This review for WC Bamberger's book was written by Ben Watson and appeared in the November 1999 edition of The Wire.

It’s hard to think of another rock act that could sustain the minute attention to detail which WC Bamberger applies to Captain Beefheart. Author of critical studies of Kenward Elmslie and William Eastlake, Bamberger is evidently unimpressed by mere pop celebrity. In interpreting an art as rigorous, modernist and hard-edge as Don Van Vliet's, that's all to the good (a low point in 'mature' rockology was recently plumbed by Jon Savage's youth sociology jibes at weirder-than-thou Beefheart fans in a review of the Grow Fins box set; were the punk wars really fought to promote such self-serving defenders of pop normalcy?).

Being an independently published book on a commercial misfit, production values are erratic: even the blurb is rife with typos, and the erratum slip gives up after page three. Bamberger’s critical theory is also patchy and improvised, with Frank P Werner (The Hand: How Its Use Shapes The Brain, Language And Human Culture, Peter Fuller (Beyond The Crisis In Art, Fritjof Capra (The Web Of Life) and Marion Milner (On Not Being Able To Paint) popping up as needs arise. However, Van Vliet’s records and paintings are scrutinised for what is actually there; they're not merely the occasion for some off-the-peg theory about genius or psychosis. Nor is Bamberger one of those scissors-and-paste dumbos who thinks the mere accumulation of biographical trivia will provide illumination. For those who obsess on the oeuvre - and with Beefheart, you either obsess or you can't listen at all - the book is compulsive reading.

In dealing with the 'readjustment' of Beefheart's reputation prompted by Zoot Horn Rollo's revelations in Lunar Notes, Bamberger acknowledges the Magic Band members' accusations of cult-style abuse, but wisely stops short of condemning the extraordinary art - basically the double album Trout Mask Replica which Captain Beefheart wrung out of his musicians. He argues that Beefheart turned the players into extensions of his personal tics, which explains why the music can be so asymmetrical and irregular yet also so organic and coherent. The external measure of socially contracted rhythms was jettisoned in favour of rhythmic intervals that were utterly individual. Like William Blake, Captain Beefheart invented his own system. This is why his music cuts through subsequent styles and fads, and after 30 years still retains its jolting freshness. Beefheart’s body-based materialism explodes the blandishments of social codes.

Bamberger’s exposition of the eco-materialism at the heart of Beefheart’s vision – he characterises it as "Gaia microcosm" – connects to the poetic expounded in Nearly Too Much: The Poetry Of JH Prynne by NH Reeve and Richard Kerridge: bourgeois individualism dissolves as we become aware of the bio-chemical and soci-biological transaction that sustain our physical being. (However, Bamberger misses the point of ‘When It Blows Its Stacks’. It isn’t a song of bluesy male power, but a depiction of the pitiless capitalist: when "He takes ‘um out / Out on an iceberg / Hand ‘em a Ronson ‘n says I’ll see you around", the boss is giving his workers the sack. This isn’t my own insight, but one vouchsafed to me by a mystery guest at the Red Lion Hotel, Cromer, circa 1977.)

After Trout Mask Replica, Beefheart gradually relinquished control. His musicians were allowed to assert themselves. The music became less alien – and less special. At his dictatorial zenith, Beefheart allowed no nuance to inflect the playing: every note had to be struck with maximum force. In effect, he converted a rock group into a drum circle, comparable to how James Brown made the JBs play, or how Mark E Smith instructs The Fall. The nuanced individualism of ‘sensitive’ playing (Harkleroad’s sentimental rendition of Beefheart’s Peon on the first Mallard album, for example) diminishes the objective power of the collective. Bamberger analyses Beefheart’s decline interestingly, and although he praises the post-Bluejeans and Moonbeams ‘recovery’ of the early 80s, he does point out that all the really radical tunes were written in the Trout Mask period.

Captain Beefheart is now Don Van Vliet, the successful fine art painter shown at Michael Werner Galleries in New York, alongside such tyros of the mid-80s yuppie art boom as Julian Schnaebel, George Beselitz and AR Penck. Quite correctly, Bamberger notes that Van Vliet lacks the cynicism and degraded technique of the younger painters, maintaining the painterly sensitivity of abstract expressionists like Willem De Kooning and Franz Kline. Although Bamberger is no John Berger or TJ Clark (the art critic whose analysis Van Vliet’s painting deserves), he does make one colossally interesting point: since he started to sell his pictures, Van Vliet has abandoned his pantheistic imagery of interpenetrating animals and humans. Instead he depicts isolated figures, as sharply defined and at odds with their environment as cacti in the desert. Bamberger points out that the chic atmosphere of the art gallery alienates rock fans, who want something more egalitarian from their art. Perhaps Beefheart is registering the loneliness of producing one-off artworks in an era when mass-production provides the technical basis – if not the property relations – for an art-for-all utopia.

In refusing the category ‘art rock’, and instead assessing the social realities of rock and art as contrasting modes of communication, Bamberger has started a serious discussion – one normally excluded from rock biogs. The Beefheart cult be damned: anyone who thinks about modern art should read this book.