Captain Beefheart, RIP

I remember when I first fell for Captain Beefheart.  I had picked up a copy of Trout Mask Replica after years of seeing it appear on “best of all time” lists with that wonderfully mysterious fish head cover and warnings of its abrasive and difficult nature.  It was time to experience the thing for myself.  The first listen confirmed its reputation.  It was a noisy mess, seemingly random and deliberately provocative.  But the voice, the voice that reached through the speaker and punched you square in the nose, was astounding, and I think it’s what made me not give up on the record right away.  Don Van Vliet, for that was Beefheart’s given name, notoriously bragged about his 4 and a half octave range, and though that fact is debatable, his exuberance and bravery justified the braggadocio.  When he grabbed the microphone he resolutely put his balls on the railroad tracks, which is what ended up making him one of the great blues singers in history, though few people knew it.  So the voice brought me back, but what locked it was the sudden realization, while driving in my car trying to cope with what I was hearing, that all this random cacophony was not random at all.  I later learned about the story (perhaps apocryphal – nothing in Vliet’s story is written in stone) of how he taught the Magic Band how to play every note on the double album, but listening in my car, I HEARD the grand scheme.  It came as a great crystallization of insight into his opaque personality and instantly had me hooked for life.  After all, who would actually plan a train wreck like this?  This wasn’t Coltrane’s Ascension, this was Ornette Coleman’s Shape of Jazz to Come.  It sounds insane and haphazard, but in reality it is carefully composed.

I still have no idea what he was thinking then, or later why he decided to sell out so shamelessly and disastrously, or later still how he recovered his maniacal muse for the masterful Doc at the Radar Station, released in 1979 apparently to teach the punks who adored him a lesson.  30 years after John Lennon’s death, people are still debating whether he was a saintly peacenick, a prick to women, a helpless man-child, or a lifelong teddy boy.  He was all those things, none of them and a whole lot more.  You’re probably in the presence of a great artist when, after you have absorbed everything they’ve done, read all the speculations about their inner nature as well as everything they’ve claimed about themselves, you still find yourself no closer to the truth.  So Vliet, who never produced a musical note in public after Ice Cream for Crow in 1982, will always remain an inscrutable figure.  All I know is that I am indescribably moved when I hear the Captain recite the following passage from Orange Claw Hammer:

'n uh youngster cocked 'er eye
God before me if I'm not crazy
Is my daughter
Come little one with yer little dimpled fingers
Gimme one 'n I'll buy you uh cherry phosphate
Take you down t' the foamin' brine 'n water
'n show you the wooden tits
On the Goddess with the pole out s'full sail
That tempted away yer peg legged father
I was shanghaied by uh high hat beaver moustache man
'n his pirate friend
I woke up in vomit 'n beer in uh banana bin
'n uh soft lass with brown skin
Bore me seven babies with snappin' black eyes
'n beautiful ebony skin
'n here it is I'm with you my daughter
Thirty years away can make uh seaman's eyes
Uh round house man's eyes flow out water
Salt water

That’s fucking beautiful.  It’s not ‘poetic’, it’s poetry, pure and simple.  Christ man, he’s seeing his lost daughter, a woman now at least 30 years old, with “dimpled fingers” and offering to buy her sweets!  If that doesn’t make you cry I don’t know what will.  You read that and you realize you’re not dealing with some run-of-the-mill blues hack, belting out pentatonic scales.  Vliet was a great American artist, a man who connected with the great tradition that came before him and brought it forward several steps, making you think that if Melville were alive in the 1960s, he might have been blowing harp on Straight Records, wailing instead of whaling, shedding tears for his abandoned child with the cherry phosphate.