Love Over Gold: Captain Beefheart

For once, something not about Mallorca or Spain. A bit of an indulgence, but bear with me ... .

I am not and never was an autograph-hunter. I have a few autographs, but too few to mention. Except for two. They are written on a compliments slip that came with the tickets for a concert at The Royal Albert Hall in London. The year was 1972. The autographs came with a sort of salutation, "love over gold". The names were those of Don Van Vliet and his wife Jan Van Vliet. I've no idea if they might be worth anything, but if they are then chances are that they are now worth more. Don Van Vliet has died. Captain Beefheart has died. The Captain is dead, long live the Captain!

The concert at the Albert Hall started with first a ballet dancer and then a belly dancer coming onto the stage. Why it should have done was a mystery, except to the Captain. Maybe it was intended to allow for some word play - ballet, belly - or to represent different worlds. His words, his lyrics were as oddball and surreal as his music. As oddball and surreal as he was. One by one, members of his Magic Band came onto the stage and performed short solos. Rockette Morton exploded his bass as did Oréjon, Zoot Horn Rollo hit a "long, lunar note and let it float", Winged Eel Fingerling slid his guitar, Ed Marimba drummed with a pair of pants on his head.

Beefheart's music was almost beyond definition. At one time, in the mid-60s, A&M Records had wanted him and The Magic Band to become a kind of west-coast American Rolling Stones. The band had a bluesy feel, but this was about as close as they came to Jagger and his group. They were just too weird for a commercial market. Beefheart eschewed the trappings of pop and, as a consequence, spent much of his music career broke. He simply wouldn't compromise and yet resented the commercial success and wealth that came the way of his old school friend Frank Zappa.

Beefheart (Van Vliet) lived near the desert in California, the Mojave. Away from the mainstream he conjured up a world of the non-mainstream. His music combined his own Howlin' Wolf-style vocals replete with growls and yelps, the blues, avant-garde experimentalism and Ornette Coleman jazz influences. The music became a highly synchronised blend of discordance and peaked with the album "Trout Mask Replica" in 1969. The cover suggested the disconnection from reality that was to be found within, Beefheart wearing a stovepipe-reminiscent top hat and the face of a trout.

The album was either a work of genius or unlistenable to. It was unquestionably painful. John Peel once described Beefheart as the only "genius" in popular music history. The excruciating, having-teeth-pulled genius of "Trout Mask Replica" was two-fold. One was that it sounded improvised. Yet it had been rehearsed over and over again. Indeed Beefheart had more or less imprisoned The Magic Band for a period of eight months while he instructed them as to how to play the 28 "songs" and while he and they had all but starved in a process that involved band members being encouraged to fight with each other and being humiliated and assaulted by Beefheart.

The second was, and this is something that never seems to be mentioned, that it had the power to frighten. Music plays with many emotions, but to make you afraid is not normally one of them. The discordance, the surrealism were dark; they were of a different world. "Trout Mask Replica" was an aural version of the nightmare that David Lynch put onto film with "Eraserhead".

Beefheart did mellow to an extent. Some of his later material was even recognisable as songs, quite sweet ones even. His relationship with Zappa, long difficult, did smooth sufficiently for them to come together on the album "Bongo Fury" in 1975. This is another of my Beefheart treasures. It was never released in the UK, but I have the import version. Amidst the more melodic music of The Mothers Of Invention, Beefheart was there, rambling on the likes of "Sam With The Showing Scalp Flat Top".

The influence of Beefheart, despite his lack of real commercial success, has been cited down the years by other musicians. Arguably, along with The Velvet Underground, his influence on subsequent rock music was greater than anyone's. His other influence, and maybe I am only now realising it, was that even if you didn't like all his music, and I didn't, he taught a lesson in how to see the world as it isn't. If you want a Spanish connection, there might well be one; he was the Dali of the music world.


Here is the Captain at his musically most indecipherable:



Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.