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Ten Percenter
- FB Enquirer -
United Kingdom
1733 Posts |
 Posted - 07/22/2003 : 08:38:02
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And there are at least three others on this forum - I thought that this article from the Independent would be of interest:
The Magic Band: Captain insensible
The traumatic experience of recording with Captain Beefheart left some of the The Magic Band scarred for life. So why, Nick Hasted asks them, have they released a tribute album to their tyrannical leader?
11 July 2003
The Captain lives in the desert now as Don Van Vliet, a reclusive but successful 62-year-old painter who has been a minor star in the American art world for two decades. Many more still call him Captain Beefheart, and revere him for the matchless innovations he and his Magic Band offered rock with 1969's Trout Mask Replica and the albums that followed till his sudden retirement from music in 1982.
Beefheart's Howlin' Wolf blues growl, free jazz rhythmic collisions, and Beat poetry mixing the Beatles, absurd non sequiturs and Nazi death camps was an unrepeatable underground explosion, flinging shards of influence from Tom Waits to The Fall. His acolytes make do with rumours: that he has gone mad, that he is enfeebled and dying, or that he has ordered wall-sized new canvases and remains formidably potent.
Even as the Captain remains a tantalising black hole, his Magic Band are back among us with a line-up spanning their tumultuous career: John French and Mark Boston from nearly the start, Denny Whalley the middle, and Gary Lucas and Robert Williams the end. A new CD of them rehearsing old favourites, Back to the Front, reanimates old quirks, with French bravely impersonating Beefheart's growl. "John wanted to do it as a tribute to Don," Boston explains, "to bring this music back to life."
Once you know their terrifying history, a Beefheartless Magic Band doesn't seem wrong. Its members contributed more than Beefheart ever dared admit, and suffered more fear and violence from him than playing music deserves. When I meet them in a north London rehearsal room, they are swapping stories like this is a platoon reunion, discussing traumatic events only fellow veterans will ever understand.
For French and Boston, the battleground was the decrepit bungalow in California's Woodland Hills where Beefheart trapped them in 1969 to create Trout Mask Replica from a brew of induced paranoia and desperate creative leaps: the greatest unfilmed horror movie, lab experiment, and avant-garde achievement in rock history.
The Magic Band's true beginning, though, was in the isolated Mojave desert town of Lancaster in the 1950s. "The freeway hadn't reached us, and that affected the music," remembers French. "Because Don had no cultural input, no way of categorising or restricting things."
French played on the Magic Band's debut album, Safe as Milk (1968), which made Beefheart seem a raw bluesman. But a year later, a far stranger, more frightening world awaited. Frustrated by a commercially remixed second album, Strictly Personal (1968), Beefheart signed with Frank Zappa, also from Lancaster, to make music with complete creative control. He achieved just that in the bungalow over 10 mad months.
The house - "old and run-down, with a spooky, haunted ambience" - sat at the top of a hill lashed by huge rainstorms. As Beefheart drilled Trout Mask Replica into them, they rarely saw outside and when neighbours complained of the unearthly noise, windows were covered with rubber, creating dungeon darkness where time crawled unnaturally. Only one of the band at a time was let out for food, in case they didn't return. At one point, Boston recalls, they "broke down" and painted each room different lurid colours. When French returned to the house after Beefheart "sacked" him by hurling him down the stairs, he found the Captain had covered every surface in pictures and poetry.
At the back of this crazy-painted dungeon, Beefheart was the sleeping ogre. He would rise in the late afternoon to reveal sketchy riffs and lyrics, which he would whistle or murmur to French. Musically unskilled, he relied on French to translate these intimations into something the band could play. But he showed no gratitude. Waking in unpredictable moods, he would scapegoat individuals for imagined errors, turning one against the other, ruling by fear. Only 19, French was crushed, till his head had nothing left in it but music.
"My personality had been encroached upon and nibbled away until there was a little bit of me left cowering in a corner," he remembers. "I couldn't express an opinion. I was afraid to. I concentrated on music instead. When the others were playing by themselves, all at once, I could hear each wrong note. I was consumed. It's an awful feeling."
The strangest part of the Magic Band story may be how a non-musician, Beefheart, created such extraordinary sounds by relying on skilled players whom he bent to his will by sensory deprivation and mind-games - exercising tyrannical power over people he was helpless without.
"I think he was intimidated by the fact that we could play complicated things more than once," French considers. "He always used to put down schooling. But I employed techniques I learnt in school. We all had to. We had to be experienced players to finish Don's fragments." The others chip in with tales of mutiny, vague musical instructions, and the paranoia the Captain created so they wouldn't bond. Lucas: "He once said to me, 'On the way over here I think, whose turn is it in the barrel?"
French: "You read about how Wagner was... I mentioned this to Don, and he said, 'Yeah, well, you can handle reading about those guys in literature and history - but you can't handle the real thing, man, I'm just like those guys!'
"It makes me shake," he says, almost to himself. "It still makes me shake when I start thinking about it, it makes me... tense."
"I left once," Boston adds. "Hid myself in the bushes and ran. But - they found me. Drug me back."
The question is how much Beefheart's cruel undercutting of individuals protected his own position - and how much it was the key to the new cacophony they made.
"We're proving by getting back together that we play better without that tension," says French. "We achieved one per cent of what we could have done if he'd let us express ourselves. The only good thing was that it allowed Don to impose his musical will upon us. And there had to be walls in order to play things that weren't considered to fit together. He used to say, 'Everything goes with everything.' You listen, and there's a cat crossing the street, there's a car going by, and nobody can really control it, it's all happening at once, it is dissonant, it's an imperfect world. And that's what he was trying to do with the music."
Beefheart bullied all his Magic Bands till their fanfare, 1982's Ice Cream for Crow. Still, a mystery remains. They are still here. French, who Boston says Beefheart "scarred", came back for more, almost till the end. This reunion was his idea. "Oh, I think a lot of Don, I always did," Boston admits. "Because I knew, even back then, that he was going to be one of the artists of the century. I knew it in my heart."
'Back to the Front' is out now on ATP
No man is an island, unless he is in the bath |
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mereubu
= FB QuizMistress =
USA
2677 Posts |
Posted - 07/22/2003 : 09:07:46
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| Thanks, Andy. Geez, what have you gotten me into? ;-) |
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speedy_m
= Frankofile =
Canada
3581 Posts |
Posted - 07/22/2003 : 09:12:18
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| mere... get thee to the pictionary. I need help. Oh, and all this business about Trout Mask Replica... weird that you bring this up now 10&er, because I just downloaded TMR, and I don't care for it. I think I need help with that, too. |
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mereubu
= FB QuizMistress =
USA
2677 Posts |
Posted - 07/22/2003 : 09:14:32
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| I've seen it, and I'm mystified. I need to ponder a bit. |
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Chris Knight
= Cult of Ray =
USA
899 Posts |
Posted - 07/22/2003 : 13:59:55
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| Thanks, that was a good article. The Magic Band's music (TMR and Decals- haven't heard anything else) is such an inspiration to me. I wonder if there'l be any live dates? |
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Atheist4Catholics
= Cult of Ray =
USA
925 Posts |
Posted - 07/22/2003 : 23:18:01
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Check out beefheart.com - I think they're playing some CA shows. Also check out the Mike Barnes biography of CB for more recording horror stories.
www.mp3.com/clootie |
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Ten Percenter
- FB Enquirer -
United Kingdom
1733 Posts |
Posted - 07/23/2003 : 01:49:36
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From the site that Atheist mentions, an article by Matt Groening:
Captain fantastic
Beefheart may be a recluse, but his Magic Band are back. And it makes Simpsons creator Matt Groening feel like a teenager all over again
Monday April 7, 2003
The Guardian
Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart, in the early 70s
On February 8, in the tiny Paradox recording studio in the desert town of Palmdale, about 60 miles north of Los Angeles, I found myself hunched down on the floor between bass player Rockette Morton and guitarist Feelers Reebo, while a few feet away Drumbo pounded the drums and Mantis clawed his guitar through an astonishingly precise version of Captain Beefheart's My Human Gets Me Blues. If you're a sentimental fool like me, you'll understand why, even though my ears felt like they were bleeding from the excessive volume, I had tears of joy in my eyes.
This song took me back to 1969, when all my teenage weirdo buddies and I were in thrall to everything that pushed beyond the flower-power culture then in full bloom: we dug R Crumb's filthy Zap Comix, Frank Zappa's multi-track masterpiece Burnt Weenie Sandwich, assorted LPs by the Fugs, the Bonzo Dog Band and Sun Ra, and what we considered, and still consider, the greatest avant-garde rock album of all time: Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band's Trout Mask Replica.
Casual listeners might hear it as a lot of clatter and wailing (which is how it struck me on first hearing), but once you get past the audacious unfamiliarity of Trout Mask Replica, you realise that this was not just some big improvised mess, but in fact the most tightly composed polyrhythmic rock'n'roll ever written. Don Van Vliet, also known as Captain Beefheart, created an entirely original music by grafting the unsentimental blues growling of Howlin' Wolf and Son House to the stringent performing demands of Igor Stravinsky, Ornette Coleman and Van Vliet's high-school pal and collaborator, Frank Zappa.
Beginning in 1966 with his debut album, Safe as Milk, and continuing through his last LP, 1982's Ice Cream for Crow, Captain Beefheart delivered an eccentric alternative to the rhythmically repetitious pop music of the day, and he did it with passion, virtuosity and deadpan surrealistic brilliance. (I once asked Zappa if Don's whole Beefheart persona was a put-on, an act, and he said, "No, Don was just as strange in high school. Stranger.")
I saw Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band perform in assorted line-ups over the following decade, and each time was floored by the intricacies of the songs and the almost hive-mind precision of the band, who nailed the rhythms and changes with the perfection of a classical chamber ensemble and yet still rocked out. My first Beefheart show, the greatest concert I've ever witnessed, was in Portland, Oregon, in 1970, and it has ruined most of the rest of rock'n'roll for me ever since.
These days Van Vliet is a recluse in northern California, where he continues his second career as a highly successful painter. But his disappearance from the public scene has merely fuelled the folk myth. The record bins are full of Beefheart reissues, outtake collections and bootlegs, and the internet is alive with fans trading tapes and speculating on rumours about their beloved Captain. I've heard amazing unreleased Beefheart performances from Zappa's legendary basement vaults, so I know the legends will continue.
And in response to the folk myths, after more than 20 years of dormancy, the Magic Band has reunited in tribute to their leader. This incarnation of the band consists of Mark "Rockette Morton" Boston on bass, Gary "Mantis" Lucas and Denny "Feelers Reebo" Walley on guitars, and John "Drumbo" French on drums, harmonica and vocals. Their repertoire extends from the early Dropout Boogie to the late Floppy Boot Stomp, with John French stepping up to the microphone to provide a surprisingly authentic and exuberant replacement for the missing Van Vliet. Robert Williams, the Magic Band's drummer in the late 1970s, will sit in for French during the songs with vocals and harmonica. To celebrate their reunion, the Magic Band has recorded Back to the Front, an informal, live-to-tape CD on the All Tomorrow's Parties label. And they will be performing live - in London tonight, and at the All Tomorrow's Parties festival in Los Angeles in June.
For those who have yet to experience the Magic Band's truly ambitious weirdness, these shows will astonish you. And for tried and true Beefheart fans like me, these are deliriously momentous occasions with maybe a nostalgic, avant-garde sniffle or two.
· The Magic Band play the Shepherd's Bush Empire, London, W12 (0870 771 2000), tonight.
No man is an island, unless he is in the bath |
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Ten Percenter
- FB Enquirer -
United Kingdom
1733 Posts |
Posted - 07/23/2003 : 01:52:03
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And a review from the same source - by the much lambasted Alexis. A good review actually, Mrs P threatens divorce when I play Beefheart (this is not a euphemism):
The Magic Band
Shepherd's Bush Empire, London
Alexis Petridis
Wednesday April 9, 2003
The Guardian
Life in Captain Beefheart's backing group, the Magic Band, was allegedly no barrel of laughs. According to some former associates, soya-bean dinners and 18-hour rehearsals were commonplace. When musicians left (as they inevitably did), Beefheart would rubbish their abilities in the press.
So you cannot blame his ex-sidemen for coming back and making an honest buck 22 years after their leader's retirement. They bear little resemblance to the collection of oddballs on the sleeve of Trout Mask Replica, the album that showcased their "polyrhythmic" style (which sounds not unlike a blues band being pushed down a flight of stairs). It is many years since bassist Rockette Morton subsisted on soya beans. Guitarist Denny Walley looks unnervingly like Dave Lee Travis.
Their audience, too, has changed. In the 1970s, Beefheart shows famously drew "the weirdest of the weirdos". Tonight, they seem to be performing before a meeting of the Terry Pratchett Lookalike Society. A handful of wives in attendance wear resigned expressions, broken by the occasional wince: every flurry of angular notes is stretching marital duty to its limits.
Indeed, the instrumental half of the show gives little to smile about. Many musicians have tried to copy Beefheart's idiosyncratic hybrid of free jazz and blues, usually with disastrous results. This quartet can play it - a remarkable achievement in itself. But as they rumble through the shifting tempos of Hair Pie, it feels like a worthy display of technical bravado. There is a Captain Beefheart-shaped hole at its centre. That changes when John "Drumbo" French takes to the microphone. His Beefheart-esque growl injects the music with life. Moonlight on Vermont is staggering in every sense, a threatening clatter of dark images and drums.
By the closing track, Big Eyed Beans From Venus, people are gamely attempting to dance. As one fiftysomething windmills his arms frantically above his head, even his wife cracks a smile.
No man is an island, unless he is in the bath |
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Ten Percenter
- FB Enquirer -
United Kingdom
1733 Posts |
Posted - 07/23/2003 : 01:55:10
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quote:
Originally posted by speedy_m
Oh, and all this business about Trout Mask Replica... weird that you bring this up now 10&er, because I just downloaded TMR, and I don't care for it. I think I need help with that, too.
Don't start with TMR, work up to it. In my view it is better to start with Safe as Milk, Clear Spot, Shiny Beast or the Spotlight Kid.
No man is an island, unless he is in the bath |
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ObfuscateByWill
* Dog in the Sand *
USA
1887 Posts |
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