The Mt Tamalpais Incident - June 1967
Although Beefheart is probably renowned for being perversely anti-commercial
or non-commercial (which ever way you want to look at). That wasn't
always the case.
The
early band when in started back in 1964/65 wanted to make it big just
like all the other young guys in countless bands getting together
across the States and the rest of the world. A hit record, money,
girls .. yes, they wanted it all too.
With the release of Didddy Wah Diddy in April 1966 they could have
broken through into the big time nationally if the east coast hadn't
been sewn up by the Remains version of the song.
Their next big chance came on the back of the release of their first
album Safe As Milk in 1967.
Bob Krasnow was now managing them and he saw the perfect opportunity
to break the album and the band to the world ... an appearance at
a festival in Monterey between 16 and 18 June.
Krasnow rented a rehearsal room off Santa Monica Boulevard and the
band that had recorded the album - Don, Alex Snouffer, Ry Cooder,
Jerry Handley and John French - were given a couple of weeks to pull
together live versions of the album material. According to John French
the rehearsals went well and the band sounded good. Unfortunately
Don kept making excuses and rarely rehearsed with the rest of them.
This is probably not the best preparation for such an important gig
but this was typical of Don at the time.
Krasnow then found them a perfect test run for the live material.
A week before Monterey there was an open air festival planned in Marin
County, the Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Festival on Mount Tamalpais.
Originally scheduled for 3 and 4 June it was postponed for a week.
As the Beefheart band wasn't included on the list of performers in
the festival booklet it's pretty safe to assume that Krasnow booked
them in at a late stage after the new date for the event had been
arranged. They performed on the afternoon of Sunday 11 June.
Find out more about the festival on the Marin
County blog
For
some reason Krasnow persuaded John French that he didn't need to take
his own drums for the gig. When John arrived and got to the stage
he found, to his horror, that the drums he was supposed to use were
set up for a left handed player. This meant he had to dismantle the
set and put them back together again before the band could even begin
playing. Not a good start to a show.
To add to the stress of the situation Don was having one of his regular
anxiety attacks and was asking people to reassure him that he wasn't
having a heart attack. Then, when the band were ready to play, his
choice for the first song was one that hadn't been rehearsed back
in Los Angeles much to the annoyance of Ry Cooder who hadn't been
in the band long enough to know this particular piece.
Somehow they got through this and then launched into Electricity.
A stellar song and certainly a showstopper in many ways ... however,
this time not in the way the band had perhaps hoped. Hardly had the
song started when Don turned away from the microphone, adjusted his
tie and walked off the back of the high stage. He landed, fortunately
for him, onto Bob Krasnow, damaging neither of them.
The rest of the mystified and horrified band were left to carry on
as best they could, They finished the song as an instrumental (not
that unusual as I saw it performed pretty much this way in 1973) and
they left the stage in disarray.
When they finally found out the reason for what had happened they
were not particularly sympathetic. It seems that Don was flying high
on LSD and as he started to sing Electricity he hallucinated a girl
in the audience turning into a fish and saw bubbles began coming out
of her mouth. This, he said, freaked him out enough to want to get
off the stage.
Ry Cooder had managed to put up with Don's eccentricities throughout
the recording of Safe As Milk but this display of recklessness and
unprofessionalism was the final straw. He decided that he would have
nothing further to do with him.
Without Cooder and with only a week until the Monterey Festival there
was nothing the band could do. They'd have to pull out of Monterey.
Their big opportunity was blown.
This has got to be one of the great 'what ifs' of rock history. Monterey
was the launch pad for the careers of so many of the bands who performed
there ... one of those could have been Captain Beefheart and His Magic
Band.
This was not the only time time that Don would sabotage his and the
band's future with his irrational behaviour.
