Among the many traces that Captain Beefheart has left behind him, one of the most familiar is the whimpering sound like a wounded animal that Ry Cooder’s guitar makes on movie soundtracks. This sound is the hallmark of a certain off-focus, Postmodern, American version of masculinity: the myth of the slide guitar stands for a male experience of disorientation that extracts from the blues what the blues never contained, namely individualism. Don van Vliet, for whom Cooder played guitar in the early days of Captain Beefheart has the reputation of being an outsider of genius, a musician unlike any other. In fact, however, this music could never have affected so many people, and other musicians in particular, if there had not been something more to it than eccentricity: if it had not been thoroughly grounded both in Afro-American musical tradition and in the idea of the rock band as discovered after the early 1960s British invasion (Beatles, Stones, etc.) by American teenagers in millions of suburban garages.
It is Beefheart’s unique achievement that, at least in the first half of his musical career, he welded these two types of collective music-making into one: the Afro-American principle of mutual absorption, listening, swapping breaks like questions and answers, and the beat band principle of everyone agreeing to do the same thing at the same time. More often than not, these prior agreements served to mask deficiencies of musical talent and to express the 1960s teenage discovery that it’s kind of fun to just meet up, without ulterior meaning, purpose, or functional harmonic need. In musical terms: all doing the same thing at specific points that are not defined by any particular dramatic necessity.
When Don van Vliet made his first record, he still seems to have believed in two things that he was later to abjure: a future in the record business and a place within the universal youth rebellion. He accordingly made concessions both to current taste and to favorite contemporary dropout themes. After two singles for Herb Alpert’s company, A&M (1965), strongly influenced by such blues singers as Howlin’ Wolf (and later reissued as The A&M Sessions), he recorded the album Safe as Milk for Buddha, a label that had made its name with Bubblegum, a kids-oriented variant of the English beat.
On this album, on which Ry Cooder can also be heard, the two types of collectivity feature separately. On most of the highly melodic, beat-influenced tracks the blues connection is as superficial as the sound of Cooder’s guitar in Wim Wenders’ films. But there is also an intro, “Sure ’Nuff ’n Yes I Do”, that not only demonstrates Captain Beefheart’s command of the Afro-American vernacular but also represents a dazzling example of interaction between a blues singer and a blues guitarist. Here Cooder shows himself as the promising student of the great black guitarists that he always was – and still is, when not working for the movies. In “Dropout Boogie”, Beefheart not only wrote a hymn to Hippie dropouts in general (later covered by the British polit-rock outfit, the Edgar Broughton Band) but also invented – in parallel to a number of English performers – the variant of white blues-rock later known as Hard Rock. On “Electricity” he gave a preview of the expressive range of his voice, from tight, snarling aggression to fulsome lamentation. But the most surprising thing was his ability to set the stamp of the great Memphis soul tradition on ballads, such as “I’m Glad”, which he himself was later to disown as commercial sellouts.
The dialogue highlights between Cooder and Beefheart bear a clear reference to such admired models as Howlin’ Wolf and his guitarist Hubert Sumlin. Beefheart told me how, after Howlin’ Wolf’s death, he once crept up behind Sumlin and imitated Howlin’ Wolf’s voice. Sumlin leapt up and spun round; he nearly died of shock. In that moment both men realised that Howlin’ Wolf had not yet really gone.
A live concert album entitled Mirror Man, issued in 1970 and long erroneously dated 1965 (i.e., before the Safe as Milk sessions), was actually recorded immediately before the sessions for the second studio album, Strictly Personal, in 1967 or 1968. On it, the guitar duo of Antennae Jimmy Simmons (sic) and Alex St. Clair Snouffer (Beefheart was already beginning to impose fanciful stage names on his musicians) drives along lengthy versions of compositions that were later revived as studio recordings, such as “Kandy Korn” and “Mirror Man”; while Beefheart himself is quite clearly experimenting, finding out what can be done with his voice. It is already clear, too, that the rhythmic constraints of blues-rock are not for him.
On Strictly Personal the beat is distorted, stretched, and buried. John Lee Hooker and others showed that the twelve-bar blues pattern need not have twelve bars at all but can have fifteen, seventeen, or twenty-one. In one of his last recordings, Howlin’ Wolf plays with the stars of British blues-rock, and a rehearsal tape shows him trying to wean these British bureaucrats of the blues away from their obsession with even bar-counts. Beefheart has his own showdown with the British invaders: “Beatle Bones N’ Smokin Stones” is the title of one number that ends with a mocking growl of “Strawberry Fields Forever”. In “Ah Feel Like Ahcid” Beefheart seems to be ministering once more to the needs of contemporary youth culture; this was music that still needed to be explained, or justified, to the public by reference to acid. But the musician Beefheart confessed that drugs never interested him. The point was that he always had been in a state that would nowadays be known as a “natural high”. What he was saying was not “I take drugs” but “I am a drug”. In the same spirit, in almost all of his rare interviews, Beefheart would bring out legends of his own ability to, say, talk to animals or go without sleep for eighteen months.
Strictly Personal was Beefheart’s only album for Liberty/United Artists. He then signed up with the Straight-label newly founded by his old friend Frank Zappa, with whom in his youth he had run a band in Lancaster, outside Los Angeles, called The Soots (the Captain was later to help Zappa on his solo LP Hot Rats by supplying vocals for “Billy The Pimp” (sic), and in the 1970s they had a rather disappointing collaboration on Bongo Fury). It was on Straight Records that Beefheart brought out the two masterpieces of his career, the two achievements that made him a crucial role model for a new generation of musicians a decade later: performers like The Fall, Pere Ubu, and John Lydon.
First, in 1969, came the double album Trout Mask Replica. Harmonically and rhythmically, this material is no longer recognizable as blues (“China Pig” excepted). And yet, significantly, the word “blues” still appears in some of the titles (one of them is “Dachau Blues”). The situation of a musical collective working in dialogue style around one lamenting, arguing, cursing individual, the dominance of the voice, its leading function (a number of tracks are a cappella), the ostentatious interaction (a number of session conversations are to be heard on the disk): all this stems from blues and R&B. The rhythmic basis, often – inadequately – described in terms of African polyrhythmy (with a decisive contribution from Beefheart’s drummer, Drumbo, who later, under his real name of John French, took part in a number of interesting projects with Henry Kaiser and others); the almost atonal compositions, held together only by constant consultations: all this was new and had been barely even hinted at either in Beefheart’s earlier records or in the work of his producer, Zappa. Trout Mask Replica – very unlike Beefheart’s later recordings – gives you the feeling that material improvised or worked out in performance counts for more than composition. True, there are unison passages of such virtuosity and subtlety that parts of them must have been written down beforehand; but Beefheart told contemporary interviewers that by the time of the second Straight record Lick My Decals Off, Baby – if not before – his band was working on such a “telepathic line” that nothing needed to be on paper. What made this possible was probably the way most of the musicians on Trout Mask Replica and Lick My Decals Off, Baby took the step from blues orientation to free improvisation in each other’s company. Mallard, a band largely composed of the Beefheart musicians of this period can be heard on both its recordings carrying on – and holding in suspense, just shy of the blues – a number of ensemble tricks from the repertoire of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band.
By the 1960s, jazz had completed the transition from modal playing to atonal collective improvisation. Beefheart followed this development attentively, and he cites Ornette Coleman and Roland Kirk as influences and/or friends. But in his music, unlike jazz, the singing voice is central. In free jazz, speech and song appear (if at all) for purposes of extramusical contrast (as in Amiri Baraka’s recordings with the New York Art Quartet) or as chorale-like allusions to gospel (as with Max Roach and Archie Shepp). Closest to Beefheart is the work of the vocalist Leon Thomas with Pharaoh Sanders, and of Juno Lewis with John Coltrane. But both derive mainly from the “speaking in tongues” of Afro-American ecstatic worship, and therefore dispense with verbal meaning, whereas Beefheart’s voice pursues clearly articulated texts – poems – up and down its celebrated four-and-a-half-octave range.
Beefheart’s free form of rock music was hardly taken up in its own day; 1969 was a time of endless improvisations, these mostly followed chord patterns, with a drummer laying down a steady beat underneath. Conversely, more and more jazz musicians were beginning to turn away from free jazz and improvise on electrically amplified instruments over simple funk structures. A second wave of Beefheart’s enthusiasm, brought on by the New Wave of the early 1980s, and a third in the hard-core Punk-derived free forms of the bands playing on the Californian SST label in the late 1980s, have still not exhausted the possibilities that these two albums opened up.
Beefheart himself then turned his back on this way of making music. The (mostly very short) tracks on Lick My Decals Off, Baby already contained hints on bridging the gap between meticulous polyrhythmic lunacy and the rock idiom. Beefheart stayed with Reprise records, the distributors of Straight, but his later recordings were no longer made under Zappa’s aegis. He began the 1970s with The Spotlight Kid and Clear Spot, which are two outstanding rock albums, but no more than that. In the mid-1970s there followed two more pop albums for Virgin; these are loathed by the Beefheart fan community, but they are pretty remarkable even so. In them, as in the soul ballad tracks on Safe as Milk, Beefheart reveals himself to be a real showman.
Admittedly, he himself has always disowned these records; and it is true that the music consists of solidly crafted, run-of-the-mill blues-rock and R&B. But it is perfectly possible – as Beefheart himself has shown in live performances – to imagine the same vocals and lyrics with a different substructure. Not only is the contrast between conventional and specific delightfully presented: it begins to soften up the conventions themselves. At times, the arrangements get out of kilter, and perverse and out-of-place elements creep in (here a solo flute, there a lonesome, over-distorted guitar). On the cover of the earlier of the two disks, Unconditionally Guaranteed, Beefheart signalled the cynical nature of the exercise by holding out a fistful of money to the camera. On the second, Bluejeans & Moonbeams, he actually had his first commercial hit, “Same Old Blues”. Whereupon he withdrew from the music business for nearly five years. Beefheart surfaced at the end of the 1970s with Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller), and on this and the two following albums, Doc at Radar Station and Ice Cream for Crow (his last), he attempted diffidently at first – to link up with what was now acknowledged by contemporaries as his own most important music: Trout Mask Replica and Lick My Decals Off, Baby. To this end he put together a lineup of young virtuosos who no longer evolved side by side with him but were made to duplicate compositions taped by him on piano. In London in 1980 I saw two shows, one after the other, that were identical in every detail. All three records have paintings by Don van Vliet on their covers, and during the interview he gave me between the two London shows, van Vliet was drawing all the time, signaling that was now more important to him than music. Be that as it may, the move from a collective to an individualistic mode of music-making can be traced in the music itself, it sounds like the more or less successful presentation of an idea that formerly opened new horizons and has now been finished off and made reproducible.
This is not an argument for improvisatory innocence, or for any other of the kitsch notions that are peddled by rock fans hooked on genius and “authenticity”. It is simply the statement of a fact: musical forms that evolve as a process cannot be reconciled with the manufacture of a commodity, such as the one album a year that Beefheart had now contracted to supply to Virgin. Record companies were no longer small, insecure departments of big entertainment corporations, as they had been in the late 1960s: since Disco and Fleetwood, they had become vast multinationals in their own right. Independents were only just starting out; in the USA, at any rate, no independent would have been able to offer Beefheart anything like a steady income.
The music of the 1980s, successful as it was in handling new technologies and changed circumstances, was in its better moments the music of isolated individuals who thought conceptually and strategically: hence its often observed affinity with visual art, Beefheart drew different conclusions from the same situation: he simply moved over into the fine-art niche, which was perfectly tailored to the marketing of extreme kinds of individualism. The tensions between his lone, eccentric, very American anarchism and the laws of working in a band vanished from his work.
In some respects, however, other people’s responses to – and appropriations of – Captain Beefheart’s visions and methods have now made a new intervention on his part both thinkable and desirable. Organized in an array of tiny pigeonholes and niches, present-day underground rock music is as highly specialized as visual art; if it is not to become even more uncommercial and esoteric than it already is, it needs to make some new connections of its own – if only with its own past history. The return of such great and unfulfilled figures of the 1960s as Velvet Underground, and recently Iggy Pop, shows that it is possible – even in rock music conditions – to come back to a project decades after it was begun, and to complete it. A new Magic Band would be a joy to us all.