In March 2025 I spoke at length to Ira Ingber about his brother Elliot when putting together a tribute following Elliot’s death and I took the opportunity to ask Ira about his involvement with the Bluejeans and Moonbeams album.
Not much is written about this 1974 Beefheart-lite album because it’s not liked by many hardcore fans. So, I thought it would be of interest to find out a bit more about how it came together from someone who was involved with the recording.
Our chat inevitably rambled over other Beefheart topics and so I have also included some of these reminiscences and comments from Ira and his stories about meeting Don.
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Steve Froy : How did you get involved with the Bluejeans and Moonbeams album?
Ira Ingber : I don’t know ! Because of my brother’s relationship, I guess. I’m always amazed about that record because I always felt it was one on the worst records he ever made. Maybe the worst. But then there are people actually in the UK who really love that record, so I don’t know what to make of it. But I was very young at the time and getting to write and record with Don was a thrill, it was really enjoyable. He was great to work with. 1974, and I have the original songwriter contracts. I never saw a penny, by the way.
SF : Well, that’s usual for any Magic Band member!
II : Yeah. I know there was movie called A Bigger Splash that used Observatory Crest. But I don’t believe any money ever got exchanged for the sync rights, but I don’t know.
It was in adverse conditions, because I always got the feeling he didn’t want to make that record. But despite that, he rose to the occasion on a few songs, and he was a real joy to work with. He was there 100%.
I’m amazed anybody likes it at all and then I listened to it not long ago and I thought, you know what? It’s not as bad as I remember it being. Maybe time softened the edges a little bit. I think certainly after an album like Clear Spot or Spotlight Kid, and then you hear those, it’s like that they’re not even the same universe but he still manages to come through with his personality.
SF : Yeah, that’s well said. He was trying to do something because he was desperate.
II : Well, he was desperate. I remember I visited him the year before when that were up in Northern California. My girlfriend and I at the time, we made the trip. I’m here in Los Angeles. We drove up the coast. Long trip. And I went to see him because I had met him through my brother, and he said, oh please come by and visit. So I went up there and he pulled me aside. I’ll never forget, and he said you know those guys – he was pointing to the band, they were in the house and we were outside – they want to make a commercial record but I’m in the way. And I said, and I knew, I had a sense he was kidding me, but I said, well maybe they’re the wrong band. He said, you know, you might be onto something.
To me that was one of the most spectacular eras of music period … those three or four albums Trout Mask, Decals Spotlight Kid and Clear Spot, they’re just .. I love turning young people on to them because they want to know, when was this recorded. Well, you know, 50 plus years ago. Then you can’t believe it’s that old because it sounds so contemporary.
SF : What I’d really like to do is try and tease out any more information about the Bluejeans album. That period of time with Beefheart, there’s not much written about it because people tend to ignore it, trying to forget about it, hoping it didn’t really happen. But it did happen, Don did try to do something different, or he was in a different situation, and he had to react differently.
Who actually pushed everything along, was it Don?
II : Andy di Martino, right. A fellow who I always got the feeling it was some kind of pay-to-play thing, that he was able to snag Don to make a record and got a deal with Mercury, which was, really it always was, an also-ran label. Maybe in the 40s it was okay here but it was just a down-on-its-luck label. I think they had 10cc. They were distributing them here, Mercury did, but really not much going on. And it was a one-off record, as it turned out.
SF : It would be nice to know a bit more about that, how he acted in the studio, how he interacted with the band. Did he come with the songs fully formed, or were you working them out?
II : Oh no, well we could talk about that quickly, I mean we wrote together. He wrote songs with Elliot, he and I wrote songs in my apartment at the time. No, he didn’t have anything, I think he may have had some scraps of ideas, lyric ideas.
SF : Well yeah, he used to carry around a big bag full of bits and pieces.
II : Yeah, that’s right, that’s right. As I said to you, I’m sure I said it, I really don’t believe he wanted to make this record. He was obligated to, maybe financially, maybe he agreed contractually to do something. This fellow, Di Martino, and I think he’s gone so I shan’t speak ill of the dead, but he didn’t strike me as being maybe as ethical as otherwise he could have been, or certainly as talented as a producer. He was a deal maker kind of a guy as I recall.
SF : Yeah, there were brothers, Andy and Augie.
II : That’s right, I never forget the other guy.
SF : Yeah, I think his name was Dave, but he was known as Augie.
II : That’s right. I think he was the sort of financial side of it.
SF : Yeah, that’s right, he was, I think, an accountant or something.
II : And so they got a deal for Don on Mercury, the Warner deal was gone obviously, and Mercury, I’ve since come to find out a very dear friend, actually he’s kind of my manager, was at Mercury at the time, and he told me that they were trying to promote Moonbeams. Mercury had nothing going here in the States. Rod Stewart had already jumped ship. I think they were distributing 10cc in the States, whatever the label they were on in the UK. I can’t think what it was. But it wasn’t Mercury?
SF : No, it wouldn’t be Mercury.
II : Was Mercury even over there?
SF : No, Bluejeans was released over here on Virgin.
II : That’s right. So yeah, they made a deal for international distribution,
SF : Augie and Andy. They’d been around since the 60s, sort of producing.
II : Yeah, if you can say that. I mean, that’s being very generous. I don’t think producing was their forte. It was deal-making. Facilitating recording.
He (Andy Di Martino) had no musical suggestions whatsoever. “Do it again”, you know, “I think we got something here”. He was out of his element with someone like Don, because he was a very straight businessman.
And I don’t think Don really had much respect for him. But he agreed to do the deal, and that’s what that record was all about. It was done pretty quickly.
There was a drummer named Gene Pello who played on most of it. A studio drummer who was really good, but missed the point, I think. He didn’t know who Don was. He really didn’t. He just didn’t. He played very competent drum parts without understanding, I’m sure. But he would have been very well served, Gene Pello, if someone had said “hey, listen to this guy, Drumbo. Listen to what this guy did, or listen to Artie Tripp”. Because I was quite young and I didn’t have any status I couldn’t do it.
Because the music was unconventional. That was the whole point of how amazing the earlier recordings were. I listened to something the other night of some work Drumbo did with Henry Kaiser and Richard Thompson.
SF : Oh, yes. I’ve heard those. Really amazing stuff.
II : Absolutely. And this guy, Gene Pello, who was a straight down the line studio drummer. Again, he was competent. He played. He arrived on time. But he didn’t understand.
These guys, and I don’t speak with contempt, it’s experience. The studio musicians, certainly at the time, had to make quick judgments about what it is they were trying to render. “Oh, it’s one of these things. Okay, I know what to do with this”. And three hours later, they figured it out, more or less.
Whereas with the unconventional people like John French, or the aforementioned people, they had to live this stuff for a while. And it took a lot longer. It was more of a slow process, organic process, you know? Moonbeams was recorded pretty quickly. And there wasn’t a lot of experimentation going on, as I recall.
It was definitely more, “okay, I think we got this one, let’s move on to the next one”. And then, after we were in the studio, these other people came in to do these overdubs. I wasn’t even around for them.
When I finally heard the record come out, I was shocked. Michael Smotherman, I think, was on it.
SF : Yes, right, he was, and Jimmy Caravan.
II : Jimmy Caravan. Wonderful keyboard player. But it was a gig, you know. They got called, probably by Andy Di Martino. I’m sure not by Don. “Come on down, we got a session. This guy, Beefheart, you may have heard of him.” And so, it was very generic sort of stuff they did. It wasn’t specific to the songs at all.
Having said all of this, because I listened to a few of the songs recently, after being pretty horror-struck years ago. Some of it does survive, because it was Don. He was irrepressible.
And he still manages to get into the picture. Because his character is just so strong. In the worst moments, he sounds like he’s just out to sea. He’s just untethered. He doesn’t know what to do. But in the best moments, The Party of Special Things, I think, is a really great song.
Observatory Crest is a great song. So, I think it was just, it was an unfortunate pairing of disparate elements, who probably under other circumstances, really shouldn’t have worked together. It was a bad match, I think. But despite that, some merit emerged from it.
SF : Did Jan van Vliet ever turn up at these sessions?
II : She was around a little bit. I found her very … she was very warm to me, partially because of, oh, you’re Elliot’s brother. So, you know, I was OK. They were very fond of each other, Elliot and Jan.
I recall her bringing food in. It’s always a welcome, a welcome sight. Food in the studio. Musicians, everything stops, you know. It’s time to eat. We’re not going to record anything. We’ve got to eat right now, you know. It’s absolute law, you know. It’s funny, too, because certainly back in the day when we had sessions with groups of people as opposed to, you know, one or two people now.
The big moment was someone would come out with a legal pad. OK, we’re going to order from this restaurant. And most of the studios had stacks of menus, before the Internet, of course.
So you had these books. Well, here’s Mexican food and here’s Thai food and here’s Chinese and all. And so everybody would have to agree. OK, we’re going to do, we’re going to do Thai food today. OK. And so the interns would have this task of writing.
They would pass the yellow pad around. Everybody would write what they wanted. And when the food, so that would there be a lag time when you ordered. Until it showed up. So, OK. We’re going to go back to work. As soon as we would see the intern enter the control room with the food or say it’s here, everything stops. It happened with everybody I’d ever worked with. It’s hilarious. You could set your watch to it. As soon as the food arrived. Didn’t matter where you were in the song. We’re quitting. Food’s warm. Let’s go.
So Jan brought food in, as I recall.
SF : Did she ever input into the songs?
II : I don’t remember any of that. No. Is she still alive? Do you know?
SF : She is. Yes. She doesn’t interact with the Beefheart fans at all.
II : But she is in control of the paintings.
SF : Very much so. She doesn’t do much of the music side, but certainly the art side.
II : Right. Yeah. Well, I remember Don told me that he made more money selling his first painting than he did his entire music career.
SF : I can believe that. Yeah.
II : Do you know where she lives? Is she still in the high desert?
SF : Well, they lived in Trinidad. As far as I know, she still lives in that house that they had on the coast.
II : Trinidad, that’s right. Yeah, North California. Beautiful, beautiful place. Very gloomy weather, but absolute redwoods, gorgeous. I visited them up there and it’s an idyllic place. Hardly any people live there.
SF : Yeah. It’s only a small place, apparently.
II : Yeah, very, very small. It’s, oh, I don’t know, probably five hours north of San Francisco. Near the Oregon border.
SF : You said it was a fairly short recording period.
II : It was just a couple of weeks or something like that I would think. I remember there were no rehearsals for any of the recordings. Typically, if you wrote songs, you would get into a rehearsal studio and work things out. This was write them and record them.
SF : Don was never much good at rehearsing, from what I could gather. Maybe rehearsing for a tour, but not rehearsing for recording.
II : But this definitely could have benefited from more thought applied to this stuff, because I think they settled pretty early on on things. “Okay, that’s good enough”, which is not really where Don was ever, that was not his focal point, I don’t believe. Things were not good enough. They had to be excellent.
And I think that this record in particular, because he seemed at times completely disinterested and at other times he was very involved, but it wasn’t, it was not consistent.
SF : No, it does seem to have been done in a completely different way from what I can gather about other albums. A lot of the stuff is worked out bit by bit by bit.
II : Some of it may have been put together before I get in the studio, but a lot of it didn’t have any of that going on. Everything that you hear, just about everything, I think I probably did some work on my own, but just about everything that you hear on this record was done on the spot. There was very little or no pre-production of things. And it shows it, you know, I think that even a song like Observatory Crest, it could have been even better than it was, had more thought gone into it. But the person in charge was making decisions.
I mean, I recall Andy did defer to Don. “How do you feel? Do you like that? Are you happy with that?” You know, he was being moderately respectful, I think. At the same time, Di Martino was tasked with finishing a record. As opposed to, you know, “what do we need to do to make this great”? That wasn’t part of it. No, it needs to be done in that amount of time and on budget.
But the studio, as I recall, was not a great place. I forgot even the name of it, but it was not anything memorable. It definitely wasn’t an A room [it was Stronghold Sound Recorders, North Hollywood – sf]. But I think in retrospect, if you tear this thing apart, as we are doing right now, I’m amazed it came out as good as it did, frankly.
Considering how adverse some of the conditions were for it. Principally, Don’s state of mind. He just, he was not, you know. I was so thrilled because I’d been around him now at that point, I was at the Spotlight Kid sessions. Walking in, my brother invited me to come. I saw Boogalarize being recorded. I saw Santa Claus on the Evening Stage being recorded. And it was thrilling. And it was at Record Plant, which was a great, great place here in L.A. There were hundreds and hundreds, thousands of great records made in this room. So by the time I worked with him in ’74, I guess that’s when. Yes, 74, that’s right. So five years earlier or four years earlier, I was already a known commodity to him. I wasn’t a stranger. Yeah, a familiar face. And, you know, I liked him a lot. He seemed to like me.
But after those records, after Spotlight Kid, certainly after Clear Spot, to be involved with this guy, to think, wow, maybe we could make an album as good as that. And that was very quickly dissipated. My hopes were very quickly dashed that it would be anything even remotely like those records. With those earlier ones, Don did rely on having, well, early on, John French arranging stuff for him. French did, and then Bill Harkleroad took that on from Decals onwards, really.
So without that person helping to arrange things, he must have felt adrift. He didn’t have that support, my brother didn’t do that kind of stuff. He contributed, you know, his point of view came across. But he was not a global overseer at that point for Beefheart. He was for his own band, for the Fraternity of Men, but not for this. And certainly with Zappa, Frank, that was what Frank did. He certainly did that to Frank. The global overseer, I mean, that’s what he does.
So yeah, that was definitely missing from this record. There was no through line. There was no point of view that adequately brought the personality of Don in a really tight focus.
SF : No, Ted Templeman managed to do it though.
II : That’s exactly right. Templeman, to me, I’ve said this to many people, if you know nothing of Beefheart, never heard of the guy, it’s the most accessible record of all the records. Yeah, it is. Clear Spot to me. For one simple reason among many, it sounds amazing.
SF : Absolutely, yeah. It’s the best produced Beefheart album.
II : It’s a beautiful sounding record, it’s impeccable. That’s what Ted did. And this record lacks that completely.
It does not have that definitive point of view. Technically, artistically, but moments come through, you know, those moments where he met, because he just was such a strong character, he came through.
SF : Yeah, his personality is so big, it’s going to project through whatever rubbish.
II : That’s right.
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Steve Froy
June 2025