lyric sheet came with this UK issue. 1969 German Original on German Straight SMS 2222/3 (double) Has ELECTROLA GESELLSCHAFT M.B.H. KÖLN on back of cover, thick smooth distinctive inner sleeve and Pink/Black/White StRaIGHt labels. 19?? US 8 Track release. Note reversed image. Scan kindly sent to meRead More →

By:
On:
In: Trout Mask Replica
With: 0 Comments

Don (Captain Beefheart) Van Vliet was among the most challenging and idiosyncratic of artists to come down the pike in the ’60s. Drawing his influences from the blues, free jazz and the avant-garde, he made music and poetry that was at once freakish and tradition-bound, nonsensical and intellectual, recalcitrant and disciplined-contradictions that kept his work consistently compelling from his early days right through his still-lamented retirement from recording in the ’80s. “Trout Mask Replica,” his fourth album, is perhaps his most celebrated. The two-record set was produced by Frank Zappa, his childhood chum and musical benefactor. Often repellent but undeniably evocative song/poems such as “NeonRead More →

By:
On:
In: Trout Mask Replica
With: 0 Comments

Trout Mask Replica, Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band (Straight Sm 1053) Captain Beefheart, the only true dadaist in rock, has been victimized repeatedly by public incomprehension and critical authoritarianism. The tendency has been to chide C.B. and his Band as a potentially acceptable blues band who were misled onto the paths of greedy trendy commercialism. What the critics failed to see was that this was a band with a vision, that their music, difficult raucous and rough as it is, proceeded from a unique and original consciousness. This became dramatically apparent with their last album. Since their music derived as much from the newRead More →

By:
On:
In: Trout Mask Replica
With: 0 Comments

Compiled by Jasper Leach. If you can help with any further info, please get in touch. All songs (unless noted differently) Produced by Frank Zappa Engineered by Dick Kunc Recorded at Whitney Studios, Los Angeles, CA; April 1969 1. Frownland Captain Beefheart: vocal Zoot Horn Rollo: glass finger guitar & guitar (left channel) Antennae Jimmy Semens: steel guitar & guitar (right channel) Rockette Morton: bass Drumbo: drums 2. The Dust Blows Forward ‘n the Dust Blows Back Captain Beefheart: vocal Produced by Don Van Vliet Engineered by John French Recorded at Beefheart House, Woodland Hills, CA; c. 1969 3. Dachau Blues Captain Beefheart: vocal, bassRead More →

By:
On:
In: Poems, Trout Mask Replica
With: 1 Comment

Not sure when this little collection was distributed but as it has the Straight logo and address we can presume it was as a promotion for the first release. Was it only sent out to the press, radio or who? It’s a collection of five handwritten poems, one for each member of the band included in an envelope that carries a great typed quote from a disc jockey. Significantly Drumbo is again left out (as he was on the credits of the original release). Update: John French was shown these poems and he immediately recognised the writing, it’s Jeff Cotton’s who often acted as ‘scribe’Read More →

By:
On:
In: Trout Mask Replica
With: 2 Comments

Recording details Date – late 1968 and March/April 1969 Studio – Sunset Sound, Hollywood; Whitney Studios, Glendale Producer – Frank Zappa Engineer – Dick Kunc Musicians Don Van Vliet Bill Harkleroad Jeff Cotton John French Mark Boston Victor Hayden Gary Marker Doug Moon Many of the musicians on this album had a poem written for / about them by Don Van Vliet. View Leach’s Listing for a thorough guide to who did what on Trout Mask Replica. Track list Frownland The Dust Blows Forward ‘N The Dust Blows Back Dachau Blues Ella Guru Hair Pie: Bake 1 Moonlight on Vermont Pachuco Cadaver Bills Corpse SweetRead More →

By:
On:
In: Strictly Personal
With: 5 Comments

US Vinyl Releases 1968 US Original on Blue Thumb BTS1 The first release on this label named by Don and set up by the producer Bob Krasnow who had also been involved with the production of Safe As Milk. Very thick card gatefold sleeve. Two different issues (that we know of): Black label with silver lettering; banded; there are pressings with different matrix numbers: J-1-RE-1 (on both sides) BTS 5001 D-1 (side 1), BTS 5002 D-1 (side 2) Black label; unbanded Jim Neher wrote to pass comment on the quality of the different releases: Next to the black label banded version, the black label unbandedRead More →