Everyone struggles with Captain Beefheart because they expect music to behave. They also expect other people to behave at funerals, to back away when they lose and arguement and for mayo never to be seen on top of mashed potato. It's a "follow the yellow brick road" reaction. The thing is that music does not behave, it can be wonderful and disturbing at times. Maybe at the same time but not so often at conventional funerals where music serves a more reflective purpose. Nothing to do with our Don though or his hat size.
Click the picture above and you can go on to read this in a more agreeable font, depending on your taste.
Most listeners want a tune to give comfort or order. They want to tap on the steering wheel at the lights. Beefheart refused this. He broke songs apart and left the pieces where they fell. These were recorded eventually. There is some melody, but it limps. There is rhythm, but it fights against itself and the listener's expectations. This can make people uneasy.
Audiences might need to unlearn a few things. Would that be useful? They feel the ground move whilst standing on an earthquake free (for the time being) continent and do not like it. Horses are spooked. The mind hears chaos and tries to reject it, but we were all born into chaos. The ear looks for a handrail and finds none. Unsighted at the top of a long staircase. Listeners may be simple people with heavy loans and outgoings. Weight in the wrong places is such a bad sandwich.
His voice does not try to please. It growls and shouts. It speaks like an animal that learned words with its tongue but kept all it's spikey teeth. Like being uncomfortable and drunk at a stranger's wedding, one your partner casually brought you along to. I doubt it's true that he had a tin trumpet that he would use to communicate with the dead. That was probably someone else.
The band (the Magic Band in various forms) always sounded loose, but it was not loose. It was controlled and hard. Let's not talk about the actual process involved. That's now chewed up history and TV talk show content. We know history loves warfare and abuse more than detail. Man's inhumanity etc. This situation was not at all perfect and it's the survivors right to tell their story or at least make it interesting and fanciful while people are alive enough to still care. I for one was almost 5164 miles away at the time.
Sometimes people value a delivered gift more than a personal visit. That just might explain his wordiness and lyrics.
To enjoy Beefheart you must stop asking if it could ever be pretty or easy. You must listen the way you look at rough countryside, derelict buildings, or bad weather. You accept it. It exists. Then you may begin to like it. After a while, you wonder if you could live there.
Some Beefheart tracks like these below might make this whole process run more easily:
“Her Eyes Are a Blue Million Miles” is gentle and sad and almost kindly.
“Clear Spot” has a groove you can sup with a honey straw.
“Big Eyed Beans from Venus” swings, even while it mutters. Has lunar influences.
“Electricity” is strange but hypnotic. Like the real thing.
“Nowadays a Woman’s Gotta Hit a Man” has humour and bite without losing the plot.
These are places to start. They give you a door instead of a wall. Having said that, walls are important parts of construction theory. Tap or lean on one today to test this out. Use an orange claw hammer.
In the end, or the ending, Don Van Vliet, aka Cpt. Beefheart, is not for everyone. That is part of his strength. He did not ask to be liked. He had a conditional condition and only asks that you listen and walk away if you have to. This kind of applies to all music and the wider world of artistic efforts in general because sometimes the coffee jar is too deep for the spoon.
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