More vintage Beefheart. The quality of the video here is somewhere between bad and terrible, but still, you get the idea. Beefheart is a mad genius, and the band just barely manages to stay with him, but when it’s on, it’s magic. Hence the name.
And lest you think it’s just random noise, listen to how tight the band is in the instrumental section of “Bellerin’ Plain” between 11:15 and 11:38.
This is a real gem. The Captain’s later, slightly less adventurous and certainly less influential music is fairly well represented on YouTube, but I was truly stunned to see this footage of the definitive Trout Mask Replica era Magic Band performing. It’s a strange film, artistically shot, apparently performing live, but not actually in concert. It may be documentary footage of a soundcheck. The only thing clearly indicated with the video itself is that it was recorded in Belgium in 1969.
The band’s all there: Zoot Horn Rollo, Rockette Morton, Drumbo, even the Mascara Snake. The songs sound slightly less developed here than on the album; I suspect (especially since the Captain can be seen holding, and consulting, a wad of papers presumably containing the lyrics) that this may have been recorded before the album, as the band was working out the material. Legend has it that Don Van Vliet wrote the entire 80-minute album in two hours. Those who challenge the artistic merits of his work might believe it to be true; my take is that he may well have sketched out the entire album in that much time, but the full arrangements and lyrics came together over a longer period, and it’s understood that the band rehearsed the material for many months before finally committing it to tape.
Plainly, this blog needs more Beefheart. So here you go. Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) is the first, and my favorite, of Beefheart’s latter-day trilogy of return-to-form avant garde albums before finally packing it in for good in 1982 and becoming a full-time painter.
This song, and Don Van Vliet’s art in general, defies explanation. Is it from the distant future? Another planet? The mind of a madman? And how, exactly, would we know the difference? Whatever it is, I love it.
For more on this excellent album, here’s an equally excellent essay.
Over the course of his roughly two-decade career as a performing musician (before retreating to a reclusive life in the Mojave Desert), Captain Beefheart’s output was scattered and inconsistent. I generally prefer albums like Trout Mask Replica and Lick My Decals Off, Baby to his (ever so slightly) more commercial later work like this. But I had to share this clip simply because I found it so surprising that in the early ’80s the Captain had made a relatively mainstream-looking music video, presumably with the serious intention of getting it played on MTV.
That didn’t happen of course. To learn more, check out this equally surprising (to me, at least, since I had no idea it had ever happened) video of one of Captain Beefheart’s (apparently) multiple appearances on Late Night with David Letterman in the early ’80s, where he did finally get at least part of the video on the air:
“Beautiful as the Moon, Terrible as an Army with Banners” by Henry Cow
From the 1976 album Concerts
Even though I’ve indulged (and I think in retrospect that’s the appropriate term) in my fair share of free-form avant garde improvisation in my time, I’ve never been a huge fan of listening to this kind of music by others, whether it be from a band that occasionally dabbles in it, like National Health, or one that does nothing but, like AMM. The only band that I’ve ever really thought did free-form right was the mid-’70s lineup of King Crimson.
I think of Henry Cow in much the same way as National Health. Both bands worked in both free-form and composed contexts, though Henry Cow’s compositions were much more challenging (to the listener, if not to the performers) than those of National Health. But in both cases, I find their composed work much stronger than their improv.
I would really prefer to link to a composed track from Henry Cow’s legendary masterpiece The Leg End, like “Teenbeat” or “Nirvana for Mice,” but unfortunately the only clips of those tracks I can find on YouTube are the album versions set to still images. (I wish it were possible to make YouTube automatically exclude any of those types of “videos” from search results.) As it is, the only actual live video of the band I’ve found so far is this clip from their later collaboration with Slapp Happy, where they went all-out with the crazy improv, including the worse-than-nails-on-a-chalkboard vocal screeches of Dagmar Krause. Still, it’s a chance to see these incredibly talented and brazenly adventurous musicians in action, so it’s worth enduring the less pleasant aspects. That’s what rock in opposition (RIO) is all about anyway!
