Article from unknown source on the 16th August 1997, written
by David Belcher. If you know where this came from, please let me
know.
AN ornery cuss is Don van Vliet, the subject of next Tuesday's
BBC2 documentary Rock Cults: The Artist Formerly Known As Captain
Beefheart, introduced and narrated by No 1 Beefheart fan John Peel.
Frank Zappa, for instance, was almost literally on his deathbed
before he could bring himself to comment in level tones about his
former musical partner, the duo having fallen out horribly and infamously
almost 20 years before.
Tuesday night's fascinating programme in fact arose accidentally
out of producer-director Elaine Shepherd's previous portrait of
Zappa, when, in the last TV interview before his death from cancer
in 1993, the renowned hippie-maverick, satirist, independent record-company
entrepreneur, and avant-garde composer opened up about his role
in 1969 as producer of Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica, a long, wilful,
sporadically incandescent, and notoriously difficult album. As Zappa
recalls of the album in Rock Cults: "If it had been produced by
any famous professional producers, then there could have been a
number of suicides involved."
Similarly, the programme underlines how Beefheart's autocratic
approach to dealing with the members of his peerless instrumental
group, the Magic Band, could also have resulted in sudden death:
Beefheart's. "One ex-member of the Magic Band recalls shooting a
cross-bow at Beefheart," says Mark Cooper, the inventor of Later
With Jools Holland and executive producer of Rock Cults. "I think
that the members of the Magic Band who are in the programme are
in general agreement that they found him impossible ... and the
ones who didn't want to be in the programme found him even worse.
"He played his musicians as anyone else would play a piano. They
served his music, and I think it's fair to say that he simply didn't
recognise the humanity of the people he worked with. That wasn't
in an evil way, but in a single-minded way. He did whatever it took
to realise his vision, regardless of the fact that it led to appalling
relations with all the labels he was ever signed to, as well as
the musicians he worked with. "He was a mad, dictatorial composer,
and yet at the same time he could be charming, and innocent, and
yet frightening. A benign demagogue. I remember going to see him
play live when I was a teenager in the early seventies - and I actually
felt frightened, but not threatened, when he started one song with
a burst of delta-blues growling."
Given his fearsome reputation, and the fact that in 1982 he entirely
forsook music for a successful career as a painter, Beefheart/van
Vliet has no direct involvement in the programme, although his wife,
Jan, did grant access to some home-movie footage.
Other insights come from Ry Cooder, who played on the Magic Band's
first epochal album, Safe As Milk, in 1967, and who describes the
Beefheartian modus operandi thusly: "The concept seemed to be that
you take the raw blues elements - the John Lee Hooker idea, Howlin'
Wolf - down to its purest sound ... a grunt maybe, something abstract,
and then you take your John Coltrane crazy time-signature, free-jazz
thing, and hybridise them, and this is what you come up with. Well,
it's a great idea."
One unqualified Beefheart fan is Matt Groening, the creator of
The Simpsons. "It's the culmination of the entire history of the
blues, rock'n'roll, experimental music, and free-jazz, combined
with extremely talented musicians playing it, and one of the most
incredible voices in musical history," says Groening, before going
to recall his first feelings on being confronted with Trout Mask
Replica. "It had Frank Zappa's name on it, so I bought it. Took
it home, put it on ... it was the worst dreck I'd ever heard in
my life - 'They're not even trying, they're playing randomly!' And
so I thought: 'Frank Zappa produced it, I'd better give it another
play,' and I played it again and I thought: 'It still sounds horrible,
but maybe they meant it to sound that way.'."He continues: "By the
third or fourth time, it started to grow on me, and by the fifth
and sixth time I loved it, and after the seventh and eighth plays
I thought it was the greatest album ever made and I still do."
Where can you detect Beefheart's influence today? In the work of
Beck, P J Harvey, and David Byrne. What has Beefheart himself said
about Beefheart's music? "I want it exactly the way I want it ...
exactly," he said in a radio interview in 1980. "Any composer would
want it that way, and I won't deviate at all. Somebody like Stravinsky,
don't you think it would annoy him if somebody bent a note the wrong
way?"
Listen to Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band's music today -
stuff like I'm Gonna Booglarise Ya, Baby, with many of its notes
bent exactly the right way - and know that it's still gonna booglarise
ya, baby, in ways that will always be completely beyond regular
tunesmiths, contemporary chaps like Noel and Liam Gallagher, say.