Captain Beefheart

The Song Does Not Remain The Same

Gary Lucas — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 22:49:51 +0000

The Song Does Not Remain The Same Gary Lucas August 10, 2026 - 18:49

Topics

Tags

The Beefheart Vantage! (Turn Image 90º To The Right for Normal View)

Sometimes all it takes is hearing a random sound out of context… a whiff of a subtle scent wafting your way…or coming upon a strange but naggingly familiar scene or tableau to trigger images buried deep in the past in your subconscious mind, memories you might have resigned as being lost to the ages if you ever recalled them at all. It's the old Proust and his madeleine effect. Here, an involuntary mnemonic device which comes to you out of nowhere and brings you up short and sharpish into the twilight world of phantoms and dreams…before the scene evanesces, and you are plunged back into what James Joyce referred to in Ulysses as the "shattering daylight of no thought."

The other day while walking in the West Village I came upon just such a recondite scene that brought to the surface of my cranial soup an entire chain of lost memories regarding my life in the West Village circa 50 years ago…which led to a vivid memory of a song lost to the ages involving me and my dear friend and collaborator Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet).

I had just turned the corner of Bleecker Street and Seventh Avenue on a stroll to Faicco's Italian Specialties, when...

Horrors!! Shrouded in construction netting, 285 Bleecker St., a 19^th-century cast-iron tenement near the corner of 7th Avenue now being renovated for the first time in 50 years, to the best of my knowledge. A 19th-century walk-up tenement building and the first place we lived in the West Village circa June '77. On the ground floor: the legendary Village butcher shop Ottomanelli's, with dead rabbits and other wild game hanging on hooks in the window and all sorts of offal on display (yecch). Right across the street, the legendary Matt Umanov Guitars. Down the block, Italian pastry joint Rocco's (best cannolis in NYC). A great location!

During the super-hot, sweaty Summer of Sam, we lived 4 flights up in a railroad flat, a middle-aged dominatrix operating her by-appointment-only trade next door (lots of spanking and barked commands could be heard emanating through her door at random times of the day, on the order of "Bend over, I'm gonna stick my big toe in your ass!"). Then there was the young couple who screamed at the top of their lungs for hours at each other until eventually having loud make-up sex in which the female would bawl her brains out between bouts of balling. At night I would sit in a comfortable chair gazing out the huge window at the Brechtian Street Scene below. Lots of foreign tourists always, the endless passing parade slowly funneling down to the real Human Zoo around McDougal in the central village on Bleecker east of 6th Ave.

At around 9 pm nearly every night until mid-summer, the French mime Philippe Petit, several months away from walking the World Trade Center, rolled up in full whiteface make-up and tattered frock coat on a unicycle directly under my window, quickly gathering a big crowd of rubberneckers as he strung a taut rope hitched from a fire hydrant to a lamppost at a 45-degree angle, and pranced up and down the rope from bottom to the top while juggling bowling pins, somehow managing to stay upright. I had a front row seat every night and a water pipe! Folks showered him with tips, and then he would cycle off to who knows where, coming back there night after night for at least most of mid-June into early July. One night he looked up rapidly, spotted me sitting in my 4th floor window perch (he was aware of everything going on around him), and gave me a quick wave.

And then came the BIG BLACKOUT of July 13-14th. The power went off all over the city around 9:30 pm, but somehow the phones kept working. The New York Times had recently run an article about what they dubbed "The Feral People," the homeless living for years in the sub-basements of Grand Central Station many levels under the tracks, who rarely came up for daylight, and then usually only to forage for food (a very lurid article that made them sound kind of like the race of troglodytes lurking in the London Metro in the 1972 UK horror film Death Line, entitled Raw Meat in the US. When the lights went off, my pal and horror film actor Bill Moseley called me and insisted we get flashlights and somehow make our way to Grand Central, go down into the basements, and explore the catacombs, so to speak. A notion I was unable to sign on to...

Years later, after I'd moved out to more salubrious lodgings in the farther West Village, a one-bedroom with a fantastic view of the Hudson out one window and the Empire State Building out the other, I became passionately involved in Captain Beefheart's music and overall care and feeding. We, the members of his Magic Band, were required to go out and purchase miniature Sony cassette recorders to capture on the fly any of Don's imperious pronouncements or oracular observations, some of which might make it into subsequent lyrics or titles of paintings or poems. Don LOVED the sound of words, and frequently deployed some good ones—"giggy ghee," "expoobident," "frowsy," "insultuous"…

One night in 1981 during a period when I was between wives, Don rang me at 3 am, rousting me from a very deep sleep. He insisted I fetch my tape recorder, as he wanted to run down a new composition over the phone. I sleepily got up to retrieve it, and coming back to the phone, I jammed my mini-recorder into the phone's earpiece to catch the full flavor of his new composition.

"You ready?"

Don started to whistle tunelessly—"pssss shoooooeeeee wheessh sheeee whee woowie whooooo"—producing nary a melody or a rhythm or an actual musical tone, the fundamental necessary skeletal building blocks of music per se that might give one something to hang on to and base a song on. His whistling, which on a good day could charm the birds out of the sky, had here devolved into a mere pushing of random air through pursed lips with no apparent compositional design overarching—Aleatory? Yes. The basis for a new song? Well…

"Didja get that?" he asked breathlessly when he'd finished. Yeah, I got it, Don.

"Gooood! Now learn that on guitar!"

Oh yeah.

He went on: "It's a new song of mine called" (wait for it)—"MELODY ARMS." Good title. Poetic—romantic even. Wish I'd heard anything halfway resembling a melody in there though…but still.

Go on…

Don waxed enthusiastic:

"It's a song about a hotel, or a boardinghouse, called 'THE MELODY ARMS.'"

Wha???

The old rascal had set me up and just pulled the rug out from under me.

"Each room in the building has a different character or characters living inside. Every verse describes a different room and tells a story about the lives of the folks living there." Sounded a bit like Nico's song "Chelsea Girls" (co-written with the Velvet Underground's Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison), in which Nico devotes a verse each to Warhol Factory denizens like Brigid Polk, Pope Ondine, and Ingrid Superstar who were then all living at the Chelsea Hotel. But I doubt Don had heard that, or maybe it was inspired by the cheesy "Tenement Symphony" as sung by Tony Martin in the Marx Brothers' late clinker The Big Store.

But I kept shtum.

Immediately I flashed on an image of 285 Bleecker Street in 1977…and the characters who dwelled within its chipped plastered walls (especially the dominatrix). That crummy little building could have been "THE MELODY ARMS." I started getting into the idea.

THIS SONG COULD WORK!

Next day though, "Melody Arms" had become the One That Got Away; yet another potential masterpiece lost way back in the queue inside the hyperactive compartmentalized psyche of Don Van Vliet, who was off in the ether and otherwise occupied—busy painting, sketching, whistling, singing and humming myriad new songs composed right on the spot—and growling at any Magic Band member that wandered too close into earshot.

Add new comment

Live From New York

Gary Lucas — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 02:28:26 +0000

Live From New York Gary Lucas January 29, 2025 - 21:28

Topics

Music Review

Tags

Captain Beefheart

DON VAN VLIET (CAPTAIN BEEFHEART) "ABSTRACT COMPOSITION” 1979 AS FEATURED IN ROLLING STONE MAGAZINE’S "RANDOM NOTES” COLLECTION

LIVE FROM NEW YORK: This article about Questlove's Saturday Night Live music documentary claims no one clapped for Captain Beefheart's performance on the show. Simply not true. Ling and I booked his appearance on the show with our friend Hal Willner, and we were there at the taping. Someone in the audience did audibly shout "Shit!" at the end of the group’s second number "Ashtray Heart"—and later apologized to us outside NBC while we were standing there waiting for the limo to ferry us to the Gramercy Park Hotel for the after-party. "I never heard music like that before," he said apologetically, which we took as a compliment.

75 million people tuned in that night. The guest host was actor Malcolm McDowell (Clockwork Orange), who came backstage to the dressing room before the group went on to tell us how much he loved the band.

The next night, we played in Albany, anticipating a sell-out show, as, after all, we had just played before 75 million people. Only about 20 people turned up (I kid you not). And as we were loading the cars and the van with the gear after the show, the promoter and his club manager appeared in the parking lot glaring at us in a menacing way, like: "Give us our money back!"

Don calmly remarked, "Gary, get ready to grab a guitar case. Guitars make excellent battering rams!"

We didn't have to fight our way out of the parking lot, though—the pair just turned in disgust after clocking us and walked back into the club.

The next day, we drove back to NYC from our dinky Albany motel to prepare for our upcoming gig at the Beacon Theatre—which was a triumph. The sun was shining on Manhattan as we headed into the city, and Little Feat's line from "Feats Don't Fail Me Now" was ringing in my ears:

"Don't the sunrise look so pretty / Never such a sight
Like rollin' into New York City / with the skyline in the morning light
Roll right through the night."

Indeed.

Add new comment

Traumnovelle Inspired by Don Van Vliet

Gary Lucas — Tue, 30 Jan 2024 23:32:37 +0000

Traumnovelle Inspired by Don Van Vliet Gary Lucas January 30, 2024 - 18:32

Topics

Art Review

Tags

Captain Beefheart

"Chinese Fisherman" 1980, ink, watercolor, graphite & colored pencil on paper

Sunday, Jan 28th 2024

Just a little while ago, while napping on a cold, miserable Sunday afternoon in NYC. Made brighter by one moment of absolute radiant clarity out on the street -- but that was earlier. And only for a moment.

So after this one bright beam of sunshine on an otherwise dull day, I'm curled up on my bed dozing off fitfully around 4 pm, after a long spell gazing at one of my favorite Don Van Vliet artworks, entitled "Chinese Fisherman." It was a gift from Don (Captain Beefheart) back in 1980 when I had just begun playing and managing him. I own a bunch of his artwork which you can view here: http://www.garylucas.com/www/dvv/

That afternoon, scrolling through the gallery I created online and revisiting his fantastic artwork triggered something deep inside me. I was overcome by the beauty and Don's childlike sense of wonder -- there are real monsters lurking in the crevices of his artwork. It was all too much at that moment, and I thought I would lie down and ponder what it all meant.

"To sleep, perchance to dream…"

And I fell into a reverie which spiraled down, down into a deep dark dream, a dream in which I'm all alone on a couch, watching a black and white '50s-type television in a small room in someone's apartment, while a full-on party rages just outside the door and I'm glued to the tv screen in front of me, where a nameless handsome classic rock star du jour -- any day really, looking not too far afield from Rick Springfield circa 1974, with blow-dried thick black wavy mullet -- is being promoted on a late-night talk show.

And now he's about to perform live.

He's sitting there hunched over in a chair clutching his big semi-acoustic electric guitar, about to deliver a performance for a national TV audience from a remote recording studio in another town, surrounded by racks and racks of recording gear: limiters, compressors, reverbs, delays which fill the room wall to wall, metal shelving towering overhead behind him.

He's about to strum his guitar and sing for us (you and me and the late-night audience).

Just about visible behind him, seen through the glass window of a tiny vocal isolation booth, is his young black sidekick, who whips out a Hohner Marine Band harmonica in order to accompany our guy's new song -- a soulful blues.

They get on it -- and yet the sound coming out of the tinny television speaker is wildly discordant, almost painful to the ear.

It's like an invisible miasma has rolled into the studio on screen, taken over their session, and fogged up the audio transmission.

The blues harp is painfully out of tune and in the wrong key to the song the guitar player is attempting to perform. The guy has brought the wrong harmonica to the studio for their big number!

But as much as the sideman huffs and puffs and sucks and blows, trying to willfully bend the stream of notes emitting from his harp to make them consonant with the singer's blues, the result is a maelstrom of dissonance.

The guitarist is livid that his big moment on national TV is being wrecked and screams in frustration.

He jumps up out of his chair and turns around to rage at his partner behind the glass, who is frantically still trying to sweet-talk/browbeat the notes he's producing into submission, but it's no use.

The rockstar runs out of the room for a second and then returns brandishing a fire axe.

He starts wildly chopping at the wall of electronic equipment that limns the studio while his sidekick cowers in fear in his isolation booth.

A frail grey-haired granny somehow connected to the network rushes into the room to try and restrain the rocker to no avail.

He swings his axe ever more widely at the equipment, and the gigantic mass of equipment -- frantic potentiometers waving back and forth, lights fizzing and twinkling-- starts to topple forward.

The old woman tries her best to prop it all up ("That'll cost us millions!") -- by literally putting her bony shoulder to a collapsing shelve -- but she is no match for the unforgiving steel, which comes plummeting down on her slender frame, burying her under the rubble, crushing her body to a pulp on the floor.

Then the entire studio begins to come apart, acoustic ceiling tiles start to give way, and all comes crashing down around the rock singer and his paralyzed partner in the glass booth.

The TV screen in front of me abruptly goes blank -- and then turns to black and white confetti "snow" as if all the studio wires had just snapped, and the transmission had ended on a historic, horrifying live TV moment (not unlike Pinky Lee's 1955 live on-camera heart attack on NBC).

I cannot believe I've just witnessed this.

I spring up off the couch, and rush out of the room and plunge into the ongoing party.

I try my best to convey to my host and his guests the profound gravitas of the moment I've just glimpsed voyeuristically.

But they couldn't care less. They just party on.

And then I wake up.

WHAT A HORRIBLE DREAM!

"Dot's very interesting…and vot do YOU think, Mr. Lucas??"

Add new comment

Captain Beefheart Album Survey, Part 4: Ice (s)Cream

Steve Holtje — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 15:00:00 +0000

Captain Beefheart Album Survey, Part 4: Ice (s)Cream Steve Holtje December 30, 2010 - 10:00

Topics

Music Review

Tags

Captain Beefheart

A couple of years ago, I was surveying Captain Beefheart albums here and got through the first seven. I always meant to finish; his death jolted me back into action. You can catch up with Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 as well.

Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) (Warner Brothers) Coming after some unsuccessful commercial compromises, about which the less said the better (Unconditionally Guaranteed and Bluejeans & Moonbeams yield one good track each, maybe two if you're generous), this 1978 album was a significant comeback. It includes the second recordings of four 1975-76 songs (and a poem) originally intended for an unreleased album, Bat Chain Puller, made for Frank Zappa's label DiscReet using guitarists Moris Tepper and Denny Walley, drummer John French, and keyboardist John Thomas. Zappa's estate owns this material and has continually blocked its legitimate release, but it has leaked out multiple times, most recently on the Ozit-Morpheus label as Dust Sucker: The Captain's own tapes of the legendary Bat Chain Puller studio sessions.

When Beefheart went back into the studio, it was with a revamped Magic Band, the most sonically colorful of his career. True, aside from Eric Drew Feldman's slight touches of electric keyboard and a tiny bit of trombone, opener "The Floppy Boot Stomp" almost sounds like it could have been on Trout Mask Replica, with slide guitar and walloping drums setting the tone. But then comes "Tropical Hot Dog Night," with Bruce Fowler's trombone and Art Tripp's marimba dominating the sound, truly sounding, as Beefheart sings, "Like two flamingoes in a fruit fight." The Captain also proclaims, "I’m playin' this music so the young girls will come out to meet the monster tonight," the monster presumably being him. The instrumental "Ice Rose" combines the two sounds, Jeff Moris Tepper's and Richard Redus's sliding and jangling guitars alternating and occasionally mixing with trombone and marimba over typically shifting beats that are nonetheless more propulsive -- more groove-like -- than Beefheart's norm. "Harry Irene" is a throwback to the sweeter, more pop-song-esque material of the previous few LPs, complete with accordion, piano, and whistling, but in the more bracing context of this album, where it acts as a change of pace, its sentimentality is more welcome. "You Know You Are a Man" is a scruffy hunk of boasting on the grittier end of the spectrum including Muddy Waters and Bo Diddley.

"Bat Chain Puller" is something of a mystery. Not sure what a "bat chain puller" is, and the other lyrics offer little enlightenment. The beat is more up-and-down than forward-moving, and harmonic motion is often absent and more sideways than forward, but it's a colorful little mobile spinning for us. "When I See Mommy, I Feel Like a Mummy" puts some amusing wordplay -- with perhaps a Freudian undercurrent -- over a beautifully skewed assortment of grooves with a modal tinge. The instruments' different parts of varying length, coming and going, give it a kaleidoscopic feel, with Beefheart often dropping out to let the music come to the fore. His harmonica bleats and squeals a fanfare on "Owed T'Alex," which again sets up shifting interlocked patterns of trombone, drums, and guitars. After that builds in density, with Beefheart growling over it like Howlin' Wolf, it concludes with a more tonal demonstration of his harmonica skills.

"Candle Mambo" doesn't sound much like a mambo; the title comes from his description of candle-cast shadows dancing on the ceiling. "Love Lies" is a hypnotically mournful admission that the singer’s woman left because of his deceits; marimba and trombone dominate, with Beefheart's wails and Fowler’s slithering slides intertwining brilliantly. "Suction Prints" is another instrumental; some sections bear a resemblance to "When I See Mommy, I Feel Like a Mummy," but overall it's more emphatic and driving. The closing "Apes-Ma" is a sad little poem about an aging ape in a cage; the lyrics suggest a chilling sociological parallel.

Doc at the Radar Station (Virgin)

By 1980, with post-punk rhythms often strongly influenced by Beefheart's favorite beats, his time had finally come, and this magnificent platter captured the moment and vastly increased his audience. Whether knowingly or coincidentally, its generally stripped-down, more guitar-centric Magic Band (less marimba and horns; John "Drumbo" French was now on guitar more than percussion), emphasized the relationship with post-punk and may have made the music more accessible to that style's adherents. (Was it some clever image-tweaking that had all six members of the band pictured wearing neckties?)

"Hot Head" is about a woman who can "burn you up in bed." Musically it's a string of irresistible riffs, one after/atop another. The album's trademark rhythmic device, off-beat high-hat clamping down, is prominent. Much of "Ashtray Heart" ("You used me like an ashtray heart / Case of the punks, right from the start / I feel like a glass shrimp" makes for an arresting opening) has a chugging, regular rhythm laid out on toms and high-hat (on one of two tracks where Drumbo's drumming), but its feeling is nonetheless angular due to the way the accents of the instrumental parts fit together. There are frequent interruptions where Eric Drew Feldman's Mellotron pushes out the other instruments; it's a very sectional piece (Beefheart varies his voice as well) -- but this is one tight band, and where in the old days there was sometimes a shambolic feel to the parade of sections, and occasionally a ramshackle feeling that it might all fall apart and the sections weren't compatible, here everything coheres tightly.

"A Carrot Is as Close as a Rabbit Gets to a Diamond" is a minute-and-a-half instrumental duet for electric guitar and piano; the guitar has the melody (with a few chords underneath) and the piano occasionally buttresses it with chords and serves to accent beats. "Run Paint Run Run" is far from Beefheart's best songwriting effort, barely above the nursery-rhyme level (albeit with dark tinges), but Robert Arthur Williams's pounding drums, some repetitive slide guitar from French and/or Tepper, and whooping trombone (Fowler) or French horn (Gary Lucas) make it naggingly compelling.

"Sue Egypt" mixes Mellotron flute with a wall of guitar-strumming/sliding and an amazing lyric ("I think of all those people who ride on my bones" and "Vagabond / bad vugam" are just a few of the gems to be heard) declaimed with riveting melodrama. "Brickbats" is one of those prototypical Beefheart constructions of asymmetric parts that cycle around each other like a sonic mobile -- with his unfettered soprano sax bleatings on top, a wild card defying the structure but also in a way tying together the shifts from one motivic cell to another -- and there are enough riffs here to power five or six normal songs. "The shiny beast of thought," another of Beefheart's best lines, kicks off "Dirty Blue Gene." It's a guitar whirlwind, with sudden starts and stops and bits where everything drops out but one guitar for a few beats. Beefheart runs through a wide range of vocal timbres across a broad pitch range.

"Best Batch Yet" is a surprisingly optimistic lyric, spoken rather than sung (though so dramatically and with so much gruff personality that it’s not really a "reading"); the guitars throw little riffs back and forth, the players' different timbres making it more than repetition. The music builds/develops more than most tracks on this album -- one of only two longer than four minutes. The short "Telephone" is another sub-par lyric, but at least lets us know how much the Captain hates the titular object ("plastic horned devil"). The jagged parts under his frenzied voice accentuate the mood without becoming memorable, probably explaining the track’s brevity. "Flavor Bud Living" is a sparkling solo electric guitar instrumental. Mixing chords and little runs across its 57 seconds, it's a scintillating miniature of barbed beauty. It's the first Beefheart guitar appearance of Gary Lucas, who was the Captain's manager at the time; if I remember correctly, Lucas told me that he had to painstakingly learn it from a tape where Beefheart played it on piano.

"Sheriff of Hong Kong" has lots of gong to evoke its Asian locale. Surprisingly, the titular character is at various times Beefheart and a woman. More high-hat/toms beats and chiming guitars. But we’re building toward the big finish, so at six-and-a-half minutes it gets to play out for a while. It’s well suited for its length, as it’s another Beefheartian creation where the rhythms and phrase lengths that the different instruments have don't all match, so they can repeat themselves without the overall pattern repeating as they fit together a little differently each time around. The different riffs also get varied and developed -- and piled atop each other more thickly -- as it goes along, with added ingredients as well, until a sudden cold ending. It would be a hard act to follow for anyone but Beefheart; instead, the concluding "Making Love to a Vampire with a Monkey on My Knee" is the high point of the album. Feldman deploys ice-cold Mellotron chords that ooze alienation while Beefheart's sinuous sax winds under his scabrous vocal. Most of it is sparsely instrumented, but it gradually adds layers (including some welcome marimba), and after he proclaims, "Death be damned! Life!" the music turns into a sort of dark instrumental merry-go-round crowned by Beefheart's braying sax, then leaves us hanging by ending with a phrase two chords shorter than expected. Fifteen years into

his career, he'd made a masterpiece to rival Trout Mask Replica.

Ice Cream for Crow (Virgin)

The last we heard from Beefheart musically appeared in 1982. He had a new Magic Band, the most guitar-centric of all. Lucas was now a full-time member, Tepper was stalwart, and there was hardly any keyboard. The new rhythm section of Richard "Midnight Hatsize" Snyder and Cliff R. Martinez sound like they'd studied the old Magic Bands acutely, or been drilled by someone who had. On a lot of tracks Beefheart recites rather than singing or even declaiming dramatically. In retrospect one wonders whether his illness was already weakening him. The album's not at the level of its two immediate predecessors, but we were just glad to have a little more Captain.

"Ice Cream for Crow" is basically a fast shuffle, but in the sections between Beefheart’s recitation, there's some shimmering slide guitar. It's a semi-comic tale/poem, I think, though one can never be sure with Beefheart. "The Host the Ghost the Most Holy-O" is the first recitation over music, with only slight shifts in vocal timbre. How religious or ironic is it? One thing’s for sure: It doesn’t speak well of humanity.

"Semi-Multicoloured Caucasian" is an instrumental with a rolling/hopping groove, a lighter respite from the heavy pondering of the preceding track. It's less dissonant, less weird, more repetitive and normally structured, and more tuneful than Beefheart's norm, especially for instrumentals. "Hey Garland, I Dig Your Tweed Coat" returns to recitation-over-music mode, with the album's most jagged music, a throwback to Trout Mask Replica. It seems to be about identity changing with appearance, but also switches from describing a human face to some odd animal vignettes and back to human. The sounds of the words are beautiful beyond sense.

"Evening Bell" is another spectacular guitar solo played by Gary Lucas, perhaps the most difficult of them all. Then it's back to recitation over music with "Cardboard Cutout Sundown," the music jerking along in fits and starts with all but guitar (sounds like Tepper) dropping out for short stretches to vary density and volume. Martinez does his most impressive drumming here. "The Past Sure Is Tense" is halfway between recitation and song, Sprechstimme as the Germans might put it, with a few howls and warbles thrown in. The music's another warped shuffle, relatively accessible, with one riff in particular driving the piece along but with plenty of slippery slide guitar ornamentation and, near the end, a powerful onslaught of fuzz guitar plus harmonica overlapping Beefheart's vocal (yes, overdubbing). "Ink Mathematics" is full of wordplay, and trying to listen for a point may be misguided. The music emphatically mirrors Beefheart’s phrasing. "The Witch Doctor Life" is another Sprechstimme track, a little more colorful than most of the album thanks to marimba overdubbed by Snyder. The guitar riffs have nursery-rhyme simplicity.

"'81' Poop Hatch" is pure recitation, no music -- except the music of Beefheart’s rhythm. What does it mean? Who knows, although there's a certain amount of ecology and suffering involved. "The Thousandth and Tenth Day of the Human Totem Pole" is some sort of sociological allegory. "The man at the bottom was smiling" but the poor guy on top was starving, balance was a problem, and really they all just wanted to walk. The accompaniment is minimal -- off-kilter beats, spare guitar lines, bass accents. After the lyric is finished, Beefheart plays horns, overdubbing intertwining lines. "Skeleton Makes Good" finds Beefheart taking his last officially released vocal, singing and Sprechstimming over a herky-jerky accompaniment. And that was the end of his musical career. (The most recent CD edition adds a bonus track, "Light Reflected off the Oceans of the Moon," flipside of the "Ice Cream for Crow" 12-inch single; it's the instrumental track of "Hey Garland, I Dig Your Tweed Coat" with Beefheart playing soprano sax over it instead of his lyrics.)

He was just 41 years old in 1982, at the height of his popularity; how many people expected that he’d follow that with 28 years of silence? That silence lasted longer, in fact, than his musical career. Not knowing at first that he was sick, Beefheart fans were disappointed that he switched from music to painting (his first love, and in his second shot at it, more remunerative than music had ever been for him). We hoped for a comeback. But the Captain was probably wise to leave on a relative high note rather than traveling down an unhealthy road of diminishing returns. The ten good to great albums he left are a unique rock-outsider legacy. By the time he died at age 69, he was a beloved figure and revered icon.

Add new comment

Captain Beefheart - The Dusty Wright Show

Dusty Wright — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 13:16:54 +0000

Captain Beefheart - The Dusty Wright Show Dusty Wright August 28, 2008 - 09:16

Topics

Vidcast

Tags

Captain Beefheart

Gary Lucas's Captain Beefheart tribute was epic. Even David Lynch got in on the action!

Subscribe via Youtube or Subscribe via Feedburner