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This hideous Captain Beefheart designer silk shirt can be yours for only $1285
10.11.2019
08:16 am
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‘Crepe and Black Lamp,’ by Don Van Vliet, 1986 oil on canvas, 148 x 122 cm / 58.25 x 48 inches
 
And here it is, the thing you never thought you’d see, a $1285 silk designer shirt emblazoned with a painting by Don Van Vliet, the artist formerly known as Captain Beefheart. I did a search on Beefheart this morning and soon afterwards I was served up a banner ad by Google advertising this shirt.

Produced by the label Enfants Riches Deprimes (“Depressed Rich Kids”), this horrible garment can be pre-ordered directly from the label.

Christ this is hideous. I don’t know what else to say. At least I hope his widow is being compensated for this shit. The rest of this label’s gear is equally heinous, like Ed Hardy on steroids. Most of it looks like it was designed by—and FOR—Jared Leto.
 

 

 

 

The good Captain makes an appearance on ‘Late Night with David Letterman’ on November 11, 1982.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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10.11.2019
08:16 am
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‘Lost in a Whirlpool’: The earliest known recording of both Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart
05.02.2019
08:46 am
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Zappa and Beefheart
 
In the mid 1950s, after Frank Zappa moved from San Diego to Lancaster, California, he and Captain Beefheart (a/k/a Don Van Vliet; born Don Vliet) met while attending the same high school. The two found they had a similar taste in music, and quickly bonded over a shared love of blues, doo-wop, and R&B records. After graduation, Frank enrolled in Antelope Valley Junior College, which Don also attended for a semester. In either late 1958 or early 1959, they recorded material at the school using a portable reel-to-reel machine. One of the songs was called “Lost in a Whirlpool,” which was written by Zappa (music) and Vliet (lyrics).

During a 1989 interview, FZ talked about the tune and the Antelope recording.

“Lost in a Whirlpool” was taped on one of those tape recorders that you have in a school in the audio/visual department. We went into this room, this empty room at the junior college in Lancaster, after school, and got this tape recorded, and just turned it on. The guitars are me and my brother (Bobby Zappa) and the vocal is Don Vliet.

The story of “Lost in a Whirlpool” goes back even farther. When I was in high school in San Diego in ‘55, there was a guy who grew up to be a sports writer named Larry Littlefield. He, and another guy named Jeff Harris, and I used to hang out, and we used to make up stories, little skits and stuff, you know, dumb little teenage things. One of the plots that we cooked up was about a person who was skindiving—San Diego’s a surfer kind of an area—skindiving in the San Diego sewer system [laughter], and talking about encountering brown, blind fish. [laughter] It was kind of like the Cousteau expedition of its era. [laughter] So, when I moved to Lancaster from San Diego, I had discussed this scenario with Vliet, and that’s where the lyrics come from. It’s like a musical manifestation of this other skindiving scenario.

Frank added that the recording is “the earliest tape that I have a copy of, from when I first started taping stuff.”

“Lost in a Whirlpool” sat in the Zappa vault for decades, but eventually saw release on the posthumously issued compilation, The Lost Episodes (1996).

Another perspective on “Lost in a Whirlpool,” from the liner notes of The Lost Episodes:

This spectacular item, according to FZ, probably marks the recorded blues-singing debut of the teenaged, yet-to-be-christened Captain Beefheart, Don Van Vliet. It was taped in an empty classroom at Antelope Valley Jr. College in Lancaster, California, with FZ on lead guitar (an instrument with which he had been acquainted for only about six months), and Frank’s former guitar teacher, brother Bobby, on rhythm guitar. (Bobby, FZ noted, later abandoned music and entered the Marines “in order to not be anything like his brother.”) It was recorded on an old Webcor reel-to-reel that, FZ fondly remembered, “just happened to be sitting there waiting to be plundered—maroon, with the green blinking eye.” The tale of a lover spurned in rather surreal fashion, “Whirlpool’s” lyrics were improvised by Vliet, who begins with an arresting parody of a (female?) blues singer. After a few lines, the essential vocal personality of incipient Beefheart becomes apparent. Listeners with an ear for metaphor and a penchant for “interpreting” lyrics might be advised not to burrow too deeply here. The whirlpool in question is one that is commonly found, and regularly employed, in modern households. Said Vliet: “Frank and I had a good time. We were just fooling around.”

 

 
An additional song, parodying the Bridey Murphy tale, was captured on the same day as “Lost in a Whirlpool,” but remains unreleased.

Frank and Don continued to collaborate, periodically, through the mid ‘70s. Their most famous team-up was for Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica (1969), which Zappa produced. The seminal double album was recently reissued by Third Man Records.
 
1975
‘Bongo Fury’ photo shoot, 1975.

8mm footage of Don Vliet, shot by Frank Zappa around the time “Lost in a Whirlpool” was recorded, was incorporated into FZ’s video for “G-Spot Tornado” from Jazz From Hell (1986).
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Metal Man Has Won His Wings’: Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa’s early ‘60s R&B band, the Soots
Captain Beefheart loses his shit during tumultuous 1975 gig opening for Frank Zappa

Posted by Bart Bealmear
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05.02.2019
08:46 am
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Captain Beefheart sings ‘Seaweed Beard Foam Bone Tree’ (and dozens more obscurities)
11.15.2018
07:51 am
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Violent white apes in a restaurant with red necks had an uprising…’ (‘Snow Apes’ by Don Van Vliet, via Doyle)

You could spend your whole life on Gary Lucas’ Soundcloud page; indeed, the way things are going, you probably should. There’s heaps of Gary Lucas music—Gary plays Fellini and Hitchcock scores; Gary plays Bob Dylan, T.Rex, Pink Floyd, the Stones, Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and a Miles Davis/Suicide medley; Gary plays with David Johansen, Alan Vega, Nick Cave, the Andrew Oldham Orchestra, and Kevin Coyne—and there’s slabs of poetry and music by Don Van Vliet.

Even the jaded Beefheart aficionado who can play the harmonica part on “Little Scratch,” the prized outtake from The Spotlight Kid, with her toes and a vacuum cleaner may not know such gems as “The Sand Failure,” “Flat Mattress,” “The I Saw Shop,” “The World Crawled over the Razor Blade,” “Let’s Get to the Good and Go,” “Luxury Crunch,” “Skol in a Hole,” “Hearts Aren’t That Casual,” “Pork Chop Blue around the Rind,” and “Away from Survival,” among others. True, some of these tracks appeared on Rhino Handmade’s Riding Some Kind of Unusual Skull Sleigh (which is hopelessly out of print and retails for about a grand), but some, as far as I can tell, have not appeared anywhere other than in Gary Lucas’ monster sound hoard.

Much of this Beefheart stuff is spoken, but there are fragments of melodies and lyrical ideas, too, and some actual songs. As on “Pork Chop Blue around the Rind” and its second part, “Skol in a Hole,” both recorded in Lucas’ West Village apartment in 1983, Van Vliet has some kind of percussion accompaniment on “Seaweed Beard Foam Bone Tree,” but whether it’s thumbs drumming on a dinner table, tape artifacts or the endogenous thudding of a reel-to-reel I cannot say. 
 

 
And here’s Gary Lucas playing “Evening Bell” and talking about his time in the Magic Band at the Captain Beefheart Symposium in Copenhagen in 2011:
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
David Lynch recites Captain Beefheart’s ‘Pena’

Posted by Oliver Hall
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11.15.2018
07:51 am
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Captain Beefheart loses his shit during tumultuous 1975 gig opening for Frank Zappa
09.12.2018
03:40 pm
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Captain Beefheart
 
By late 1975, Captain Beefheart’s career was on the rebound. After two albums aimed at a mainstream audience failed to sell, and the dissolution of his Magic Band, he reached out to his old friend, Frank Zappa. Beefheart subsequently joined FZ’s latest incarnation of the Mothers of Invention for a tour and the Bongo Fury album. Then, as part of his desire to return to his avant-rock roots, he revived the Magic Band. But just because things were on the upswing, the notoriously cantankerous Captain didn’t always keep his cool. 

After the Bongo Fury outing was complete, Beefheart recruited members of the Mothers and convinced a couple of Magic Band veterans to come back into the fold. In October, the new Magic Band hit the road, playing classic Beefheart tracks (his recent, commercially-minded material was ignored) for audiences across Europe and the States. A handful of dates opening for Zappa would take place during the last week of the year.
 
Clipping
 
The December 27th gig was held at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco. The concert was noteworthy for the Captain’s heated exchanges with the crowd. Beefheart had quite the temper and had confronted audiences before, but this was something else altogether. Years later, members of the Magic Band would recount what transpired. Here’s guitarist Denny Walley:

That [gig] was memorable to me because that was the one where the audience started booing and throwing things at us, after Don [Don Van Vliet is Captain Beefheart’s real name] had given the finger to somebody. Somebody had given the finger to him. Frank was the headliner. We had opened for him. Frank used to give the finger a lot—to the audience—it was a way of saying “Hi!” To Don, it was a way of saying, “Fuck You!” So, he god pissed off and got right in the guy’s face with it, and the next thing you know a lot of people were angry, and they started booing and throwing shit.

It was constant heckling and stuff. (taken from Beefheart: Through the Eyes of Magic)

During a 2000 Q&A, multi-instrumentalist and the Magic Band’s musical director, John French, had this to say about what happened that night:

Don “gave the finger” to the guy in an insulting way, got right in his face and started hurtling insults to the audience. The objective of this behavior seemed to be to intentionally provoke the audience. People were throwing objects at the stage. I was upset with Don for not just ignoring the guy and performing. Don eventually left the stage. We played “Alice in Blunderland” and appeased the crowd a bit, but as soon as Don came back up, they became hostile again.

Afterwards, we walked into the dressing room, which was completely dark. Don had broken out all the lights. Every light in the dressing room was broken, and there were shards of glass everywhere. He was saying “I wanted the audience to do that, man! That was exactly what I wanted them to do!” It was a very unnerving evening, but certainly not the first time Don had managed to alienate an entire crowd.

 
Winterland
Captain Beefheart on stage at Winterland, December 27th, 1975.

While an audience tape of the Winterland performance has circulated online, it doesn’t sound that great. But recently, audio sourced from a first generation cassette surfaced. It was provided by an anonymous collector who says he obtained his copy from the taper of the show not long after the concert. This collector also added that the person who recorded it was none other than Matt Groening—the future creator of The Simpsons! Groening is a big Beefheart fan, and is believed to have recorded a number of the Captain’s Bay Area performances.
 
Matt Groening
 
The Magic Band lineup:

Captain Beefheart: vocals, saxophone, harmonica
Drumbo John French: drums, percussion, guitar (on “Dali’s Car”)
Bruce Fossil Fowler: air bass (trombone)
Winged Eel Fingerling Elliot Ingber: guitar, slide guitar
Feeler’s Reedo/Walla Walla Denny Walley: guitar, slide guitar
 
DiscReet promo photo
L-R: Ingber, Beefheart, Walley, Fowler, French (front).

The setlist:

01. Introduction
02. Moonlight On Vermont
03. Abba Zaba
04. Orange Claw Hammer
05. Don addresses the audience
06. Dali’s Car
07. When It Blows It Stacks
08. My Human Gets Me Blues
09. Band introductions
10. Alice In Blunderland
11. Untitled improvisations
12. Electricity
13. Golden Birdies
14. Big Eyed Beans From Venus

The audio is clearer than other versions of the gig, with speed and volume adjustments. The show’s drama is first heard before “Orange Claw Hammer.” During his band introductions, the Captain hurls his own brand of insults at the crowd, including this humdinger: “It’s like playing for a jar of pickles and trying to turn them back into cucumbers.” 

HA!
 

 
Matt Groening on how he came to love Trout Mask Replica:
 

Posted by Bart Bealmear
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09.12.2018
03:40 pm
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Captain Beefheart rips your head clean off in this ‘74 TV concert with the ‘Tragic Band’
08.23.2018
08:59 am
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Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, June 1974 (via WalesOnline)
 
Don Van Vliet was capable of vocal ferocity. He commanded extremes of volume and timbre that murdered microphones. In the program below, he summons a growl that has mass and weight; it seems to gather physical force as it whizzes through the mike cable to the little paper cone in your TV, where it shoots into the air and lodges in between two of your cervical vertebrae, shivering the teeth and brains in your head. It has the texture of grooved pavement. Why, he made Barry McGuire sound like Wayne Newton!

One YouTube user identifies this show as Toronto, winter ‘74, but Beefheart didn’t play Toronto in the winter of ‘74 as far as I can tell, and the set list from his Toronto date that spring doesn’t match. Almost certainly it is the Cap’n's performance in Paris on May 24, which was broadcast on French TV. The picture that has come down to us from that faraway time is so-so; the sound is bitchin’.

Because I am blessed with the gift of clairvoyance, I can peer into the Akashic records and read comments not yet written by the future people of tomorrow, dismissing this show as a “Tragic Band” fiasco. A word of advice for these wiseacres: they should try listening to music with their fucking ears rather than their fat, saggy buttocks. No, this group is not as good as the Magic Band that played on Safe as Milk or Trout Mask Replica or Lick My Decals Off, Baby or Clear Spot or Doc at the Radar Station. Thanks for pointing that out. I hear Dom Pérignon 1989 really sucks, too.

The set list:

Mirror Man
Upon the My-O-My
Full Moon, Hot Sun
Crazy Little Thing
Sweet Georgia Brown
Peaches

This version of the broadcast is cut short. To see the encore (“You’re Gonna Need Somebody on Your Bond/Keep on Rubbin’/Who’ll Be the Next One”) and appreciate how much worse the picture could be, click here. And if you like this material, pick up London ‘74.
 

Posted by Oliver Hall
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08.23.2018
08:59 am
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Nona Hendryx covering Captain Beefheart—hear the entire album here first!
11.03.2017
07:26 am
Topics:
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Because her fame is perpetually tethered to her membership in the vocal trio Labelle, and because that group is most famous for the immortal disco fucksong “Lady Marmalade,” the idea of Nona Hendryx recording an album of Captain Beefheart covers with a member of the Magic Band may at first seem pretty weird.

But then it’s useful to recall that it was Nona Hendryx’s songwriting that played a large role in their successful transition from the ‘60s girl-group Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles into the more daring R&B trio they’d become in the ‘70s as Labelle. And that Hendryx’s post Labelle afterlife included a stint in the New Wave band Zero Cool, and one in Bill Laswell’s defiantly genre-indifferent jazz group Material. Just this past August she participated in a collaboration with Nick Cave at MASSMoCA. Hendryx’s admirable willingness to go off the map is a tradition of long standing, and in that context, her singing Beefheart seems like something that could have happened sooner.
 

When you can pull off this look, you get to cover whoever the hell you want.

Her album with latter-day Beefheart guitarist Gary Lucas (Doc at the Radar Station, Ice Cream for Crow) is due out on November 10; it’s titled The World of Captain Beefheart and it’s a goddamn stunner. It’s jarring at first to hear Beefheart songs covered by someone who can sing so well—so much of these songs’ original feel was dependent on Don van Vliet’s celebrated gravel-throated vocal stylings that Hendryx’s equally celebrated husky alto can seem almost alien to the material, but unsurprisingly, she totally slays it. Standout tracks include “Sure ‘Nuff ‘N Yes I Do,” “When It Blows Its Stacks,” and “I’m Glad”—that last one being kind of a gimme as it’s pretty straight R&B, but Hendryx nails more angular and difficult material like “When Big Joan Sets Up” equally well.

We were fortunate enough to get some time to talk with Gary Lucas about how how the project came to be

Gary Lucas: This all came about because our bass player and my co-producer on the record, Jesse Krakow, did a tribute to Captain Beefheart some years ago, in a place called the Bowery Poetry Club, and Nona was one of his guests. I was invited to come and play on a couple numbers—Jesse and I had played in Fast ’N’ Bulbous, we did two records for Cuneiform—so I met Nona at this tribute, and she was very friendly. Co de Kloet, who’s like a Beefheart/Zappa go-to guy in the Netherlands, a producer & DJ, he asked me if I would do a symphonic Beefheart night at the Paradiso in Amsterdam, and in casting about for a singer I thought Nona could do it. She was really cool, and she came and did a great job. There were some Dutch vocalists as well, someday maybe that’ll come out.

But so anyway, when that was done, I wasn’t going to wait around to get more kicks with a 65-piece orchestra, as great as that was, I wanted a way to do that with a more portable ensemble. So I stripped it down to just drums, bass, guitar, and keyboards, and Nona. It took a few years to get it done, I was busy with some other projects, but we tackled it and we nailed it, I guess it was almost a year and a half ago we turned it in. It’s been a tortuous route to it finally coming out, but it’s coming out on Knitting Factory, who’ve been very gung-ho and supportive. The package is beautiful, they really committed to it.

Dangerous Minds: There are songs on this that significantly predate your tenure in the Magic Band, was any of it new to you, or was it all material that had already been in your repertoire?

GL: Not really. Even things I didn’t actually play in the Magic Band I played in Magic Band reunions with Rockette Morton and John French, so I did that for a while, and it was a comprehensive overview of Captain Beefheart, so anything I hadn’t learned in my time with him I learned for that project and for Fast ’N’ Bulbous. Some of it I hadn’t played in some years but we definitely went into the recording very prepared and rehearsed. It was a good mix of weird dark stuff and more accessible R&B stuff. It’s a pretty endlessly fascinating repertoire with a lot of payoffs.

Keep reading after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Ron Kretsch
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11.03.2017
07:26 am
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Stuck in the Mudd! Four decades later, the doorman of the wildest nightclub in NYC lets you in!

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Here’s a drink ticket—enjoy the post!

“If you’ve been standing here for more than ten minutes you’re not coming in” announces Richard Boch in a stern but cute, almost teenaged stoner way. Don’t get me wrong, he means it. This was how “normal people” were greeted much of the time at the door of the Mudd Club (and many other ultra hip clubs in New York City at the time). This made getting in a huge badge of honor and being turned away a major disgrace. Imagine riding on THAT possibility just to pay to go into a nightclub? An anonymous “sniper” refused entrance once even hit Boch with a dead pigeon from a few yards away and sped off in a taxi cab!

Back then these normal people showing up at Manhattan nightclubs were mostly referred to as the “bridge and tunnel” crowd (Queens, Jersey, Brooklyn) a term not heard much these days, but once heard hundreds of times every night in NYC clubs. Some were 9-5ers, some wealthy disco-types expecting to stroll in on the doorman’s view of their Rolex or hot girlfriend. These regular folks were basically told to cool their heels or fuck off while an 18-year-old kid like me dressed to the hilt in what may have looked to them like idiotic rags, parted the seas and strolled in like I was Mick Jagger. This was not Studio 54 as they would find out soon enough. What it was, though, was a trip into known and unknown galaxies of hip culture throughout history, like a living, breathing museum/funhouse/drug den/concert hall/discotheque, mixed with nitroglycerine and LSD and thrown into a blender to create the unknown. The future. THE NOW!

The Mudd Club was almost literally unbelievable. Inmates running the asylum on an outer space pirate ship. This vessel was founded, funded and schemed by Steve Mass, who was on every side of the street all at once. When I first met Steve, he was roommates with Brian Eno and got that input, but he STILL drove me out to my parents’ apartment in Queens to help pull my record collection from under my bed, my parents shrugging their shoulders until reading about us a year later in the New York Times, thereby making it “Okay.” But really he was always very curious, constantly grilling me, getting inside my head. I once told him I thought he should round off the corners and ceiling of the Mudd Club like a giant cave and have live bats flying around the club. He actually considered it! He did this with certain other kids, rock stars, Warhol superstars, models, designers, Hollywood royalty, junkies, freaks and lord knows who else. We all had a bit of our heart and soul in that place.
 
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Mudd Club owner Steve Mass. Photo by Kate Simon

The above mentioned Richard Boch is the author of a incredibly well-written new book from Feral House titled The Mudd Club. Boch was the main doorman there and the book is his autobiography or a coming of age story told in pretty much the aftermath of the glorious Sixties during the truly, in retrospect, harsh, dark, real version of what was hoped for, but lost in that previous decade. Richard’s story is all of our stories, those of us lucky (or unlucky) enough to have grown up or wound up in New York City’s grimy punk/art/drugged musical and historical mish-mosh. It was the Velvet Underground’s songs come to life after waiting a decade for the world to catch up to it, or crumble to its level.
 
To quote Richard:

I’ve always referred to the Mudd Club as the scene of the crime, always meant as a term of endearment. It was the night that never ended: the day before never happened and the day after, a long way off. There was nothing else like it and I wound up right in the middle. I thought I could handle it and for a while, I did.

 
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Author Richard Boch. Photo by Alan Kleinberg
 
Boch was given marching orders orders early on to avoid bloated seventies superstars and the limo crowd. On one of his first nights of work he was faced with a huge, loud, and very sweaty Meatloaf. “Definitely not something I wanted to get close to, physically or musically,” Boch says, and ignored him. My first ever DJ gig was early on at the Mudd Club and I was told told by Steve Mass to do things like play Alvin and The Chipmunks records when it got a bit crowded, to “make everyone uncomfortable,” including myself. Of course I had the record. I also gouged a 45 with scissors insuring the record would skip horribly and then pretend that it wasn’t happening. Just long enough to get the asylum to freak out a little bit.

Later this stuff went out the window but it was quite a formative experience. Humor filtered through even to the most deadly serious moments there. The Mudd Club was a place where twenty people could literally have had twenty different experiences on the same night during the same hour as there was just so much happening on different mental/pharmaceutical levels and different floor levels. Everywhere you turned there was someone amazing. From the way I had grown up, seeing Andy Warhol, John Waters, David Bowie and the Ramones within a twenty minute span was “my” Studio 54. Watching Screamin’ Jay Hawkins while standing next to Jean-Michel Basquiat, seeing the Soft Boys, girl groups like the Angels and the Crystals, Frank Zappa, Bauhaus, Nico, the Dead Boys, Captain Beefheart, John Cale, a Radley Metzger film presented by Sleazoid Express or an impromptu freakout by Warhol Superstar Jackie Curtis, well this was my dream come to life!

My dream hasn’t changed in 40 years. I’m still in awe that it happened. And in the middle of all that I was allowed to put on my own demented conceptual events with friends (“The Puberty Ball,” etc.) and be a regular DJ. The people I came to know in the punk world who wanted more found it at the Mudd Club. Our mad obsession with the Sixties, especially the Warhol/New York sixties, informed much of what we did, and at the same time the Warhol Factory itself became more corporate. The Superstars were by then getting older and pushed out, but they were looking for more themselves, and they were looking to us to inform them, making for some extremely insane morality and immorality plays coming to life before our eyes. Mudd had the pull of what the press called “downtown,” and for the downtown types, well our voices were about to be heard loud and clear.
 
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David Bowie and Dee Dee Ramone. Photo by Bobby Grossman
 
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Howie Pyro deejaying at Mudd

Richard Boch understood all this, and was also an artist himself so he knew who everyone in the art world was, as well as all the new punk stars and celebutantes, no wavers, new wavers, culture vulture gods and the ones who would become gods themselves in a year or so. In the book he talks about being nervous about starting working there but man, he was the one for the job. In the pages of The Mudd Club, Boch’s quite candid about everything you’d want to know (gossip but not mean gossip: sex, drugs, more drugs, and getting home at ten AM, having done every drug and a half dozen people along the way—normal stuff like that). It reads in one, two, or three page sections, my favorite kind of book. You can put it down in ten-minute intervals or read it in any order you want, IF you can put it down at all. I have literally read certain sections backwards for 40-50 pages while looking for something and didn’t really notice. It made me laugh out loud, and it brought tears to my eyes. It’s kind of like “Please Kill Me, the Day After,” though it’s not an oral history as such, as it is written from Richard Boch’s point of view, but it has the same immediate anecdotal feel.
 
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‘TV Party’ at Mudd. Photo by Bob Gruen
 
The club’s benevolent benefactor, Steve Mass, was responsible for making this incredible witches brew keep bubbling and kept the happenings happening. He was willing to do anything, just for the sake of doing it. Steve originally owned an ambulance service. For my 19th birthday they had a huge party for me on the second floor of the Mudd Club. Since Steve had medical connections, and since we were ALL junkies (well, a good 85% of us were), he furnished a massive cake with dozens of syringes with the plungers & needles removed so they could put the candles in the open syringes. This of course turned into a massive cake fight with the participants looking like the Little Rascals (with pinned eyes). Steve was always down for this sorta stuff. As for the main floor, the bands, writers and performers that I saw in a single month’s time was staggering! More than some people see in a lifetime.
 
From the book:

January 1979. The Cramps freaked out The Mudd Club with a loud Psychobilly grind that included such hits as “Human Fly” and “Surfin’ Bird.” A few months later, the “big names” started to appear…

He goes on to say:

The legendary Sam and Dave got onstage a few weekends later, and it was the first time on my watch that I got to see the real deal. By late summer, Talking Heads took the stage while Marianne Faithful, X, Lene Lovich, and the Brides of Funkenstein waited in the wings.

There were so many great performances: Scheduled, impromptu, logical and out of left field. The locals and the regulars were the staple and the stable and performed as part of the White Street experience. They included everyone you could imagine and some you never could. John Cale, Chris Spedding, Judy Nylon and Nico, John Lurie and Philip Glass were just a few. Writers and poets such as William S. Burroughs, Max Blagg, Cookie Mueller, and “Teenage Jesus” Lydia Lunch all wound up on the Mudd Club stage. The talent pool was so deep and occasionally dark that even Hollywood Babylon‘s Luciferian auteur Kenneth Anger got Involved.

Steve’s willingness and generosity along with his guarded enthusiasm offered support to a local community of artists, musicians, and filmmakers. Together with Diego (Cortez)’ and Anya (Phillip’s) short-lived but “dominating” spirit, the Mudd Club became an instant happening, a free-for-all with No Wave orchestration and very few rules.

Diego described the Mudd Club as “a container, a vessel, but certainly not the only one in town.” What made the place unique was its blank-canvas emptiness. When the space filled up, IT happened and everyone wanted to be a part. A living, breathing work of art, it was beautiful and way off center, a slice of golden time.

I was lucky, and soaked it all in.

 
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Nico playing her wheezing harmonium. Photo by Ebet Roberts

All of us who got to be there were lucky. This was a timeless world of it’s own. A world that could be compared to any and all magical artistic movements, scenes or spaces. Dada. Warhol’s Factory, the Beats in NY and SF, Surrealism, etc.—times, places, people all endlessly written about as there’s just so much to say. Everyone involved had a unique experience, true to themselves. This wasn’t just a nightclub, it was so much more. It almost seemed like a private place where, on the best nights, people’s lives and fantasies were put on display and the public was allowed to watch. The public who just came to do coke and dance (as we all did) but who accidentally got touched by a bizarre and wonderful world that lived in the shadows of the city then, usually just brushing against them like a ghost in the night. Whether they even noticed or not, well, who cares?

This first book on the subject (I guarantee it will not be the last) is Richard Boch’s own experience, peppered with those of us who he interviewed for the reminders. This book is about his eyes opening, his chain-wielding power stance, his blowjobs, his drinks, his drugs, all of which are plentiful. It includes a little of most of us, the people we loved, the ones we lost, the games we played, and the love we shared of each other and our mutual history. Still though, there are a million stories in the Mudd’s microcosm of the naked city, this is just one of them.

And what a glorious place to start: right at the front door.
 
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The trailer for the book
 
More Mudd Club after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Howie Pyro
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09.19.2017
02:47 pm
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Click, Clack: Art of Captain Beefheart on display in new gallery show
08.14.2017
05:14 pm
Topics:
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Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band,1972
 

French radio interviewer in 1972: “In your music—and even if you don’t agree—there are a whole lot of influences from blues and free jazz. Do you listen to people like Albert Ayler or Sun Ra?”

Captain Beefheart: “No. I myself am an artist too, you see. I’ll tell you once again: I have i-ma-gi-na-ti-on…. It isn’t polluted, and believe me, people have always tried to put labels on me…. What’s the story with that? ‘Blues’ and ‘jazz’? The more often people say it, the more difficult it gets for me to come here. It took five years to play here in Europe, because the critics had written I was sort of avant-garde, jazz, blues and such. It’s wrong. I am an artist; just like Albert Ayler is one, like Muddy Waters or John Lee Hooker. i know John Lee Hooker and even in my boldest imagination, I can’t see myself using the music of Hooker, Ayler or anyone else. Why should i do that, when I have so much myself? You have heard it tonight—so why all those classifications? Tell it to the Rolling Stones, to the Beatles, the Jefferson Airplane—but not to me!

The late Don Van Vliet, the artist who was formerly known as Captain Beefheart, was always an extremely prolific visual artist from a very early age. By the age of ten he was already being recognized regionally in Southern California for his life-like clay sculptures of animals, and was considered a bit of a child prodigy. He was still creating art throughout his career as a musician, and many of his paintings and sketches have appeared on his album covers. In the early 1980s Van Vliet gave up music entirely and concentrated on making fine art until his death in 2010.

The Michael Werner Gallery in Manhattan has a new exhibition of Van Vliet’s works on paper. The exhibition of smaller work—drawings and paintings on paper from the 1980s through 2000—is the first solo showing of Van Vliet’s art in New York City for a decade.

The artist’s bracingly stark and decidedly naive primitive style of abstract expressionism (as opposed to a more sophisticated abstract primitivism represented by the likes of say, Jean-Michel Basquiat) was highly influenced by the landscape, plants and animals of his home in the California desert. The earliest pieces in the show are abstracts rendered in watercolor and gouache, while work from his later years tends to leave the paintbrush behind for colored pencils

Whereas I’m a huge fan of Van Vliet’s massive paintings—and have seen them in person several times—I’m less sold on these smaller works. His large canvasses are absolutely awe-inspiring and have an oddball power to them. They are huge and they are as weird as they are huge. These works on paper are simply less impressive than their gigantic counterparts, if admittedly I am judging them off a computer screen. If some of these were nine feet tall, and slathered with paint and texture, then I’d say yeah.

Still, some of them are quite interesting, even if, as it would appear, most of the really good Van Vliets have probably already been sold a long, long time ago. The show is open through September 9th at the Michael Werner Gallery.
 

“Untitled”, 1987, India ink, gouache on paper 30 x 22 1/2 inches
 

“Untitled”, 1985, India ink, gouache on paper, 10 x 7 inches
 

“Untitled”, 1985, India ink on paper, 7 x 10 inches
 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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08.14.2017
05:14 pm
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David Lynch recites Captain Beefheart’s ‘Pena’
07.20.2017
09:09 am
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Don Van Vliet, ‘Crepe and Black Lamps’ (via beefheart.com)
 
Among the treasures stored on Magic Band alumnus Gary Lucas’ Soundcloud is this recording of David Lynch reading “Pena” from Trout Mask Replica.

The director, who also appears in Anton Corbijn’s short movie about Beefheart, Some YoYo Stuff, recorded “Pena” for a Beefheart tribute show Lucas put on at the NYC Knitting Factory in 2008.

“Three little burnt scotch taped windows.” Where Antennae Jimmy Semens shrieks “Pena” like it’s his last words at the gallows, Lynch’s measured recitation lets you picture every image. They could come from one of his own paintings:

Pena
Her little head clinking
Like uh barrel of red velvet balls
Full past noise
Treats filled ‘er eyes
Turning them yellow like enamel coated tacks
Soft like butter hard not t’ pour
Out enjoying the sun while sitting on
Uh turned on waffle iron
Smoke billowing up from between her legs
Made me vomit beautifully
‘n crush uh chandelier
Fall on my stomach ‘n view her
From uh thousand happened facets
Liquid red salt ran over crystals
I later band-aided the area
Sighed
Oh well it was worth it
Pena pleased but sore from sitting
Chose t’ stub ‘er toe
‘n view the white pulps horribly large
In their red pockets
“I’m tired of playing baby,” she explained

Listen after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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07.20.2017
09:09 am
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‘Metal Man Has Won His Wings’: Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa’s early ‘60s R&B band, the Soots
06.23.2017
06:04 am
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Zappa at the door to Studio Z in Cucamonga

Briefly, during 1963 and 1964, Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa were in a proto-Magic Band called the Soots, and among the numbers they recorded at Studio Z in Cucamonga was “Metal Man Has Won His Wings.” It isn’t the first recording the pair made together (that’s the my-baby-flushed-me-down-the-toilet epic “Lost in a Whirlpool,” recorded at Antelope Valley Junior College in the late ‘50s), but it’s the first instance of the Frank Zappa blues adventure style that crystallized in later classics like “Why Don’t You Do Me Right,” “Trouble Every Day” and “Willie the Pimp.”

The Magic Band’s John “Drumbo” French identifies the song as a breakthrough in his massive study Beefheart: Through the Eyes of Magic:

In Metal Man Has Won His Wings the music immediately bursts forth, a music surprisingly reminiscent of the early Magic Band. Zappa was obviously making headway in his production attempts. The young Vliet’s repetitive Wolf-esque ramblings are buried in the mix. The song is brought to a halt with a typical blues kick - something Zappa may have learned while playing at Tommy Sands’ club.

“Metal Man Has Won His Wings” (misheard by bootleggers for years as “Metal Man Has Hornet’s Wings”) first surfaced on Mystery Disc. Zappa’s liner notes shed light on how the track’s vocals came to be “buried in the mix”: Beefheart used an unorthodox recording technique, one that reminds me of his later refusal to wear headphones while overdubbing his parts on Trout Mask Replica.

In our spare time we made what we thought were ‘rock & roll records.’ In this example, Vliet was ‘singing’ in the hallway outside the studio (our vocal booth) while the band played in the other room.

The lyrics were derived from a comic book pinned to a bulletin board near the door.

 

On the road, 1975 (via beefheart.com)
 
Zappa scholar Biffy the Elephant Shrew has identified the comic book as issue #7 of the DC title Metal Men. Beefheart took part of the song’s title and “wheet! wheet!” from an ad in that number promoting the new book Hawkman:

HAWKMAN HAS “WON HIS WINGS”... AND FROM NOW ON HIS FAMOUS “WHEET! WHEET!” BATTLE CRY WILL APPEAR IN HIS OWN MAGAZINE!

More after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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06.23.2017
06:04 am
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Mr. Bungle’s Trevor Dunn covers Captain Beefheart with post-hardcore duo Qui
06.14.2017
09:27 am
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Not so very long ago, in those lighthearted summer days of 2016, when our biggest worries were wondering which celebrities would be next to die young and weirdos dressing up like clowns for midnight strolls, Dangerous Minds told you all about Qui, the fascinating but underrated experimental post-hardcore duo of guitarist Matt Cronk and drummer Paul Christensen. The pair have parlayed some favorable friendships into jaw-dropping musical collaborations, even ensorcelling the Jesus Lizard’s David Yow to serve as their frontman for a spell in the ‘oughts, releasing in that trio configuration the wonderful Love’s Miracle. In an email exchange for that article last year, Cronk told us about recording their How to Get Ideas E.P. with Melvins drummer Dale Crover, and in the process he let the news slip about a future project with Mr. Bungle/Melvins Lite/Trio-Convulsant bassist Trevor Dunn.

That project—a full length album inventively titled Qui w/ Trevor Dunn—is now on the horizon, and it includes a ripping little cover of “Ashtray Heart,” a standout from the last truly great Captain Beefheart album (IMO YMMV), Doc at the Radar Station. It’s a really great cover; I won’t be so ridiculous as to say it surpasses the original, but it contemporizes the source material without shedding or shitting on everything that made the original a stunner, and it features contributions not just from Dunn, but from main Melvin King Buzzo and Cows bassist Kevin Rutmanis.
 

 
In a recent phone conversation, Cronk talked about hooking up to work with Dunn:

In 2012 we were recording our last LP, Life, Water, Living, with Toshi Kasai and Dale Crover, and Trevor was in Los Angeles during that. Dale and Toshi played him the record and he really liked it. After that, it was really Toshi pushing us to do something with Trevor, saying how we should hit him up, and he just gave me Trevor’s number. So I just hit him up, said “hello,” and asked if he would be interested in doing something. He got back right away, and I believe he actually said “fuck yeah!” So we did like a year of writing the whole record with him in mind to play on it, making practice demos and sending files back and forth—he lives in New York. And then last year we got it all together. We booked a few days in the studio, he came, and we banged it out. It was really fun, Trevor is an incredibly nice guy. It was really cool, apart from emailing I didn’t really know him from Adam, but he was charming, friendly, and easygoing. We were a little nervous, to be honest, he’s a bit of a giant to us—I’ve been listening to his stuff since I was in high school, but we all hit it off right away and had a lot of fun in the studio. It was a real honor to get to play with yet another of our musical heroes.

Cronk also talked about how Qui chose to cover “Ashtray Heart”:

That’s my favorite song. My father was a big Beefheart fan who used to rock me to sleep to that stuff when I was a baby! And Doc at the Radar Station is my favorite Beefheart record. When Paul and I first started goofing off together 20-plus years ago, the drumming on that record, the sort of broken, angular, jagged drumming was something we really liked, and something we’ve toyed with a lot over the years. We really wanted to play a Beefheart song and “Ashtray Heart” seemed like the one we could do with the instrumentation we had for this album. My dad hasn’t heard it yet, and he’s really been chomping at the bit, like “WHEN’S THAT RECORD COMING OUT?”

Well, Matt’s dad, the album isn’t going to see the light for a couple of weeks, but we can hook you up reeeaaal gooood on the Beefheart tune, after the jump…

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Posted by Ron Kretsch
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06.14.2017
09:27 am
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Captain Beefheart conducts the Magic Band’s feet and fingers on TV, 1971
04.13.2017
06:25 am
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Live on ‘Detroit Tubeworks,’ 1971
 
Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band’s appearance on Detroit Tubeworks is justly famed. On January 15, 1971, Don Van Vliet’s 30th birthday, the group cooked and ate Trout Mask Replica‘s “When Big Joan Sets Up” and two cuts from side one of Lick My Decals Off, Baby, “Woe-Is-Uh-Me-Bop” and “Bellerin’ Plain.” There is a Library of Congress in my mind, and this tape reel is the only item on its windswept shelves.

The group also played an untitled, unreleased, improvised number for 120 digits. Under what sounds like the whine of an air conditioner—though it could just as easily be a swarm of bees at a Ligeti concert, a first lesson on the musical saw or a plain old case of sticky-shed syndrome—a dozen feet and a dozen hands follow Beefheart’s direction. His mouth moves, so maybe he was vocalizing in the studio. What’s the difference? You can’t hear it.

The YouTube comments point to a 2012 interview in which John “Drumbo” French says Van Vliet’s main concern was keeping the Magic Band from talking to the press:

There’s a film of The Magic Band that I think is from ’71 where you’re playing three or four songs in a TV studio, and then the band is filmed silently twirling your feet underneath a table…

(chuckles) Yeah.

Do you remember this?

Don’s idea.

He appears to be conducting you as you’re twirling your feet, and I was just curious, was that the idea that you were, like, playing the parts of one of your songs with your feet supposedly in time with each other, or…

No, actually, I really think that those kind of, sort of Dadaistic moments that Don created, were because he would do anything to keep us from being interviewed. He didn’t want the band to be interviewed. And I think mainly the reason was because he had created such an alien environment to work in that it would have become evident right away that there were a lot of problems in the band, that something wasn’t quite right. So he would invent these things to do as a diversion. I had no idea what that was supposed to mean one way or the other, but we all took off our shoes and they filmed our feet under the table. That’s all I remember about it. I think that was done in 1971 on a tour in January. If I recall, it was either outside of Detroit or outside of… let’s see… yeah, it was outside of Detroit, and we did it at night en route to the hotel.

More after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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04.13.2017
06:25 am
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Captain Beefheart meets David Lynch in ‘Some YoYo Stuff’
04.13.2016
04:12 pm
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In the early 1990s Anton Corbijn made a peculiar short movie called “Some YoYo Stuff” featuring Don Van Vliet, a.k.a. Captain Beefheart. The movie is in black-and-white and lasts a little under 13 minutes. Most of the movie is the Captain’s face in front of a large screen on which words and images appear. The Captain addresses the topics projected onto the screen in his elliptical way. David Lynch even gets into the act.

Corbijn has been taking pictures of prominent musicians since the mid-1970s, when he worked for NME. He is noted for luminous b/w pictures of rock icons—his work appears on the cover of U2’s The Joshua Tree; as it happens, it appears that “Some YoYo Stuff” was likewise shot in Joshua Tree National Park.
 

 
Here’s Corbijn in the pages of World Art in 1998 describing the movie:
 

It was a simple affair to make the film: His mother sue opens the movie with the photograph that I took when Don and I first met, saying: “This is Don, my son,” and, apart from David Lynch asking him a few questions via projected film, it is all Don’s thoughts on various matters. Some funny, some serious, but all sharp, poetic and beautiful. You really want to hear every single word he says—whether it’s about paint, Miles Davis, an ear (“nice sculpture”) or the desert. 

 
My colleague Marc Campbell eloquently described the difficulty of capturing the essence of Beefheart on film several years ago:
 

His writing and occasional communiques were like those of a modernist monk of the left hand school. He spoke in an ancient craggy voice that sounded like hollow bones being rubbed together. Corbijn’s film communicates the desert father aspect of Beefheart’s existence. There’s an otherworldliness about the whole thing that seems as though it is being beamed in from another planet.

 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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04.13.2016
04:12 pm
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Gary Lucas meets Captain Beefheart
10.05.2015
12:35 pm
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One of the nice things about editing this blog is when fun—and unexpected—things arrive in your inbox, like this delightful tale from grand guitarist Gary Lucas, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the live Frank Zappa/Captain Beefheart album, Bongo Fury, which was released on October 2, 1975:

I’d originally met Don Van Vliet at Yale when I was an undergraduate there in the early 70’s. I was music director of their radio station WYBC in the fall of 1971, when he and his band came up to play a show at Yale around the release of The Spotlight Kid album, and I got the task to interview him and then do a hospitality meet-n-greet when the band arrived to play at Woolsey Hall (with performing monkeys as the opening act, I kid you not).

I had previously seen his NYC debut the previous year at a little club on the Upper West Side called Ungano’s in January 1971, and it changed my life. I vowed to myself that night:  “If I ever do anything in music, I want to play with this guy”—it was that life-affirming and radical of a show/presentation.

I always made a point after that to hang out with him backstage when he came around the NYC area to tour—I saw him at Town Hall several times with Bob Seger and Larry Coryell opening, also at the Academy of Music on 14th sandwiched between a then-fledgling Billy Joel and The J. Geils Band.

Don eventually gave me his phone number and we drew closer, with marathon phone conversations that would last an hour. We lost touch when he did his “Tragic Band” thing on Mercury. I didn’t have the heart to go see it live, having loved the old band and songs but in 1975 I was home in Syracuse NY when I saw in the newspaper that Don would be the special guest of Frank Zappa at the Syracuse War Memorial.

I had to see that—especially as his last words to me about Frank hadn’t been too favorable. He came out in the show and did the great cameos which are featured on Bongo Fury which came out later that year. He was still great!

When the show was over and they were packing up, I approached the stage and there he was, looking lost amidst the chaos, clutching a paper grocery bag filled with sketch books, harmonicas, cigarettes. I called his name and he yelled my name: “Gary!”—and came over and hugged me.

He was hungry and wanted to eat barbecue, so me and a pal drove him to a midnight barbecue pit known as “Tobe’s” that this old black guy Tobe Erwing ran after hours in his backyard in the ghetto of Syracuse,
you had to drive up a gravel road to get there. Amidst the midnight ribs chowdown, after Don, delighted by this scene, sang some a cappella blues while Tobe sat around looking bemused packing heat in his apron,
I revealed to Don that if he ever wanted to put his band back together I’d love to audition for it.

“You play the guitar?!?” he asked incredulously.

I’d never revealed this to him before as I was a) shy and b) didn’t want to offer my services until I was convinced I could handle his music, which I’d been secretly wood-shedding on.

“Come on up to Boston where I’m playing with Frank on Friday night, and bring your guitar” he instructed.

We caroused around some more in downtown Syracuse, eventually Don and myself bringing Frank back a bag of Tobe’s ribs (we found him in his bathrobe watching some cheesy Skiles and Henderson-like comedy duo in the top floor revolving restaurant of the Holiday Inn where they were staying).

I went home to crash about 6am, and got up around 10am to race back downtown to Syracuse University’s Crouse College Auditorium for the press conference of Frank and Don for invited students—the Soundcloud clip is just one excerpt from a fairly hilarious hour.

Later that week I duly took the Greyhound bus up to Boston with my ‘64 Stratocaster in tow… crashed with my Yale pal Bill Moseley (whom I ran a successful midnight horror film society with—Things That Go Bump in the Night—at Yale; Bill is now worldwide horror icon as Texas Chainsaw Massacre II‘s “Choptop” character, and has starred in a couple of Rob Zombie’s films). We went to see Frank’s Boston show with Don and then I went back to Don’s hotel room, where I proceeded to play for him.

“Great!! We’ll do it!” 

But when? He was vague… and I had a ticket to go to Taiwan in a few weeks to start work for my uncle (my parents attempt at shipping me off overseas to free me from the clutches of a 56-year-old Italian-American shaman-ess whom I’d been living with…)

We parted as friends—and I knew I was destined to play with him.

It did take a few years, but in 1980 things fell into place with Doc at the Radar Station …but that’s another story.

Guest post by Gary Lucas

Below, a brief excerpt from a Bongo Fury-related press conference at Crouse College of Music auditorium, Syracuse University, 4/23/75. My late friend Jamie Cohen (A&R maven for EMI, Columbia Records, and Private Music) was a student at Syracuse University back in 1975 when he asked Don Van Vliet this question at a press conference I also attended the morning after Frank Zappa and the Mothers—with special guest Captain Beefheart—performed at the Syracuse War Memorial:
 

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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10.05.2015
12:35 pm
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‘Big Eyed Beans from Venus’: Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band destroy minds on French TV, 1980
07.24.2015
09:39 am
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“God, please fuck my mind for good!”

While I very much doubt there is such a thing as a bad Captain Beefheart performance—at least, I have yet to hear a tape of Van Vliet and the Magic Band sleeping on the job or “phoning it in”—some recordings are better than others, and boy oh boy does this pro-shot, 30-minute French TV broadcast cream the fucking corn. I would have given my right eye for a VHS of this thing when I was a teen.

Taped during the 24-date European tour behind Doc at the Radar Station, this concert took place just two weeks after Beefheart was, improbably, profiled on local news in L.A. by “journalist” Paul Moyer, who became familiar to the Angeleno TV audience during his subsequent very long career as the Southland’s most blow-dried shithead.
 

 
This is an especially formidable Magic Band: guitarists Jeff Moris Tepper, Richard “Midnight Hatsize” Snyder and Gary Lucas wrestle manfully with bassist Eric Drew Feldman (later of Pere Ubu, Frank Black, PJ Harvey et al.) and drummer Robert Williams (fresh off his collaboration with the Stranglers’ Hugh Cornwell). Warning: if this version of “Big Eyed Beans from Venus” doesn’t move you, you may already be dead.

The set list:

Nowadays A Woman’s Gotta Hit A Man (0:17)
Best Batch Yet (3:44)
Dirty Blue Gene (8:47)
Safe As Milk (12:42)
Flavor Bud Living (16:33)
Bat Chain Puller (17:47)
Big Eyed Beans From Venus (22:58)
 

Posted by Oliver Hall
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07.24.2015
09:39 am
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