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I must admit – Captain Beefheart’s music is an acquired thang. But once you acquire it – there’s no turning back, as the devout will tell you. When I first bought Trout Mask Replica (on the day of its release!), it was merely because at the time I thought anything Zappa was involved with – directly or indirectly, HAD to be good (little did I know). I brought it home and was appalled that there was not only one, but two records full of a hideous confused barrage of garble. This was the untrained ear’s interpretation. I couldn’t believe that I had forked out twiceRead More →

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In: 1974 New York, Your stories and tributes
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I am writing to you from my home in Colorado around midnight. I have been a longtime Cap’n B fan (since 1972) when I first had my reality changed by way of Lick My Decals Off. I was only 15 at the time and living in Brooklyn, NY, where I was born and raised. It was my brother who first introduced me to the Magic Band. What remains to this day as some of the coolest things I have ever witnessed are the concerts. I had heard, from my brother and his crew, fabulous stories of the live Magic Band. How Rockette Morton would doRead More →

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Why do I like Beefheart? Hmmm……. not easy to answer. Maybe I should start with ‘how’… I think my story will be echoed by other fans in the UK. In 1966/67 the music scene exploded. Although those years are parodied or ridiculed by many they were critical in the freeing of music and it is difficult to explain how radically things were changed. The frontrunners – The Beatles and The Stones – were experimenting with new sounds, but the most exciting music seemed to be coming from the American West Coast. Weird music played by bands with strange sounding names. The only way many ofRead More →

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In: 1980.11.02 Schouwburg Sittard, Your stories and tributes
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I first got to know about Captain Beefheart through the music of Frank Zappa. I didn’t know what to do with this strange music. The story of the Simpsons guy, Matt Groening, is very accurate. I had exactly the same experience: I got Trout Mask Replica on tape and it all sounded very messy, as if there were no different songs on the album. My recording was of a German Straight pressing which had no song seperation – confusing. Then, in November 1980 the Captain was coming to the Netherlands. At the same time The Cure were touring, so I was hesitating. A good friendRead More →

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While standing outside the theatre waiting to get in to see Beefheart just after the release of The Spotlight Kid, the road crew was bringing the band’s equipment in through the side alley door. My friend and I were checking out the Magic Band’s drum cases and were confused by what was stenciled on them in large letters: CAUTION – LIQUID DRUM SET. What the hell is a liquid drum set? Finally, after sitting through too many opening bands (including The Pure Food and Drug Act with Harvey Mandell and Sugar Cane Harris on electric violin – how’s that for a real 60’s rock andRead More →

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Hi, I’m a civil servant in the greater Detroit area. I am married and have a son who is 13 years old. My first exposure to Captain Beefheart was when I heard “The Clouds are full of Wine…” on the radio (It was on WABX for anybody who may be familiar with Detroit radio on the late sixties-early seventies). I did not think much of it at the time. Maybe a year or so later, (about summer, 1973) I was at the house of some friends listening to records. One of the guys played “Abba Zaba”. I enjoyed it and asked another one of theRead More →

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In 1981, a friend and I were shopping for spirits at a “liquor supermarket” in Lancaster, California by the name of “Liquor Barn” (My friends name is Matt Livingston, and as far as I know, he lives in Palmdale, CA currently.) We were searching for the cheapest bottle of vodka we could find, when suddenly I heard a VERY LOW VOICE ask: “Is there really a difference between expensive and inexpensive vodkas?” Of course, he was talking to himself. My friend Matt spotted him instantly, and whispered “That’s Captain Beefheart….” We struck up a conversation, and he told us that his wife Jan was goneRead More →

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Captain Beefheart has definitely functioned as the guru for me. I was always on the lookout for something strange, something different. Not just a different kind of music, but a different kind of experience. All great artists transmit a genuine form of experience by allowing the creative potential and energy of their consciousness to be shared with others. Only the purist artist does it for free. What I am talking about is freedom. Beefheart’s music, art, words and presence for me has always been a great experience of the reality of freedom. You don’t need to take drugs in order to experience the infinite. JustRead More →

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Here is my recollection of my first listening to the Spotlight Kid. (the artist- not that particular album! hehehee) In 1973 and at the age of 16, I went to New York from my hometown of St. Louis to see Jethro Tull perform ‘A Passion Play’ at The Garden and the Nassau Colluseum with a New Jersey couple, Ron Lorman and Lisa who were students at Webster College that I had met at the Tull shows here two weeks earlier. *shwew* One night between shows we were hanging at thier apartment when he hands me a clear plastic record jacket with a white cardboard insert.Read More →

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There used to be a great club in Glasgow, Scotland called The Maryland, and the owner Willie Cuthbertson (one of the great unacknowledged heroes of Scottish Rock) brought Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band up to play at a place called the Kelvin Hall. This venue was famous already in the halls of rock n roll fame as the site of the Kinks first “Live” album. Because we knew Willie he promised to take us back stage to meet the Captain before the concert. We were all massive Beefheart fans – there were about 6 of us – and Gus (Angus Macintyre) was the biggestRead More →

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In: 1973.03 Celebrity Theatre Phoenix, Your stories and tributes
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I have had the pleasure of seeing Beefheart at least a dozen times between 1972 and 1980, starting with “Clear Spot” line-up. The first time I saw him he was headlining at a theater-in-the-round in Phoenix, Arizona in 1973, and Little Feat was the opening act. It was a rather bizarre venue – the moving stage did a full revolution every five minutes, so although all the seats were close the perspective kept changing. After Little Feat put on a superb show, there was a lull between sets, and then suddenly, some… GUYS jumped out of their seats in the audience, and… RAN onto theRead More →

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In: 1973.04.27 Guild Hall Preston, Your stories and tributes
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Some of the finer points of this tail may be a little out due to memory loss… but this is the gist of it: It was the Clear Spot tour in the UK in ’73. We had seen it in Liverpool, where we all lived, and his next venue was Preston at the Preston Guild Hall. One of our gang was a guy called Tony, he was a rather slim Irish character with a larger than life personality. He had a way of getting himself noticed wherever he went just by his exhuberance, and had managed to get noticed at the Liverpool concert; by theRead More →

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I discovered Don Van Vliet through a demo album of Frank Zappa’s music. The first album I heard was “Trout Mask Replica,” and I was taken with the freedom of the lyrics he creates as well as the looseness of the musical conception, without sacrificing a certain kind of rigor. His punning and word-play reminded me of James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, a bit of e. e. cummings. You could make your own associations. The music reminded me of a kid with an ear who has no training, sitting down at a keyboard and playing around with the sounds just for the joy of seeing whatRead More →

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In 1980, as a 15-year old I had been reading Lester Bangs’ articles about Captain Beefheart in “Musician” magazine (which turned out to be amazingly accurate and descriptive), and was quite interested to learn more about what this supposedly amazing music sounded like. However, I didn’t have the money to actually buy the records – and believe me, noone else in Sparta, Illinois had them to loan to me. One night I was interested to notice in our T.V. Guide that Beefheart was playing on that night’s “Saturday Night Live”, a show which my parents wouldn’t let me watch (although they did watch it themselves).Read More →

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you fucked with language like no fucker had done before you turned a three minute noise into a ribcage and tuned the bones to different scales with a genius lifted tuning fork the greatest composer of the 21st century not bad for a man whose greatest work was done in Trout Mask Replica but a replica of what if anything? the river fishes swim on land and kill all the humans and i fail to notice. i am crucified above an altar of dead desert reptiles a church in the shape of your moustached face. you attacked notes with lunacy and melody with hallucinogenic creativityRead More →

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I was a sixteen year old Gong freak – an affliction I still bear now – days would go by as I would entertain my friends with the floating ambient prog that was the Radio Gnome Trilogy. They preferred the less subtle strains of Ozzy era Black Sabbath (can’t knock that) and the post Nirvana grunge explosion. Strangely enough they were not overly taken with the sound. They were even more resistant to my Sun Ra and Ornette Coleman records (although my old R’n’B and soul ones were all right). I couldn’t stand Pearl Jam and the such like and I started to find myselfRead More →

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I went to school in England in ‘67-‘68, and discovered the John Peel show on the BBC on Sunday afternoons. I figured I had pretty good taste at the time, with my favorite groups being the Who, Beatles, Kinks, Cream, Doors, Love, Jimi, et al. And oh yes, don’t let me forget the greatest, baddest of all, the true Mother of all Bands, the STONES! So, one Sunday after finishing my studies and knocking off a few righteous hits of some really potent, pungent black Afghani, I turned on the radio.. JESUS CHRIST! What the f*** is this??? I screamed out loud. What it was,Read More →

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I have been listening since Safe As Milk, and fondly remember my days in the sixties when I worked quite hard to become comfortable with a trio of artists – Beefheart, Ornette and the AACM – a time that was highly rewarding and from which my musical tastes continue to grow. I can honestly say I was the only surfer in North Florida then listening to this stuff, and it isolated me from most of my friends who were getting into Hendrix and other stuff. My other great love is Paul Butterfield, about whom I have written extensively for a blues magazine here in theRead More →

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I was interested in something I saw in one of the links from this site–a photo from one John Petraitus taken of a Zappa/Beefheart concert in Bloomington, Illinois, May, 1975. My girlfriend and I were at the next show (or the one before?) in St. Louis. It’s been so long ago that I don’t remember much about the concert, but one thing will always stick out for me. When the show finally began (after an interminable set by the band Styx featuring their unconvincing evocation of Jimi Hendrix with a psychedelic version of “America the Beautiful”) the house lights went down, and eerie green pointsRead More →

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The only time I remember Beefheart having played L.A. was, (I believe), in late 1979 or early 1980 at a gig at the Whiskey. Naturally, I was there. Several months later, I’m writing for some piece of crap “hip, late-nite comedy show” called “Fridays”. After the show one night, the lady who does publicity for the program, (I think she’s currently Arnold Schwarzenegger’s P.R. person), suggests we go to Canter’s for something to eat (a famous local all night deli). I hardly even knew this woman, but since I had vague hopes of maybe getting laid, I figured what the heck. Twenty minutes later, I’mRead More →