July 1–8, 1999

music

There's Magic in the Madness

Captain Beefheart returns on a new anthology and rarities box set.

by a.d. amorosi

Captain Beefheart’s musical manifesto was a terrorist’s concoction of gut-shot blues and psychedelic delirium. His squirrelly noise and Dadaist prose predates "alternative" music by 30 years, yet his influence on art rock, noise rock and math rock is undeniable. This summer, getting in touch with the bizarre avatar will be easier than ever.

The new two-CD anthology The Dust Blows Forward (Rhino Records) touches upon the major points of Beefheart’s career – from 1966’s "Diddy Wah Diddy" through the seminal Trout Mask Replica, plus live couplings with Frank Zappa (who produced several Beefheart albums) and the last three records of the ’80s. The five-CD box Grow Fins 1965-1982 (Revenant) digs through the obscure side of Beefheart and His Magic Band. If Beefheart’s 1969 Trout Mask Replica is, as many say, the bible of avant-rock, then Grow Fins is its preface, outline and epilogue. For those who just can’t get enough, the two early, angular blues bombs Safe As Milk and The Mirror Man Sessions have just been released by the Buddha label with many added tracks.

Rhino’s Dust nicely excerpts Trout’s "Ella Guru" and "Orange Claw Hammer" in all their distaff beauty and highlights blue-horror gems like "Big Eyed Beans From Venus" from the out-of-print Clear Spot. It also completes the picture by taking 10 tunes from Beefheart’s Virgin label days, the end of his musical career. These loopy synth sessions, featuring They Might be Giants keyboardist Eric Drew Feldman and Knitting Factory fave guitarist Gary Lucas, send Beefheart off with a corrosive, jazz guitar-driven bang. A mewing, coughing Beefheart crawls through the stuttering "Bat Chain Puller" and the silly "Tropical Hot Dog Night" with all the artful passion and dazed confusion he first established 20 years before.

Safe as Milk (1967) and The Mirror Man (1970) are perfect bookends for Trout’s mangled field-recording. Milk is ravenous and childlike, a young man’s pop-blues that dips its toe into a lysergic acid lake. Mirror is the after-effect of a bad trip, a crawl from the decaying swamp of Trout.

It’s hard to deny that Beefheart can, at first, be repellent. But after a few listens, his primal scream, animalistic and artfully mannered, becomes part of you. Safe as Milk’s "Plastic Factory" (with 19-year-old Ry Cooder on slippery slide guitar) is sinister and grotesque, dragging the blues tradition to the precipice of psychedelia. The scarred Delta epic "Tarotplane" from Mirror Man is an unhinged live wire looking for muddy water.

To understand how the 59-year-old Beefheart, now retired from music and devoted to painting, went from being a blues baby to an avant dandy, listen to Grow Fins’ riotous rarities. Never-before-heard outtakes and live tracks are made vivid with CD-ROM video clips and taped discussions between Captain and Magic Band members like John "Drumbo" French, who contributes plenty of background information in the accompanying hardcover book. Beefheart created a communelike setting in order for the Magic Band to breathe life into songs per his strict instructions, going over and over details carefully.

Listening to Fins is like watching Michelangelo sketch the Sistine Chapel with a pencil. Notorious for not notating music, Beefheart moved musicians like crusty brushes onto the cracked canvas of blue barn-burners like "Just Got Back From The City" and instrumentals like "Hair Pie Bake."

These tracks come off as fluid, Grateful Dead-like guitar workouts with sweet tonality. Two tracks from 1981, the gentle and stark "Evening Bell" and the haunted "Vampire Suite," are both remarkable. But if Fins does nothing else, it displays Beefheart’s ferocious verbal acuity. Sounding like it was recorded in a phone booth somewhere between Haight-Ashbury and Hades, Captain rips "Black Snake Moan" from the heart. His traditional hellhound howl, peaked with adrenaline, is near-religious, a tongue-speaking preacher looking for the right words. In the liner notes, David Fricke and Drumbo say Beefheart was nervous when it came to recording, holding back his voice as if he was holding onto his soul. On Fins, Beefheart let everything go.