Captain Beefheart Album by Album thread *

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by vinyl diehard, Jan 18, 2018.

  1. jacethecrowl

    jacethecrowl Forum Resident

    Location:
    Los Angeles, CA
     
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  2. jacethecrowl

    jacethecrowl Forum Resident

    Location:
    Los Angeles, CA
  3. Scope J

    Scope J Senior Member

    Location:
    Michigan
  4. Scope J

    Scope J Senior Member

    Location:
    Michigan
  5. Scope J

    Scope J Senior Member

    Location:
    Michigan
  6. Scope J

    Scope J Senior Member

    Location:
    Michigan
  7. misterdecibel

    misterdecibel Bulbous Also Tapered

    Two notes - (1) look at the window behind Eric Drew Feldman, it looks like there's someone walking up a flight of stairs during the performance, and (2) an audience member shouted an obscenity when they finished, and this went out over the air.
     
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  8. Platterpus

    Platterpus Senior Member

    The only vinyl LP I have of Beefheart's is "Ice Cream For Crow" plus the Blue Collar SDTK which I have on cassette and vinyl. I traded a Bowie 80's RCA CD for the "Ice Cream For Crow" LP from a friend of mine back in North Dakota. Otherwise it would have only cost me $5. So the trade was a no brainer. Prior to the 1999 2CD Rhino Anthology being released, I was over at my friends house and he put on a 12" single called "Light Reflected Off The Oceands Of The Moon" The instrumental B-side blew my mind so I was happy that Rhino put it on the 2CD Anthology. This was also around the time or perhaps a little earlier when I found a used cassette copy of the Blue Collar SDTK with "Hard Working Man." I'm glad this song was put on the Rhino CD Anthology as well. Some CD pressings of Ice Cream For Crow issued after 1999 have "Light Reflected Off The Oceands Of The Moon" as a bonus track. Ice Cream For Crow was a great album to end Don's career/legacy and not to ruin it. The frail picture of Don on the cover speaks a thousand words. Don's MS illness must have set in.

     
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  9. vince

    vince Stan Ricker's son-in-law

    Slighty Off-Topic Dept.:
    Just thought I'd let you 'hard-corse' Beefheart-fans know;
    Back in the '80's, a young woman named Danielle Dax sampled "Frying Pan" for her song "Yummer Yummer Man"!:
     
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  10. lou

    lou Fast 'n Bulbous

    Location:
    Louisiana
    He was a Beefheart fan!
     
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  11. lou

    lou Fast 'n Bulbous

    Location:
    Louisiana
    As was Vaclav Havel, former President of Czechoslovakia- he also liked Zappa but after meeting him he was quoted as saying the person he REALLY wanted to meet was Captain Beefheart!
     
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  12. Vangro

    Vangro Forum Resident

    Location:
    London
    A wise man!
     
  13. Jack Keck

    Jack Keck Forum Resident

    Location:
    Redford, MI
    This did my heart good!

    I COULDN'T AGREE MORE!
     
  14. vinyl diehard

    vinyl diehard Two-Channel Forever Thread Starter

    Doc, love this the from the opening of Hot Head. A great follow up to Shiny Beast.
     
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  15. PIGGIES

    PIGGIES Forum Resident

    Location:
    UK
    The opening riff is great
     
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  16. vinyl diehard

    vinyl diehard Two-Channel Forever Thread Starter

    I’m somehow not surprised!
     
  17. vinyl diehard

    vinyl diehard Two-Channel Forever Thread Starter

    Here's what Rolling Stone said in 1980:

    Don Van Vliet, a.k.a. Captain Beefheart, thunders through the rock & roll jungle like some mythological beast, a fantasy creature with the body of a burly monster and the head of a vaporous poet. Like its creator, Beefheart's current album, Doc at the Radar Station, comes charging at you in much the same way: the artist and his art go on a cultural rampage, ripping and tearing at dense, lush undergrowths of melody while hurling imprecations of the airiest, most elliptical wit.

    The result is music of such heat, strength and passion that many listeners will get trampled or will simply choose to avoid the jungle of Beefheart's music altogether and camp out in a safer, calmer thicket: e.g., the musical equivalent of driving through a controlled "habitat" where toothless lions loll on the hood of your car, gumming the windshield wipers.

    Beefheart, by contrast, has always bitten too hard for most people. He insists on joining together what popular music has put asunder: Delta blues and free jazz, atonal freakouts and sweet lyricism, primordial yawps and delicate joking. The Magic Band, Beefheart's tribe of sardonically dexterous musicians, follow their leader with unswerving faith. They cultivate and tend the jungle for the sole purpose of having their Captain rumble and cavort across it.

    Their labor is extremely worthwhile. Doc at the Radar Station's twelve compositions are wirier and more concise than the chipper anthems on Beefheart's previous record, Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller), yet they share a similar insistence upon small, quotidian themes expressed in curt, violent music. The new LP's fast, pounding opener, "Hot Head," comes perilously close to being a bit of conventionally structured blues-rock, with crisply defined verse and chorus (the title is Beefheartese for an ideal woman: "She can burn you up in bed/Just like she said/'cause she's a hot head"). But already, rules are being splintered: Robert Arthur Williams' drums are so bold and prominent that they occasionally batter Beefheart's words beyond recognition.

    After "Hot Head," Doc at the Radar Station begins to "jungleize" in earnest. The next number, "Ashtray Heart," sports an amusingly overwrought organizing metaphor ("You used me like an ashtray heart"), but it's set to a rhythm that's simultaneously stately and jerky: sharp, whining guitar lines cross each other and tangle in an effort to achieve the dominant melodic position. This kind of confusion and tension brings out the best in Beefheart, and both "Hot Head" and "Ashtray Heart" feature his most raspy, lycanthropic howls.

    Unlike the majority of Captain Beefheart's good work (i.e., just ignore the exhausted sellouts, Unconditionally Guaranteed and Bluejeans & Moonbeams). Doc at the Radar Station quite often entertains the idea of making normal, rational music. The songs here rarely shatter into headlong chaos without first showing us the comely, formal compositions they might have been. Indeed, they suggest part of the process that Van Vliet goes through to arrive at his marvelously complex, deracinated style ("an elegantly controlled use of the inexplicable," as critic-painter Mannie Father once said of Billy Wilder's movies).

    In this sense, the LP serves as a way for Beefheart to combat his increasingly ponderous reputation as cult genius. Granted, any man who writes such peculiar and unique music, who assures showbiz isolation by residing in a trailer in the Mojave Desert and who paints pictures that look like cave-man de Koonings deserves both a cult and the imputation of genius. But being a cult genius is inimical to Van Vliet's fiercest ambitions. While no AM-radio programmer will probably ever give airplay to Doc at the Radar Station, Beefheart is still busy aiming his grand, sweeping gestures at precisely that audience. Unfortunately, calling his fans a cult may prevent many people from asking to hear his music. And what is Beefheart's willful primitivism — his fractured chords and schizophrenic syntax — if not a firm, overt denial of genius? On their most superficial level, tunes like "Hot Head," "Telephone" and "Best Batch Yet" are forceful assertions that Don Van Vliet is bugged by the same things that plague us all: bad relationships, bad technology, bad government.

    Because it acknowledges the loneliness and powerlessness that lurk beneath the comforts of cult devotion. Doc at the Radar Station is Captain Beefheart's most meditative, heroic album. The record's recurring theme of gentle, playful, uncomplicated lyricism — in the quick instrumentals. "A Carrot Is as Close as a Rabbit Gets to a Diamond" and "Flavor Bud Living," in the sorrowful bleat of "Ashtray Heart" — might even be Beefheart's method of alienating his cult, for whom his highest achievement will forever be that masterpiece of livid, frustrated communication. Trout Mask Replica (1969).

    Though often funny and touching. Trout Mask Replica was harrowingly abstract, dark and coarse. Doc at the Radar Station is lit more brightly and speaks of less profound matters. In short, it's a smaller work, but no less serious for its unpretentiousness. There are always light images and ideas glowing in the heart of the jungle.

    Indeed, by previous Beefheart standards, the current LP offers a clean canvas on which the artist smears thick drum blobs, guitar brush strokes and vocal spatterings. The painterly metaphor is explicit in "Run Paint Run Run," a piece of ranting art criticism in which the Captain would have you believe that it's the paint that paints the picture, not the artist. This is an animistic aesthetic that remains remarkably consistent throughout Doc at the Radar Station.

    In a recent interview. Don Van Vliet admitted that Franz Kline was a conscious influence. But Van Vliet, perhaps the most interesting of rock & roll painters, lacks Kline's neurotic melancholy. The musician's darker colors, like the somber tones of the guitar parts in his songs, are moody and contemplative, yet never despairing or agonized. This is where Captain Beefheart's pop-art instincts jolt and enliven Van Vliet's formal romanticism. When Beefheart arrives at some knotty problem, be it technical or emotional, he does what his assumed name suggests: he bulls his way through the dilemma and confronts it with stubborn but well-intentioned (good-hearted) resolve.

    All of this culminates in Doc at the Radar Station's final number. "Making Love to a Vampire with a Monkey on My Knee" is Beefheart at his most juicily sensuous, squirting sweet, funny images: "The pond shined dry like a lady's compact/Lillies leaped like flat green hearts. "But the tune's plot is exactly what its title proclaims. Over a wheezing, clanging accompaniment of strings, brass and drums, the singer ends each verse with the rhythmic reminder that he's "making love to a vampire with a monkey on my knee." Midway through, the lovemaking turns frustrating ("Gnats ****ed my ears and nostrils") and labored (the monkey is really getting in the way), and Don Van Vliet closes the album by unleashing all his artistic ambivalences. "**** that thing! **** that poem!" screams Captain Beefheart, and the rattle in his throat tells you he's thinking "**** art" and "**** rock & roll," too. Such conviction is as frightening as it is exhilarating.
     
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  18. Vangro

    Vangro Forum Resident

    Location:
    London
    Pretty annoying review - that Delta Blues/free jazz trope trotted out again! - I don't agree with a lot of his conclusions about this album.
     
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  19. lschwart

    lschwart Senior Member

    Location:
    Richmond, VA
    I agree with you. I don't think there's a single relevant "observation" in that review.

    L.
     
  20. Pants Party

    Pants Party MOSTLY PEACEFUL

    Location:
    Washington, DC
    Doc At The Radar Station is a whole different brand of Beef to me. Even though the ingredients that make it up fall within the Captain Beefheart off-road, recipe book of how to make music -- there's just something different here to me. His last two albums -- but Doc especially -- are just so bitter and so far outside of any logical categorical placement. Just file it under "Reggae" and leave me alone. Lol.

    It's interesting that this music was essentially birthed from the same well as Shiny Beast and the whole Bat Chain period -- because, as released, it all bares little resemblance to me. As mentioned in the last album, I think I prefer the Bat Chain versions to what we actually got -- but since what we actually got is re-imagined and different -- maybe it's good it didn't all work out. Doc At The Radar Station, despite reusing much of this Bat Chain Puller material, is a different beast.

    I think it's the completely dry sound and Don's weathered, sun-bleached voice. Everything is so unbearably parched. Dry, beaten, weathered and tortured. Like those desolate flat-lands where they set land speed records. It makes me thirsty. At first, this barren surface can make it a little challenging to get to the music and mayhem underneath. As a result, this album took me longer to get into, and I wouldn't say struck me initially. Though I did recognize it as a significant arrival -- albeit at some abandoned destination, with rusted cars, bleached bones and no water or life to be found.

    I don't know what else to say about it -- I really like the album. But not like how I enjoy other albums. I listen to it. I hear it. But I don't laugh, smile (much), tap my toes, or feel stirred in some spiritual way. It's like the cover. It's perplexing. I don't know what it is. It's hits and scratches and at times, damn near deserves a restraining order. It's a masterpiece of music-like, sonic art. It's so flat, that it feels like it should (and could) be hung on a wall. To be seen just as much as it can be heard.
     
  21. A random observation. For whatever reason I had never paid much attention to the instrumental tracks from the 78-82 albums. In the context of the albums, they are palette-cleansers and tend (for me at least) to get lost in the sound and fury. This thread made me listen more closely, and man, some of the instrumental tracks from 78-82 are just phenomenal.
     
  22. Jack Keck

    Jack Keck Forum Resident

    Location:
    Redford, MI
    The ring tone on my phone is from "Telephone". It's just that "telephone, telephone" refrain repeated over and over. My pastor heard it and referred to it as "death metal". I wasn't sure what to make of that. I told him it was by Captain Beefheart and that his last album was released in 1982. He remarked that he was alive in 1982. I'll have to explain the Captain to him some day.
     
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  23. elaterium

    elaterium Forum Resident

    I was at that concert and still have that flyer.
     
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  24. Pants Party

    Pants Party MOSTLY PEACEFUL

    Location:
    Washington, DC
    Lol! That's awesome. Because that's exactly how I feel when any phone is ringing. Ahhhh! Telephone!!

    Plastic horned devil
     
    Last edited: Mar 24, 2018
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  25. Pants Party

    Pants Party MOSTLY PEACEFUL

    Location:
    Washington, DC
    They really are. They're executed to perfection.

    The sad thing about it all, with this whole astonishingly brilliant comeback period -- is how abruptly it all ends. I assume it was his illness. But I just really loved where he was going with his music and it crushes me that we'll never know where he was going next. I know it was going to amazing.
     
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