Audio By Carbonatix
Ever miss an un-missable concert? It’s one of those pangs that lingers, fixed like a stamp on the back of your skull. It’s a bad taste in your mouth that never leaves, a constant reminder of how your life could have been better had you seen (insert band name here) play live.
Many Dallasites never got over missing Nirvana’s set at Trees. More recently, countless hearts were broken when a fear of icy streets prevented them from seeing Kanye’s date at the AAC. For me, I missed what I consider to be the greatest musician of all time (well, at least in rock ‘n’ roll); It was 1974, almost exactly 40 years ago, when Don Van Vliet — better known as Captain Beefheart — first played Dallas. It was at the Electric Ballroom and I was 11 years shy of existence. Still, It’s something I dream of often: seeing the Captain and his Magic Band of misfits live. Soft, half-asleep scenes of a live Beefheart sculpting his Frankenstein shape of rock out free jazz, blues and red-hot emotional overflow taunt me like stubborn bouts of deja vu.
So, who is Captain Beefheart? In short: a child prodigy turned musical (and visual) genius.
In long: Well, it all starts in the desert, where Don Van Vliet would spend most of his life. The artist began sculpting and painting at age 3, and by 11 had lectured at Barnsdall Art Institute in L.A., consistently appeared on a weekly art television program, and earned a six-year full scholarship to study sculpture in Europe. The latter he could not accept, because his parents had moved him out to the desert in hopes of distancing their son from activities they deemed too “queer.” It was in the Mojave that he met Frank Zappa, with whom he would gain both a love for music and the nickname Captain Beefheart. The rest is history.
Despite Beefheart’s lack of commercial success, there exist few artists as critically celebrated. The renowned radio DJ/ record producer John Peel said of Vliet, “If there has ever been such a thing as a genius in the history of popular music, it’s Beefheart.” The legendary critic Lester Bangs proclaimed him “one of the giants of 20th century music.” The Ivy League scientist and music writer Pierro Scaruffi echoed these sentiments, saying that “the distance between Captain Beefheart and the rest of rock music is the same distance that there was between Beethoven and the symphonists of his time.”
While these statements might verge on hyperbole (might), there’s no questioning Beefheart’s influence. The man operated at the furthest extremes of artistic expression, and in doing so rewrote the vocabulary of rock music. With vocals like a black-lung angel and a startling, almost absurd command of avant-garde composition, Beefheart wove atonal instrumentation and free-associative dadaism into a tapestry of music that’s both staggeringly complex and unclassifiable. Most impressive of all, he did it without a whiff of self-consciousness or pseudo-intellectualism.
Something that’s always struck me as especially remarkable is how Captain Beefheart went about transcending rock’s conventions. In stark contrast to the pastoral, kaleidoscopic aesthetic adopted by most of the ’60s “visionaries,” Beefheart proceeded further into, rather than out of, Western musical traditions, and in turn uncovered some of the strangest, most unexpectedly satisfying music ever made. That is, instead of exploring the sonic territories of Eastern or African music, as most of his contemporaries did, Beefheart tunneled deeper into the American heritages of jazz and Southern blues. This entailed eschewing the hypnotic repetition of world music, in favor of odd time signatures and a much more angular sound — a baroque approach that foresaw both post-punk and art-pop. Even amongst the innovators, Captain Beefheart was an anomaly.
No tale of the Capt. would be complete without mention of his 1969 magnum opus, Trout Mask Replica. This was my entry point to Captain Beefheart — which is a bit like easing into drug use by jumping straight into meth — and remains the most radical piece of music I’ve ever heard. It’s certainly one of the most jarring and abrasive experiences one can have with a turntable. Supposedly written in one eight-hour session, and then rehearsed 14 hours a day for eight months, Trout Mask (28 tracks long) only took six hours to record in the studio. This feat was possible largely because of the militant control Beefheart exercised over his bandmates. The story goes that the group lived a communal “Manson-esque” lifestyle in a rented house throughout the entirety of the rehearsal process. Restricted from leaving the premises, and surviving on a bare minimum of food (a cup of soybeans a day), the band was coerced to perfection by a fiercely dominant Beefheart (thus explaining the band’s speedy execution). In the years since its conception, Trout Mask has come to be regarded as one of the best and most original artifacts in all of rock history.
I never got to see Captain Beefheart play live. And given that he permanently retired from music in 1982 (to become a painter) and died in 2010, I never will. But maybe that’s OK. On further investigation, I discovered that the bulk of Beefheart’s Dallas set consisted of songs from his weakest effort, Unconditionally Guaranteed, meaning I would have likely left disappointed. Instead, I’m left with the unscathed mystique of an artist who always seemed too surreal for fleshy entanglements anyway. I’ll always have the ability to peruse the albums and videos that have come to construct the Captain Beefheart I imagine in my head. The person who, for me, is the greatest musician of all time
So, take solace, fellow mourners of missed opportunities, and do not fret, because maybe the ideal concert experiences are those that unfold in the imagination, where giants never fall.
See also:
–The Top Ten All Time Best Replacement Lead Singers in Rock and Roll
–Songs That Have Hidden Messages When Played in Reverse
–The Ten Best Music Videos Banned by MTV
