Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [85]
The years of what career-oriented folks would file as “failure” have ripened and mellowed Don; like most of us, he's grown up some, albeit perhaps against his will. Once I listened to him rant drunk and bitter all night; now I ask him: “Do you think the music business will ever find you ‘commercial,’ and do you care?”
“I don’t think they ever will,” he laughs, “and I don’t care. I’m just thankful that an audience is listening to me.”
He just lets it turn with the earth, though he was particularly angry in the past when a band he literally taught to play cut some sides under his name without even telling him. There are also many of us who think Frank Zappa, with whom he grew up, wouldn’t be hock in a spittoon, much less a “composer” (anybody says that certifies themselves a moron) if there had never been a Don Van Vliet on this earth. When Zappa established his Straight Records in 1968, he invited Don to join a carny sideshow which also included the GTO's, Alice Cooper, and Wild Man Fischer, producing, or so he was credited, Trout Mask Replica. That record was four sides, 28 songs cut in two days of the most unparalleled ruckus in the annals of recorded sound. In it, after relatively unfocused albums for Buddah (with whom he even scored a minor hit in ‘66, “Diddy Wah Diddy”) and Blue Thumb, Beefheart and his unearthly looking cabal of spazmo henchmen seemed effortlessly to cook up the so-far still definitive statement on the possibilities for some common ground (“fusion,” I believe they called some bathwater quickbuckaroos bearing scant relation a few years later) on which raunch rock, slide-slinging Delta blues, and post-Coltrane/Shepp/ Ayler free jazz might consecrate a shakedown together.
Like almost all of Beefheart's recorded work, it was not even “ahead” of its time in 1969. Then and now, it stands outside time, trends, fads, hypes, the rise and fall of whole genres eclectic as walking Christmas trees, constituting a genre unto itself: truly, a musical Monolith if ever there was one. On it, Beefheart, behind a truly scarifying gallery of separate voices, becomes at various times a sagebrush prospector, Jews screaming in the ovens at Auschwitz, greased-back East L.A. pachuco, a breakable pig, an automobile, “Ant Man Bee” (title of one song), a little girl and her brinechawed seafarin’ aged father (in the same song), a Pa Kettle-mischievous “Old Fart at Play,” and several species of floral, piscatorial, and amphibious life. The band, under his tutelage, thereon reinvented from the ground up rhythm, melody, harmonics, perhaps what our common narrow parameters have defined as “music” itself.
Since then he has released seven albums of varying quality. The immediate followup, Lick My Decals Off Baby, was brilliant though a little abrasive even for my ears at the time it was released. 1971's The Spotlight Kidwas more commercial, though hardly compromised, and many people regard 1972's Clear Spot, a minor masterpiece of sorts, as a dance album in disguise. Two later records on Mercury, Unconditionally Guaranteed and Blue Jeans and Moonbeams, were baldfaced attempts at sellout. Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller), a charming but relatively minor work, was released by Warner Brothers in 1978. None of these albums has thus far sold more than 50 or 60 thousand, and that's over a long period of time; only Trout Mask Replica and Shiny Beast, in fact, remain in the catalogues.
Perhaps it is the “success” (“triumph?”) of the New Wave that has emboldened Warner Brothers. In any case, Doc at the Radar Station is one of the most brilliant achievements by any artist in any year. And in 1980 it seems like a miracle. It certainly is not compromised, and I doubt that it will get any radio play in this country at least, but then I said the Clash didn’t have a prayer. While some of his self-acknowledged acolytes have gone on to stardom, megabucks, pop-out lunchboxes, etc., the progenitor remains in his Mojave trailer, where he barely has room for an indoor easel. (So if any neo-Florentine patron