When Don Van Vliet , aka Captain Beefheart, passed away last December, The Wire magazine ran a feature of personal tributes.
The one that most mirrored my own experiences was by Mike Barnes who described his first encounter with the album Lick My Decals Off Baby. He recalled that his first reactions to this record were of confusion and even repulsion. At the same time there was something strangely fascinating about this music that drew him back and eventually this resulted in a kind of the epiphany : “the clouds suddenly parted and the sun streamed in, illuminating fantastic musical shapes I never thought could exist”. Barnes ended the piece by saying that because of this revelatory experience “no music since has ever proved such an insurmountable obstacle”.
The first record I remember being repulsed/fascinated by was The Beatles’ I Am The Walrus, a song that now sounds relatively conventional. However, this experience was nothing compared with the shock of first hearing what most (including me) regard as Beefheart’s masterpiece ‘Trout Mask Replica’. Like Barnes, the initial disorientation gradually gave way to a sense of awe. Over four decades on it still sounds as radical as when it was released in 1969.
Barnes’ piece led me to his biography of Beefheart, a book I was vaguely aware of but had never seriously considered reading. I doubted that anyone could ‘explain’ what type of brain lay behind the music and I was right.
While Barnes book is a thoroughgoing, and occasionally illuminating, piece of journalism, the author himself is forced to admit that a work like Trout Mask “resists demystification”.
The double album is rightly heralded as “one of the few truly unique musical statements of the 20th century” and then later, feeling the need to clarify what it is that makes it so special, Barnes drowns us in Wire-speak of typically bombastic proportions in describing it as “an index of possibilities in the unfettering of self-expression”.
Fortunately, such literary lapses are few and far between. For the most part Barnes confines himself a fairly straightforward account the man through his music, quoting extensively from published reviews and interviews and making a track by track summary of each record.
A huge gap lies in the fact that Barnes never managed to interview Van Vliet so he has to rely on the accounts of friends and musicians. Most of these recognise Van Vliet’s genius, while recounting what a pain he was to work with. He was well known for his autocratic, bullying character. In declaring that he wanted his music to be an irritant, he had no desire to create a cosy, homely atmosphere in the studio. Barnes says that members of the Magic Band needed “exceptional musical talent and a skin of rhinoceros thickness”.
Beefheart was not a lateral thinker but ,undeterred, Barnes gamely attempts to piece together stories and themes in the surreal lyrics to his songs. This occasionally leads to the absurd exercise of building a narrative out of songs that are full of bizarre expressionistic word play . An example of this is in this description of the track Orange Claw Hammer, where Barnes writes : “after memorably offering to buy the ‘child’ a ‘cherry phosphate’, he explains to her how he was shanghaied and describes her messy conception in a ‘banana bin’. In a tearful denouement, he takes her down to the harbour to see the ship from which he was disembarked, resplendent with erotic figurehead, ‘the wooden tits on the Goddess”
Also, Barnes’ hero-worship occasionally gets the better of him . When focusing on the “Nowadays A Woman’s Gotta Hit A Man” from Clear Spot (somewhat redundantly summarised as “a song about the misuse of women by men”) he makes the dubious claim that Van Vliet was “the first major rock artist to address sexual issues in this way”.
In many ways, Van Vliet’s self-sufficient character was typical of the absorbed artist and when he abandoned music in to focus on his paintings, the impression is that he was relieved to be out of the public eye.
Mike Barnes’ biography is a serious and well written account of a musical innovator but if you come to it expecting insights into what really lay behind the mask, you will be disappointed. This is not the fault of Barnes but is simply a reflection of how journalists who tried to discover what lay behind his art were, for the most part, stone-walled. Barnes reports, for example, that when Van Vliet was once asked the inane question ‘What are your paintings about?’, he replied “Things”, when asked to elaborate, he said “Good things”.
Van Vliet’s habit of fictionalising his own life also means that details of his childhood remain at best sketchy and into adulthood, we learn nothing about his wife even though they were together for over 40 years.
Yet despite being a master of obscure statements, Van Vliet’s own words , when talking about his Decals album, best sum up why his music provides such a valuable legacy:
“If I had a message, it was of personal empowerment and enlightenment through the dismantling of the mental barriers, thus breaking down the obstacles that stood in the way of independent thought”
