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”. Continue reading →
ened to learn that DonVan Vliet – Captain Beefheart – has died at the age of 69.
