Captain Beefheart a Rochefort
http://www.rochefort-en-accords.fr/
"En fin de semaine, y'a Captain Beefheart a Rochefort, mais je pourrais pas y aller! Fait chier!"
Le jeune Joe a flashé sur Steve Marriott et Jimi Hendrix. Il a a peine vingt ans. Il joue dans un groupe de La Rochelle. De la guitare. Et il joue super-bien. Avec son cœur, le son, tout ça tout ça... Et il savait pas que Don Van Vliet n'est plus de ce monde... Un brin perdu dans ses rêves, le gamin, comme devaient l’être tout les gamins de son age dans les sixties, je suppose...
C'est beau, de rêver... Sans ça, y'a pas de Japonais ni de MP3.
Captain Beefheart fait partie de notre réseau étendu.
Son étoile brille tout la-haut.
Elle a toujours éclairé le monde, mais le monde ne le savait pas.
Lorsque quelqu'un montre la lune, l'idiot regarde le doigt, disent les chinois...
A Rochefort, cette semaine est donc placée sous le signe des Demoiselles et du Capitaine Cœur De Bœuf.
Vous risquez y croiser des filles de joie, des freaks, des bruitistes et des perchés, des boucaniers et même des
végétariens, tous venus honorer la mémoire de notre cher disparu!
il y a pire comme nouvelle, vous en conviendrez, non?
C'est une bonne idée que ces jam'sessions annuelles...
Il est temps de se serrer les coudes et d'aller voir chez le voisin si un bout de notre nez ou de notre palpitant
n'y est pas... Et je pense que vous êtes assez curieux pour aller entendre de vous même comment ils s'y prennent.Si le beau temps et le vin blanc sont de la partie, vous pourrez peut être finir par vous lâcher un peu, pour changer...
A moins que partager des trucs ensemble, faire des étincelles et pourquoi pas l'amour ne vous foute une trouille bleue...
"la ou on en joue, le voyageur entend la musique des montagnes", disait Hunter Thompson.
A moins que je ne ramène des bruits de la bas, ou que des spectateurs amateurs preneurs de sons et d'images ne soient présents, il se peut qu'a l instar des divas et des maestro de jadis qui répugnaient a êtres enregistrés, cette rencontre ne reste gravée que dans les cœurs des participants... Serait-ce si grave?
Puisque j'en suis a Chinoiser, comme on dit ici, je repense a ce petit nom charmant qu'ils ont pour nous désigner: Les fantômes...
Je repense a cette photo perdue de Jim Morrisson moribond a la Corderie Royale dont me parlait Julien Sex-Toy...
Y'aura t il des orbes sur vos négatifs?
Hey Joe, ramène ta graisse, Rochefort est un Hamburger!
Le Vicomte Jean-Pierre De Rocka Rolla
http://www.myspace.com/rockarolla17450
UN BRIN DE BONUS :
Un peu de Plaisir Des Yeux Dadaïste:
DISCO-GRAPHISME RÉCRÉATIF DU PRÉSIDENT CAILLET:
http://approximatif.free.fr/index.php?page1
http://bricolagea.free.fr/
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100002353014727&ref=pb
Une Juxtaposition Sonore Dadaïste:
MORISSON-DJANGO par JULIEN SEX-TOY:
http://www.myspace.com/morrisondjango
Le Groupe dans lequel Joue Joe:
KAZEMY
UNE INTERVIEW DU CAPITAINE PAR LESTER BANGS:
Captain Beefheart's Far Cry/Iridescent Logic - Lester Bangs Interview & Drawings
"...Captain Beefheart's Iridescent Logic was an article written by Lester Bangs that appeared in Musician #29 in
1981. Three of Don's sketches, shown below, were scattered through the article. The text was also published as
Captain Beefheart's Far Cry in the Village Voice, October 1980. The sketches were not included with this
version...."
(REPOSTED FROM THE EXCELLENT BEEFHEART RADAR STATION)
http://www.beefheart.com/zigzag/articles/cry.htm
Captain Beefheart's Far Cry
This excellent article / interview was written by Lester Bangs and was taken from the October 1st - 7th 1980 edition
of Voice.
He's alive, but so is paint. Are you?
Don Van Vliet is a 39-year-old man who lives with his wife Jan in a trailer in the Mojave Desert. They have very
little money, so it must be pretty hard on them sometimes, but I've never heard them complain. Don Van Vliet is
better known as Captain Beefheart, a legend worldwide whom the better part of a generation of New Wave rock 'n' roll
bands' have cited as one of their most important spiritual and musical forefathers: John Lydon/Rotten, Joe Strummer
of the Clash, Devo, Pere Ubu, and many others have attested to growing up on copies of Van Vliet's 1969 album Trout
Mask Replica, playing its four sides of discordant yet juicy swampbrine jambalaya roogalator over and over again
until they knew whole bits - routines out of his lyrics, which are a wild and totally original form of free-
associational poetry.
There are some of us who think he is one of the giants of 20th century music, certainly of the postwar era. He has
never been to music school, and taught himself to play about half a dozen instruments including soprano sax, bass
clarinet, harmonica, guitar, piano, and most recently mellotron. He sings in seven and a half octaves, and his style
has been compared to Howlin' Wolf and several species of primordial beasts. His music, which he composes for
ensemble and then literally teaches his bands how to play, is often atonal but always swings in a way that very
little rock ever has. His rhythmic concept is unique. I hear Delta blues, free jazz, field hollers, rock 'n' roll
and lately something new that I can't put my finger on but relates somehow to what they call "serious" music. You'll
probably hear several other things.
This is going to be a profile partially occasioned by the release of his 12th (and best since 1972's Clear Spot)
album, Doc at the Radar Station. This is also going to be, and I hesitate mightily to say this because I hate those
articles where the writer brays how buddybuddy he is with the rock stars, about someone I have long considered a
friend and am still only beginning to feel I understand after 11 years. Which is perhaps not so long a time to take
to be able to say that you have learned anything about anyone.
Meanwhile, back in the Mojave Desert, Don Van Vliet is enjoying a highly urbane, slyly witty (anecdotes and repartee
litter the lunar sands like sequins 'n' confetti on the floor of a Halloween disco), and endlessly absorbing
conversation with a gila monster. "GRAAUUWWWKKK!" says the big slumbrous reptile, peering out its laser-green
lidless bulging eyes and missing nothing. "Brickbats fly my fireplace," answers Van Vliet. "Upside down I see them
in the fire. They squeak and roast there. Wings leap across the floor." "KRAAEEAUUWWWKKK!" advises heat-resistant
gila. Van Vliet the Captain nods and ponders the efficacy of such a course. They've both just washed down the last
of the scalding chilli fulla big eyed beans from Venus what glare atcha accusingly as ya poppem doomward inya mouf.
The Captain, Van Vliet, call him which you choose, has chosen to live out here, squatflat wampum on this blazened
barren ground for many a year. Don't see too much o' the hoomin side o' the varmint family out here, but that's fine
with Cap Vliet, "Doc" as he's called by the crusty prospectors hung on lak chiggers from times before his emigration
to this spot.
Have you ever had somebody you idolized or looked up to as an artist?
"Can't think of anybody, other than the fact that I thought Van Gogh was excellent."
How about in music?
"Never in music I never have. A hero in music. No, fortunately."
So you didn't listen to like Delta blues and free jazz and stuff before you started to-
"Not really. . . I met Eric Dolphy. He was a nice guy, but it was real limited to me, like bliddle-liddle-
diddlenopdedit-bop, "I came a long way from St. Louie," like Ornette, you know. It didn't move me."
Dolphy didn't MOVE you?
"Well, he moved me, but he didn't move me as much as a goose, say. Now that could be a hero, a gander goose could
definitely be a hero, the way they blow their heart out for nothing like that."
Is that because you think that people generally do it for purposes of ego?
"Um, yeah, which I think is good because it gets your shoes tied. You know what I mean, it doesn't scare old ladies,
you get dressed. So I think that's nice."
You don't think it's possible to create art that's egoless, that just flows through you?
"That's possible, I'm tryin' to do that, on this last album definitely."
Well, one thing I find is that the more I know the less I know.
"Me too. I don't know anything about music."
As reviews over the years have proved, it's always difficult to write anything that really says something about Don
Van Vliet. Perhaps (though he may hate this comparison) this is because, like Brian Eno, he approaches music with
the instincts of a painter, in Beefheart's case those of a sculptor as well. (When I was trying to pin him down
about something on his new album over the phone the other day, he said: "Have you seen Franz Kline lately? You
should go over to the Guggenheim and see his Number Seven, they have it in such a good place. He's probably closer
to my music than any of the painters, because it's just totally speed and emotion that comes out of what he does.")
When he's directing the musicians in his Magic Band he often draws the songs as diagrams and shapes. Before that he
plays the compositions into a tape himself, "usually on a piano or a moog synthesizer. Then I can shape it to be
exactly the way I want it, after I get it down there. It's almost like sculpture; that's actually what I'm doing, I
think. 'Cause I sure as hell can't afford marble, as if there was any."
Much of what results, by any "normal" laws of music, cannot be done. As for lyrics, again like Eno, he often works
them up from a sort of childlike delight at the very nature of the sounds themselves, of certain words, so if, to
pull an example out of the air; "anthrax," or "love" for that matter appears in a line, it doesn't necessarily mean
what you'll find in the dictionary if you look it up. Then again, it might. Contrary to Rolling Stone, "Ashtray
Heart" on the new album has nothing to do with Beefheart's reaction to punk rockers beyond one repeated aside that
might as well be a red herring. ("Lut's open up another case of the punks" is the line reflecting his rather dim
view of the New Wavers who are proud to admit to being influenced by him. "I don't ever listen to 'em, you see,
which is not very nice of me but... then again, why should I look through my own vomit? I think they're overlooking
the fact - they're putting it back into rock and roll: bomp, bomp, bomp, that's what I was tryin' to get away from,
that mama heartbeat stuff. I guess they have to make a living, though.") He laughs about the misinterpretation, but
since the song is pretty clearly about betrayal, I asked: "What was it about the person in the song that could make
you care enough to be that hurt?"
He says: "Humanity. The fact that people don't hear it the way you really mean it. Probably for a similar reason
that Van Gogh gave that girl a piece of his flesh, because she was too stupid to comprehend what he was doing. I
always thought that he gave her that as a physical thing to hold onto because she didn't accept the aesthetic value
of what he was saying."
'We don't have to suffer, we're the best batch yet.' Would you care to comment on what that might mean?
"Yeah, what I was doing there was having these cardboard ball sculptures, fake pearls, real cheap cardboard
constructed circles, you know what I mean, floating through that music. Actually, I was afraid to sing on that
track, I liked the music so much, it was perfect without me on it. And so I put those words on there, you know
they're just cheap cardboard constructions of balls of simulated pearls floating through, and it's an overwhelming
technique that makes them look like pearls. "We don't have to suffer, we're the best batch yet" were these pearls
talking to themselves."
As opposed to the other ones. What does mean when you say, "White flesh waves to black"?
"God, I don't know what that means. It means, it's just a, uh, it's merely just a painting, you see, that's poetic
license."
I thought you were talking about racism.
"Oh, no. I don't know what to do about racial or political things. It was just a poem to me. A poem for poem's
sake."
I was also thinking of when you walk around looking at people who have turned themselves into commodities.
"Yeah, we're the best batch yet! We're the newest best that has been put out. Well that has to do with that, too.
You know I'm, uh, ahm, whaddaya call it, it isn't schizophrenic but it is, oh. what people in the West think of
people in the East, you see, meaning that in some instances they think that people are crazy who think multifaceted,
that there's many ways of interpreting something. I mean 'em all. I can't say I don't know what my lyrics mean, but
I can say that, oh, yeah I know what they mean, but if you call it you stop the flow."
Van Morrison has said that he doesn't know what a lot of his own lyrics, mean and even if Beefheart does, or they
mean something different for each of us, I think as with Morrison, occasionally you feel that the voice of some
Other just might be speaking through this singer at this particular time, as if he were an instrument picking up
messages from...? Doc at the Radar Station. (About the various voices he switches between, often in the same song:
"I'll tell you the truth, some of those guys really scare me, that come out at me when I do some things, like
'Sheriff Of Hong Kong,' I never met him before. Or she, I dunno. . . it's like different, uh uh... you see, I don't
think I do music, think I do spells.")
Wherever Don Van Vliet gets his rules and messages from, it's rarely the external, socalled rational, I think
psychotic "civilized" society we've known and lived in. He chooses to live out of it, mentally and physically, and
began trying to escape from it at a very early age: "I never went to school. I wet my pants and my mother came and
got me as I was running and I told her that I couldn't go to school because I was sculpting at that time a hell of a
lot. That was kindergarten, I think. Itried to jump into the La Brea Tar Pits when I was three, whatever that means.
They caught me just in time. I was sc intrigued by those bubbles going bmp bmp. I thought I would find a dinosaur
down there. I told my mother when I was three years old - she showed it to me not too long ago, in this baby book in
that horrible Palmer Penmanship method of writing that she used, you know that fantastic curlicues type stuff that
had everything to do with everything other than what it said, on this old yellow piece of paper it's written out,
that if she would stay on one side of the room and I would stay on the other, that we would be friends the rest of
our life. I used to lock myself in a room and sculpt when I was like three, five, six."
What sorts of things did you sculpt?
"Oh God, things that I would try to have moved kinetically, try to move these things around. These were my friends,
these little animals that I would make, like dinosaurs and. . .I wasn't very much in reality, actually."
Do you feel bad about that?
"No, ! feel good. I was right. The way people treat animals, I don't like it. One of my horrible memories is the
great Auk, the fact that it was extinct before I was born. What a beautiful bird."
What were your parents like?
"Pretty banal. They moved me to Mojave, that's where they kept the Japanese-Americans during World War II. They
moved me up there to keep me out of a scholarship to Europe for sculpture. They wanted to get me away from all the
'queer' artists. Isn't that awful? Periscopes in the tub, right?"
In this sense, he's still not very much in "reality." His problems with record companies over the years are
legendary. Yet he has, somehow, kept on making those amazing albums; just when you've almost given up hope, somebody
else comes along and offers him a contract, and he does another one, and it doesn't sell. Jon Landau told me in
1970, when he was my record reviews editor at Rolling Stone: "Grand Funk will be more important to the history of
rock and roll than Captain Beefheart. And you can quote me on that." But there are other occasions, like the time I
met a young woman in a bar who was not a scenemaker or into avant-rock, and when I asked her what kind of music she
liked she said: "This guy I heard named Captain Beefheart. There was just something kind of real sensual and musky
about it, I dunno. . .it was different, but I loved it."
Beefheart himself thinks women tend to understand his music better than men, so especially since he can be so
elliptically, obscurantistly difficult to pin down in interview and describing his music in prose is kind of like
trying to catch the prism of a dragonfly wing and hold it intact in the palm of your hand, I'll talk about his wife.
Jan is a young woman of such radiance and wholehearted sincerity that it can be a little stunning at first meeting.
Phrases like "earth mother" are too quaint, dreary, way off the mark. She is as active an artist as he and the
complexities of her mind are fully up to his moodswings, which can give you jetlag. Which doesn't mean she's the
archetypal Great Artist's Nursemaid either - she won't take his shit, and he can be a tyrannical baby at times. Like
a lot of us.
Jan helps mightily at broaching some kind of rapprochement communications-wise between this man and the world at
large. In other words, she translates. In both directions. You'd see the same thing at the U.N. And if Don is not
exactly intoning "Klaatu baraada niktu," he does at times seem almost like a visitor from another planet, or more
precisely someone still stunned by his first sight of this one, as I suspect he always will be. Perhaps he just
doesn't have those filtering mechanisms which enable most of us to cope with "reality" by blocking out at least 80
percent of it.
According to his set of filters, in-animate objects are alive, and plants and animals share with them the capacity
to think as well as feel. Don sees perspicacity in a mesquite, an old broom-handle even. If his lyrics are about
anything absolutely, they are about ecology.
You're a painter. In "Run Paint Run Run" are you saying that the paint itself is a conscious entity with a will of
its own?
"Yeah! Definitely! Hey, you got it. Yes, it does have a will of its own."
So it's alive.
"I think so. I definitely feel that it is."
Do you generally feel that about the things around you, inanimate objects?
"Um hm. Yeah, I really do. I think they're all alive. Don't you?"
I don't know.
"Come on, you do too."
So how do you and the paint get along?
"Pretty damn good, I'll tell ya. I'm just looking forward to getting enough money to be able to really paint big. I
don't wanna paint any littler than five by five. But I'd like to paint twenty by twenty."
Do you and the paint ever have fights?
"Yeah, definitely."
Do you feel the same way about the electric guitar, that when you plug it into the call it's this battle of wills
sort of?
"I think so. It'll spit out atcha anything that's out there."
Was that what you were talking about in 'Electricity"?
"Yeah, that had a hell of a lot to do with it. It always seems to come out the way it wants to, y'know."
I think that partially Don anthropomorphises animals and objects as a defence against a human crew who empirical
observation has told him are by and large incomprehensible to themselves as well as him, that's when they're not
also out to getcha. He's like an Androcles that would chat a spell with Leo but see fangs and claws on a delivery
boy. Lacking aforesaid filters, he has devised an elaborate system of checkpoint charlies to keep most of
humankind's snoots at bay. This can sometimes be frustrating. His favourite device in the past was to always say
some bigtime gonzo Dada non-sequitur ("All roads lead to Coca-Cola" was the first one I ever heard), then look you
straight in the eye and insistently enquire: "Do you know what I mean?"
"Yeah, sure, Don, sure!" everybody (except Jan) would always huffnpuff. He is a very charismatic person; a guru, of
sorts. He knows how to charm, and has a way of flattering you by asking you all. kinds of questions suggesting real
concern. He really means it too, his basic philosophy has always been summed up in the open invitation to share his
suddenly brighter sunshine in Trout Mask Replica's "Frownland". But see, that's just it: it was always his sunshine,
on another level all these things were and are distancing devices (though he's not nearly as egocentrically
defensive as he used to be) and it can be extremely frustrating because no matter how intimate you get with somebody
if all they ever say practically is stuff that sounds like it came out of their lingo-tango lyrics (another
technique is to ask you to elaborate when you ask a question and then just agree with you) you go home with a tape
recorder full of words that mean nothing in particular and the sad hunch that there was something a bit impersonal
about this whole affair. I've been told that with Don the best countertactic is to try and pin him down: "Just
exactly what do you mean?" But somehow I've never been able to draw that hard a line. The man is too magical.
Literally. Once in Detroit I walked into a theatre through the back door while he was onstage performing. At the
precise moment I stepped to the edge of the curtains on stage right where I could see him out there haranguing the
audience, he said, very clearly, "Lester!" His back was to me at the time. Later he asked me if I had noticed it. I
was a little shaken.
The years of what career-oriented folks would file as "failure" have ripened and mellowed Don; like most of us, he's
grown up some, albeit perhaps against his will. Once I listened to him rant drunk and bitter all night; now I ask
him: "Do you think the music business will ever find you 'commercial,' and do you care?"
"I don't think they ever will," he laughs, "and I don't care. I'm just thankful that an audience is listening to
me."
He just lets it turn with the earth, though he was particularly angry in the past when a band he literally taught to
play cut some sides on Mercury under his name without even telling him. There are also many of us who think Frank
Zappa, with whom he grew up, wouldn't be hock in a spittoon, much less a "composer" (anybody says that certifies
themselves a moron), if there had never been a Don Van Vliet on this earth. When Zappa established his Straight
Records in 1968, he invited Don to join a carny sideshow which also included the GTO's, Alice Cooper and Wild Man
Fischer, producing, or so he was credited, Trout Mask Replica. Hell, it's such a sleeper you can still order it from
Warner Comm. That record was four sides, 28 songs cut in two days of the most unparalleled ruckus in the annals of
recorded sound. In it, after relatively unfocused albums for Buddah (with whom he even scored a minor hit in '66,
"Diddy Wah Diddy") and Blue Thumb, Beefheart and his unearthly looking cabal of spazmo henchmen seemed effortlessly
to cook up the sofar still definitive statement on the possibilities for some common ground ("fusion," I believe
they called some bath-water quickbuckaroos bearing scant relation a few years later) on which raunch rock, slide-
slinging Delta blues and post Coltrane/Shepp/Ayler free jazz might consecrate a shakedown together.
Like almost all of Beefheart's recorded work, it was not even "ahead" of its time in 1969. Then and now, it stands
outside time, trends, fads, hypes, the rise and fall of whole genres eclectic as walking Christmas trees,
constituting a genre unto itself: truly, a musical Monolith if ever there was one. On it, Beefheart, behind a truly
scarifying gallery of separate voices, becomes at various times a sagebrush prospector, Jews screaming in the ovens
at Auschwitz, greased-back East L.A. pachuco, a breakable pig, automobile, "Ant Man Bee" (title of one song), a
little girl and her brinechawed seafarin' aged father (in the same song), a Pa Kettle-mischievous "Old Fart at
Play," and several species of floral piscatorial and amphibious life. The band under his tutelage, thereon reinvent
from the ground up rhythm, melody, harmonies, perhaps what our common narrow parameters have defined as "music"
itself.
Since then he has released seven albums of varying quality. The immediate followup, Lick My Decals Off Baby, was
brilliant though a little abrasive even for my ears at the time it was released. 1971's The Spotlight Kid was more
commercial though hardly compromised, and many people regard 1972's Clear Spot, a minor masterpiece of sorts, as a
dance album in disguise. Two later records on Mercury Unconditionally Guaranteed and BlueJeans and Moon Beams were
baldface attempts at sellout. Shiny Beast, a charming but relatively minor work, was re leased by Warner Brothers in
1978. None of these albums has sold more than 50 or 60 thousand, and that's over a long period of time; only Trout
Mask and Shiny Beast, in fact, remain in the catalogues.
Perhaps it is the ''success" ("triumph?") of New Wave that has emboldened Warner Brothers. In any case Doc at the
Radar Station is one of the most brilliant achievements by any artist in any year. And in 1980 it seems like a
miracle. It certainly is not compromised, and I doubt that it will get any radio play in this country at least, but
then I said the Clash didn't have a prayer. While some of his self-acknowledged acolytes have gone on to stardom,
megabucks, popout lunch boxes, etc., the progenitor remains in his Mojave trailer, where he barely has room for an
indoor easel. (So if any neo-Florentine patron is reading this, I will make a plea that Don would never make or ask
anyone else to for him: support a real artist.) I'm not sawing violins in half - Don certainly doesn't feel sorry
for himself, and in late 1977 when he reappeared at the Bottom Line with a new band and Shiny Beast in the wings, he
had the distinct air of a, well, I don't even feel "survivor" is the word. A patriarch, perhaps, a high priest, born
again from Ancient Egypt smiling like the spuming headwaters of the Nile, long weathered body holding just that many
mysteries, arcane secrets from half-apocryphal texts of hoodoo mojo Coptic canebreak healings of the kind Ishmael
Reed likes to dream up.
Next to him, Dr. John looked like Gary Glitter (apologies to Dr John, I’m sure he doesn’t mean it - Graham): all
soot, no zoot. He could go 15 rounds brainwave-to-brainwave with Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and judges who know nothin'
anyway call it a draw. Might be the white Leadbelly. Too much in love with living to be Robert Johnson. In the late
'60s, some hotshit young hitpicker got famous by proclaiming that Don Van Vliet, if he wanted to, could be the
greatest white blues singer in the world." That would have been dumb as settling for a moosehead over the fireplace
when you’ve lassoed the Loch Ness Monster and taken it to dinner, highballs and dancing. Like Van Gogh doing pasteup
for Bloomingdale's. Make no mistake, Captain Beefheart is an absolutely authentic hunk of taproot Americana on a
Mark Twain level with Paul Bunyan stature.
But today an artist is expected to market him or herself as a commodity to be generally recognised. So in that sense
it's no wonder Don retreated to the Mojave outback. On the other hand, the old irret routine doesn't exactly work
anymore either. And Don has pretty much been through his phase of living out the artist as Genius/Idiot Savant
cliche. On the phone the other day I mentioned Andy Warhol, and Don said, "He soups things up. But isn't it nice,
being able to say that we're not like him?" At the time I thought his was a shopworn verbal popper combined with an
absolutely childlike attitude: "Isn't it nice, being able to say that we're not like him?" Well, yes, it is, and Mr.
Rogers will be here at 3:30. This plus the fact that artists know how much they can get away with, how much we in
fact expect of them, can lead to truly sick situations, disastrous for all concerned: "Isn't it nice, being
somebody's pet?" I feel like even the word "genius" should be put in quotation marks because the very concept has a
way of getting out of hand, like an unruly child. Artists often end up conspiring with their adoring audiences to
ensure their own isolation. Once, a very long time ago, I saw Don go sweeping imperiously in and out of hotels until
he found one that met his aesthetic specifications, entourage (including me) trailing embarrassedly behind while he
wore a cape and doodled on a pad the whole time.
Still, there is something ingenuously natural about him. I don't think, for instance, that he necessarily "tries" to
"create" these things, they just sort of happen to (through?) him. In the course of this process, he has managed to
practically reinvent both music and the English language. And if you think that's a thorny thicket of defenses to
try and hack through so as to get at the actual person back there, you're right. He embarrasses you with his
effusiveness; he feels misunderstood and craves desperately to talk with anyone who, he's satisfied, understands
what he's trying to do. I don't know why he thinks I understand it. I only understand a little part of it. A lot of
it is Sanskrit to me too. But you'll never miss the feeling however obtuse the structure, because this man is almost
100 per cent feeling, can be feverish with it, leads with every open nerveend till sometimes you wonder if he has a
mind at all, or just threw the one he had away one day because every pore in the body is a knowing little eye
fiercely darting at experience.
Now, there is no reason on earth why such a creature should be articulate. Except that he is. But on his terms, most
of the time. And this is what has always bothered me. What good is being an artist, creating all these beautiful
things, if you can't just throw down your defenses sometimes and share things on the common level of other people?
Without that, it's barren and ultimately pathetic. Ultimately, without some measure of that, it can never matter as
art. 'Cause art's of the heart. And I'm talking about the heart that flies between two or more humans, not to the
ghost of the great Auk, or a glob of paint, or any of his other little friends. All this week, one song off Trout
Mask Replica kept playing in my head: "Orange Claw Hammer," an unaccompanied field holler-like poem about a man
who's been away at sea for years and catches first sight of his daughter since she was in swaddling. He grasps her
hand and offers to "Take you down to the foamin' brine ‘n water, and show you the wooden tits on the goddess with
the pole out full-sail that tempted away your pegleg father. I was shanghaied by a highhat beaver-moustache man and
his pirate friend. I woke up in vomit and beer in a banana bin, and a soft lass with brown skin bore me seven babies
with snappin' black eyes and beautiful ebony skin, and here it is I'm with you my daughter. Thirty years away can
make a seaman’s eyes, a round-house man's eyes flow out with water, salt water."
Now if that isn't pure true American folklore then you can throw everything from Washington Irving to Carl Sandburg
and beyond in the garbage. I'm saying Don Van Vliet, "Captain Beefheart," is on that level. But what I realised this
morning, the reason why it was this song stuck out from 26 others: because it's not about the "Neon Meate Dream of a
Octafish," but something that happened between people.
Why do you almost always talk elliptically?
"Due to the fact that probably it's very difficult for me to explain myself except in music or paint."
But don't you think talking that way all the time is kind of impersonal, a distancing effect?
"It probably comes out very personal in the music. That's where I'm truthful and honest. I don't know how it happens
exactly, but my mind becomes the piano or guitar."
What about when you're alone with Jan?
"We don't talk too much. Because we trust each other, and we don't have that much faith in the spoken word. I guess
it's true that I do talk selfishly, as a conversationalist."
Well, don't you think you're missing something you might get from other people by being that way?
"Sure, but they usually won't accept me anyway. I'm comfortable talking to you. Not many people seem to have things
in common with me. I guess what intrigues me the most is something like seeing somebody wash my windows - that's
like a symphony."
But if you and I are friends, and you trust me, we should be able to have a reciprocal conversation.
"We're talking without talking. I mean that in a good sense. We're saying things that can't be put into the tongue.
It's like good music.
In the end I'm not sure which of us is right. I am probably unfair in wanting everything so explicitly defined from
everybody, demanding the rest of the human race (perhaps especially ironic in the case of artists and musicians) be
as verbal or verbose as I am. I can't say that he's wrong in choosing to live out of society, because this society
itself doesn't seem to have much of a future, and doesn't seem to care either. A goat and a corporation exec, or
most rising young affluent career people around this town for that matter, come up about even conversation-wise, and
the goat smells better and is fun to pet so there you are. As for art that deals with human situations, almost none
of the art being produced from within the society these days does that, so why pick on Beefheart because he'd rather
commune with paints and bats in the fireplace? Certainly he illuminates more about the human heart, and the human
groin for that matter, than all these dry dead literati and "minimalist" artists and juiceless composers. As for Don
Van Vliet the man, each passing year seems to bring him farther out of defensive obscurantism, measurably more open
and trusting, which is really wild in itself because the world around is careening in exactly the opposite
direction.
Besides which on another level it's none of my business anyway, except insofar as he chose to make it so. If he is
somewhat in retreat, it can be justified on all the levels above and several more I'm sure, besides which who isn't
in retreat these days? His kind takes a lot more courage than most, and as. an artist he is so far removed from any
kind of burnout that he can't even be called, like I said earlier and like all the Neil Youngs and Lou Reeds who
made it from the late '60s to this point relatively intact, a survivor. More like a natural resource. The
difference, finally, is that, to use an example by one of his favourite writers, he'll never give us his version of
Macbeth. He would rather be the Grand Canyon.
http://ttexshexes.blogspot.com/2009/06/captain-beefhearts-far-cryiridescent.html
Posted by T. Tex Edwards
Sunday, June 28, 2009
http://www.beefheart.com/zigzag/pictures/iridlogic81.htm
An unusual picture this one ... A cartoon family group.
Could this be a young Donnie with his parents, Glen and Sue?
