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:
