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Up to the minute notes on the current state of free thinking and free living: Kentucky moonshine - original analysis and reporting from MoreThings, and all round pop culture museum of sight and sound - photo galleries, mp3 and video downloads.
Al Barger and MoreThings - getting people's goats since 1998.
Live free or die!
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January 15, 2003
Captain Beefheart turns 62
Don Van Vliet, better known to the world as Captain Beefheart, was born January 15, 1941. Happy #62, Cap'n!
He's strictly a painter these days, but he's most known for his music. It is some combination of Delta blues, free jazz, beat poetry, and some essence of pure organic California desert freakiness. He really wasn't trying to be weird. It's just in his blood. Put it this way, Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa were high school buddies, and Zappa was the one who turned out relatively normal.
Trout Mask Replica -a double album from 1969- usually tops critics lists as the best Beefheart album. It is the piece de resistance of his catalog. The pure existential horror of "Dachau Blues" cuts right through issues of weirdness or novelty. "China Pig" and "Moonlight on Vermont" are catchy and relatively easy to relate to. The novelty paranoid rap of "The Blimp" might be an odd point of entry.
Many people find Captain Beefheart absolutely unlistenable. Occasionally I see lists of albums to put on if you want to clear people out of the room. Trout Mask Replica usually tops the list. Consider that a challenge. Part of that comes from his very unorthodox ideas of rhythm, I suspect, which sometimes comes across to people as having no rhythm. In fact, his music is tightly scripted and carefully thought out. Much of it doesn't have anything that would be mistaken for a good dance beat, but listen closer. There's a lot going on.
I don't know sales figures, but my best guess is that his most popular album would be the 1980 opus Doc at the Radar Station. "Ashtray Heart" stands out as a particularly memorable and bitter diatribe. This was the album he was supporting when he played Saturday Night Live.
Perhaps the best starting place for the uninitiated, however, might be his 1978 album Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller). I strongly get the idea that he was TRYING very hard to sell out. Put another way, this seems to be his idea of "pop music." Keep this thought in mind as you listen to "Tropical Hot Dog Night." It has some odd sideways Caribbean rhythms, and his classic invocation to all the ladies: "I'm playing this music so all the young girls will come out to MEET the MONSTER tonight!" You can read this on the page, but you must hear how it sings, and the way he riffs on the lyric over the end of the song. This does in fact qualify as pop music for me, but that's probably more a statement about how twisted I am. Anyway, it's my personal favorite among his work.
The Dust Blows Forward-Anthology features a pretty good selection, or you can look for some of these specific tracks:
"Tropical Hot Dog Night"
"Dachau Blues"
"The Dust Blows Forward N the Dust Blows Back"
"Diddy Wah Diddy"
"Ashtray Heart"
"Moonlight on Vermont"
"Floppy Boot Stomp"
"China Pig"
"Run Paint, Run, Run"
"Bat Chain Puller"
posted by Al at 1/15/2003 02:07:00 AM
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