Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [82]
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. (“Let'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 lyric 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 these 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 it 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, uh, 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, uh, 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