The Number One Weirdo Comes Back To Earth
This article was written by John Morthland and was taken from the February 1978 edition of Gig.
On paper, it probably sounds like just another Captain Beefheart comeback Lord knows he's had his share. Yet for his fans, it's a most welcome one - Beefheart has always been very special to his followers - and, besides, there is clearly something new happening with the Captain these days. Consider the situation:
Prehistoric Delta Blues
Here is a man considered to be visionary by many critics and by his ever-faithful cult, and an incomprehensible weirdo by everyone else. He roars his pointed, free association lyrics in a startling voice with a four and one-half octave range. He plays his soprano sax with wild, spontaneous, child-like glee. His music is a coarse clomp-stomp of jarring rhythms that somehow still pulse forward together, with soloists playing what's usually considered free jazz. The style is based in Delta blues, but sometimes it's hard to tell whether it's the Mississippi Delta, some delta from prehistoric times, or one on an as-yet-undiscovered planet.
Since his emergence from the Mojave Desert via Sunset Strip in the mid-Sixties, he has released nine albums on several labels. The last two (on Mercury, in 1974 and 1975) were relatively conventional-sounding, and hence widely regarded as Beefheart's condescension to commercial pressures. Then he vanished for a while, did one album and tour with Frank Zappa, and vanished from popular view again.
Yet here is Beefheart up on the stage of the Bottom Line on Thanksgiving weekend with a new four-piece Magic Band, playing both new songs from an album (Bat Chain Puller) that he has yet to sell to a record company and old favorites ("China Pig," "Pachuco Cadaver," "Moonlight on Vermont, "The Blimp," "Electricity," "Low Yo-Yo," and more). The Magic Band members are decked out in a bewildering array of coats, capes and hats, but the slide guitars are sizzling, and the rhythms as engaging as ever. What's more, the new songs are as strong as anything he's ever done. Captain Beefheart's powers are undiminished. There's even a detectable change in attitude.
Pearls Before…
"I can't put that out - they'll never get it," Don Van Vliet (his real name) says the next day in his hotel room after he plays "Brick Bats," a song from the new album, on his cassette recorder. It features perhaps the most uninhibited, other-worldly sax he's ever blown, and the truth is he really can't not put it out either; it's that good. This he acknowledges just as quickly.
That dual attitude may indicate that Van Vliet is learning to live with his cult figure status. In the past, he has always harbored the idea that his music - no matter how far outside the mainstream it got - would be accessible to everyone if they'd just sit back and listen. Of course, it wasn't. The idea probably springs from the fact that he has always had to work in a blatantly commercial milieu - the pop music biz - and thus has always had a record company on his mind, no matter how much he distrusts them (and he still distrusts them considerably). Making this album outside that milieu must have influenced his thinking on the matter. Now all he must do is sell it - several companies are interested - and if it only sells well enough to pay for itself, he'll probably be satisfied.
No Commercial Potential
Commercialism has always been a stickler for Beefheart. The two Mercury albums, he now says, were an attempt to "get that band some money, which I don't care about, but they wanted some." This is not the explanation he gave at the time those albums were made - he was understandably hoping for some money himself, at the time, as I recall - but "that band" he refers to is the original Magic Band, which he had taught from scratch, but which left him on completion of the 1974 Mercury album. (The group released a 1977 album, In A Different Climate, on Virgin, under the name Mallard.) It's a little discomforting to hear Van Vliet still speak of harshly of them after all this time, but their abrupt departure remains a sore point with him.
In other ways, Don Van Vliet strongly resembles his previous incarnations. He doesn't give interviews so much as he jams, free form, on ideas or images inspired by the interviewer's questions. His use of language must seem baffling to the uninitiated, but there is an internal cohesion to his conversation that is bawdy, entertaining, insightful, and completely comprehensible. ("I dig words. Shakespeare is what's shakin'. When you hear that guy, ain't no Massachusetts to it.") He still returns again and again to the topic of whale slaughter - Van Vliet is an animal lover - and he still alternates between chastisement and praise when he speaks of Zappa, a childhood friend and co-collaborator at several stages of their careers.
Lighter Attitude
But aside from his perception of his place in the pop marketplace, there are other noticeable differences. He now has a much lighter attitude toward himself in general; he no longer insists on referring to himself as an artist, though he certainly is one, and though he does still slip in the phrase "avant garde" often.
"I don't think I'm that artistic, l don't know if there even is such a thing, but I was always vomiting as good as I could," he remarks about his Trout Mask Replica phase. "I mean, the thing that happened later is I got bagged by 'I consciousness.' And it's pretty easy for that to happen to a painter. 'I see that.' 'I do this.' The artist routine. I got into that. In order to paint, you had to do that, you have to put on that fucking ego cloak." (Beefheart always carries notebooks and sketch pads with him for drawing, painting, and writing poems, songs, and good lines.)
He's feeling particularly sprightly right now - just came from Paris, where he played before 10,000 at a National Socialist Party music festival, the highlight of a tour that's done quite well despite there being no new album in the stores or record label behind him. In truth, this could conceivably be his time. Earlier in his career, he was the number one weirdo for audiences that prized weird above and beyond all else. That's a lot of baggage to carry, and in more subdued times such as these, perhaps his music can be taken strictly on its own terms and viewed as the unique, vital stuff that it is. Much of his New York audience didn't seem to know a lot about him - probably they were drawn by the Zappa connection - but by the end of his set, it was hard to tell the new fans from the old cult, unanimous and emphatic was the applause. Besides, there is one more song on Bat Chain Puller that sounds like some inspired cross between Randy Newman and the Lovin' Spoonful, and if it is not a hit single, it is surely so accessible that it will gain FM airplay when it surfaces.
As we Beefheart loyalists keep telling ourselves, anything is possible. It wouldn't take massive sales for both Beefheart and a record company to turn a modest profit on his music, especially now. What he needs most is an exec that understands both the strengths and limits of his music and his audience. Stranger things have happened.
