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that this music has a certain strange power and pertinence that even in an album as second-rate as Miles Davis in Concert (which sounds, as a friend put it, like it was recorded on a day when everybody in the band had bad hangovers) makes it matter in a way that's at least different from the way things like E.S.P. and Nefertiti mattered. Yes, it means more to me personally than they did (though not more than Sketches of Spain or Kind of Blue), though maybe that's because I am so emotionally impacted that I have successfully used the second and fourth sides of Get Up with It to pull me out of deep depressions on more than one occasion. No lie; friends report similar results with “He Loved Him Madly.” It seems somehow that the coldness of emotional death in that music touches the emotional repressions inside us which have culminated in such gulfs of seemingly pointless unhappiness, that Miles’ heart, even as it is dying if it is dying, somehow touches ours and makes them live again in a way that even something like “My Funny Valentine” or “Concierto de Aranjuez” might not be able to just now. Because even at their most meditative those were expansive musics, and before we can feel them again something has to light up the parameters of the cage. Or, as somebody else once said, “Nothing in my dreams, just some ugly memories.”

In the meantime, there is The Man with the Horn, obviously a setup media event, pleasant enough but at best Miles (who, it must be said, looked at the concert like a man who had been gravely ill) just getting a toe back in the water. It sent me back to Bitches Brew, which (except for the crappy powerchording guitar) is pretty much where it noodles, and made that album sound positively heavy instead of a little too airy as always before. But look at it this way: how would you feel if you were Miles Davis and opened Billboard and Chuck Mangione had the Number Three album in the country while CBS was deleting some of your recent catalog? You would go through a period of black-on-black bitterness and then you would begin to strategize. It's not so much the fact of a vocal (how about Bob Dorough singing “Nothing Like You” on Sorcerer, or that track from the Birth of the Cool sessions?) as the nature and lyrics of the vocal that’re bad, but if it gets Miles radio play, sells the album along with all the other tinselly hype and gets that Chuck Mangione audience to go for his next release as well, then my most cherished hope could only be that he would hit ‘em with a 30-minute “Rated X.” They won’t like it, but maybe by then, only 10 years after On the Corner, they’ll at least have some idea what's hitting them. And why.

Music and Sound Output, December 1981

Captain Beefheart's Far Cry:

He's Alive, But So Is Paint.

Are You?

Don Van Vliet is a 39-year-old man who lives with his wife 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