Beefheart The Visionary
This article was written by Steve Peacock and is originally taken from the 9th January, 1971 edition of Sounds.
Captain Beefheart is one of the few visionary musicians alive and working today. His music has a rare quality that makes it painful in the clarity of its perception, in its honesty, and above all in its humanity that is so real and so much of a contrast with the superficiality that we tend to accept as normal that it takes on superhuman, almost mystical qualities.
Yet as with nearly all men of vision, Beefheart has been ignored, ridiculed, attacked, and misunderstood. He has gained a certain amount of acceptance in this country if not in America, but he is misunderstood - worshipped as a kind of freak, a circus hero. People tend to project onto Beefheart their desires for something unusual, weird, fantastic, "far out", and on a superficial level he can be moulded to fit the image. But look closer and you find that Beefheart is not some kind of unreal fantasy figure, he is basically a man who lives at the core of everyone’s personality, a core that is buried and swathed in layers of assumed attitudes, force-fed values, ‘civilised’ behaviour.
Beefheart seems eccentric because he doesn't fit our standardised patterns, but that doesn't mean that he is outside. In truth, he is very much inside at the roots. You don't really listen to or appreciate his music, you feel it, and though it seems harsh to say it and it may not be a statement that is justifiable by cold logic, if you can't feel it then you are the freak, the one who stands outside the human race.
Beefheart's music belongs in the tradition of the real blues, not with the commercially acceptable manifestations that came from Chicago, not with the show-men of the R&B era, but with the field hollers, the bitterness, the laughter, and the raw, unschooled music of the Delta.
He ranks with people like Blind Lemon Jefferson, Lightnin' Hopkins and Son House, but he belongs too with people like Coltrane and Albert Ayler, and perhaps even Hendrix - musicians who had technique, but who understood that technique was purely a means of communicating themselves, their vision.
These are people who push forward the frontiers of music, but they do it not purely with exceptional technique but with themselves - with their hearts, their souls, with whatever you like to call that power that is within most people, yet is realised and used by so very few.
There are, of course, many differences between the music on his first album and the music on his most recent one: the members of the Magic Band have changed, the style has changed and developed, and the amount of outside interference varies with each album. But all his music is striding, raunchy, and animal, with a good-humoured warmth, an honesty and directness, which makes it rare in the mainstream of 20th century music where standards are based more on technical expertise, novelty, and palatable sentiment.
It was the blues of Chicago and the cities, and later even further emasculated white English city blues that gained wide scale recognition, not the blues from the Delta; and in the same way it is Frank Zappa, not Beefheart, who gets recognition and commercial rewards for his music.
This is not to say that I think all city blues is insincere, commercialised rubbish - far from it - and it is certainly not to say that I don't enjoy and admire the music of Frank Zappa, but because they are so often associated, and because there are similarities in the music of Zappa and Beefheart I think it in important to make the distinction between them.
Zappa is a fine technician, a craftsman with a wealth of expert knowledge on which he draws to construct intricate and order (through bizarre) set pieces of music. He deserves, and gets, respect for his craftsmanship and also for the way in which he blends absurdity, outrage with an extensive, wide-ranging set of musical reference points. Listening to Zappa’s music is a thoroughly enjoyable experience, and though there is an emotive quality, the overriding effect is intellectual.
But what Zappa does not have is the raw, natural emotion of Beefheart’s music, and although you can hear similarities in technique between Zappa’s band and the Magic Band, there is this essential difference. Frank Zappa constructs and controls his music, it is for the most part conscious creation; Captain Beefheart opens up and lets it flow. Frank Zappa is shrewd, Beefheart is a visionary.
Beefheart’s first venture into the world of records and business was a couple of singles for A&M in the States in 1964. But that didn’t work out, and it was a year before the Captain and his Magic Band put out the album "Safe As Milk" - on Buddah in the States, and later here on Pye International.
The Magic Band of that period were Beefheart (vocals and harmonica), Ry Cooder (guitar), Alex Snouffer (guitar), Jerry Handley (bass) and John French (drums). The music on that album is thick-textured and fast moving, firmly rooted in the blues (listen to Ry Cooder’s bottleneck guitar work) yet with a driving force that owes much to rock and roll. The album sets foundations for the future, but it is really Beefheart’s words and inspired vocals that show which way things are moving.
The first Magic Band split soon after "Safe As Milk" and he formed a new band that kept Handley and French, and added Alex St. Claire and Jeff Cotton. This was the band which Beefheart brought into England, and the band which recorded "Strictly Personal" on Boue Thumb in the States and released here through Liberty - an album that began to break through all the restrictions of formal structures, that showed the Captain's music opening out, and the stripping off of its veneer.
His music was beginning to lose the forms of its origins, while retaining the feeling behind them. But the album was anything but Strictly Personal, as producer Bob Krasnow saw fit to disguise the stark nakedness of the original music with unsympathetic phasing and other electronic gimmickry. In the final analysis the music wins, but it shouldn't have to fight that battle.
Then the second band split during a European tour, and Beefheart was on his own again - until he met up with his old friend from teenage days in Lancaster, Frank Zappa, who signed him to his new Straight label and promised complete artistic freedom. Beefheart assembled a new band from friends who were not professional musicians - Zoot Horn Rollo (glass finger guitar, flute). The Mascara Snake (bass, Clarinet and vocals), Rockette Morton (bass and narration) and Antennae Jimmy Semens (steel appendage guitar). No drummer is credited on the album sleeve.
"Trout Mask Replica" - released on Straight - was the first album which really let Beefheart’s music live and breathe. And it is important for that, and two other reasons: first, the music really is free of traditional forms - the Magic Band are humans finding expression in music rather than musicians trying to transcend their technique - and second, the Captain uses reeds for the first time - tenor and soprano saxes, and bass clarinet. The effect is incredible.
Supported by an open band of innocents (though they are far from naive) Beefheart found his true setting, and the music just flows on and out and up, Beefheart’s sax jabbing, cutting, thrusting, soaring and the band playing wild, pure and free, criss-crossing rhythms and colliding notes in an outwardly chaotic but harmonious way - though with complete disregard for conventional harmonies.
Zappa produced the album, but as he said when I interviewed him in December: ‘The choices were always left up to him (Beefheart). I did everything I could to make sure there was no tampering with his artistic concept, because I thought in the past his albums weren’t accurate representations of what he was into."
The twenty-eight tracks on the Trout Mask Replica double album constitute a major achievement in music, but there were flaws, there were places where things didn’t come together as well as they might have done. The new album Lick My Decals Off Baby - also on Straight - shows the Magic Band closer knit as a unit, yet still as free and open as before, It is not that they have become more formal, there just seems to be more of a corporate spirit to the music, a spirit that has produced inspired playing from everyone not least the Captain.
There are no credits on the album cover, but everything points to the assumption that this is the same band that made "Trout Mask". I am left wondering how Beefheart can move on after "Decals" - as he once said, he really needs a new art form. But then with his music he could almost be said to have created one.
With his instruments, with his voice (which he uses as an instrument with seemingly limitless range and colour), with his whole body, and with his Magic Band, Captain Beefheart expresses a universal feeling. You have to feel his music, it is not something to intellectualise about, and once you have he leads you back into the raw, basic consciousness that underlies the human race, and at the same time opens up his vision of the way ahead.
It is not a supernatural force, it is a totally natural one. Beefheart's vision is intangible. impossible to express in mere words, but it is real and it is human.
