John "Drumbo" French - Beefheart: Through the Eyes of Magic

Hello all, looked around on the Beefheart threads and didn't see a whole lot of discussion on John French's autobiography, which is also of a history of Beefheart and the Magic Band. I've only read about 100 pages of this thing, picking it up at random so far, but wow, that is one wild story.

It does kind of confirm something I figured since I first heard "Trout Mask Replica" in that these people have to be crazy making this music. Come to find out, yeah, they were in fact quite crazy.

It is a very interesting read so far.

I'd love to read this. French got the shittiest end of the Vliet treatment during the TMR days, from what I've read.

is Drumbo a born again Christian these days or am I imagining that? this book is like 1000 pages long, isn't it?

I posted abt this in some other thread, but basically this bk is a chaotic and ill-organised mess, full of repetitions, insane amounts of unnecessary background info, undigested interview extracts, grimly pedantic point-scoring and the like. Even worse, French's understandable butthurt and resentment towards Beefheart makes him blind to the Captain's incredible creative strengths, so the book starts to feel like one long sour whinge. The Bill Harkelrod bk covers similar territory far more coherently and convincingly.

And yeah, Drumbo is now born-again, tho' tbf he doesn't hammer that home too much in the book. What's harder to stomach is his antipathy to improvisation and experimentation - it's p clear that French wishes that Beefheart had stuck to being the slightly odd cosmic blues singer of the A&M sides - so that after a while you can almost understand why the Captain treated his his band so v badly (my favourite anecdote along those lines - Don storms into a rehearsal room and tells the Magic Band, "All you guys do is eat and shit")

Obv in a 1,000 page bk there's enough juicy stuff to interest serious Beefheartians, but French has been let down by his publishers and editors, who really needed to shape this material a lot more.

(I reckon don's bog was stunk out by persons unknown that day)

I really enjoyed it. I need to read the Rockette Morton book still.
Liked getting the background too.
& the overview of the recordings.

What Ward said. It's such a mess but I still enjoyed reading it. The book could lose a lot of those pages and be better for it.

so is the Bill Harkelrod/Zoot Horn thing pretty much the best beefheart book? i wonder if anyone's working on like a "definitive" captain bio now that he's passed. almost feel like just an oral history would be great too.

the Mike Barnes Beefheart bk is a pretty good straightahead biog

ah yeah, i forgot about that -- keep meaning to read it.

just noticed it got an update after don's death.

The Barnes book is the best current Beefheart overview

A Carrot is as Close as a Rabbit Gets to a Diamond: Captain Beefheart Interviews and Texts, 1966 - 2001

Anyone read this?

No but I am working my way through the John French book, I'm about a quarter of the way in (they've just recorded "Mirror Man"). As said upthread the amount of detail in the book is insane, in fact the retention of (often) irrelevant details French displays after nearly 50 years is bordering on the freakish. It is pretty much a hatchet job on Beefheart, if you ignore the first few hundred pages about French's family and Lancaster in the 50s blah blah blah you can pretty much open it at any page (and there are a LOT of pages!) and find Beefheart getting a verbal kicking - and that is no joke, honestly if you ever come across a copy of this book try it. If French is to be believed, Don's faults are almost without number, but being drug-addled basket case will do for now. Don's main saving grace seems to be that he was a good singer - though that doesn't stop French mentioning at least three times that the rest of the band wanted to ditch as him lead singer and replace him with, you've guessed it, John French! French does admit to Beefheart's "creativity" but he can't seem to put a finger on the whats, the whys and the wherefores of this creativity. Oh and by the way, not only didn't Beefheart write the music he also didn't write the words - that was Herb Bermann, according to Herb Bermann, who French (surprise surprise) believes. And we havent got to Trout Mask yet! Did I say that I am enjoying this book immensely and I thoroughly recommend it to any Beefheart nuts out there?

Herb Bermann did write most of the lyrics for Safe as Milk. Check the credits. There's a good article about it on one of the Beefheart sites somewhere. He also claims that he wrote some of the lyrics that Beefheart used without crediting him on Strictly Personal which seems totally believable. He doesn't claim anything after that though.

And French does a surprisingly decent Beefheart impression live!

He claims he also wrote Trust Us, Safe as Milk, Kandy Korn, Owed t'Alex, and Gimme Dat Harp Boy

http://www.beefheart.com/i-was-a-scribe-for-captain-beefheart-herb-bermann-speaks-part-1/
http://www.beefheart.com/herb-bermann-speaks-part-2/

best revive ever

Have made a little more progress. We're in the sunny uplands (comparatively) now and the band have just completed the recording of "Strictly Personal" and, apart from paragraphs of moaning about drum-related problems that not even another drummer would find interesting, Drumbo is being a mite upbeat about things, even about Beefheart himself. He actually seems to have enjoyed playing in London, and he hasn't enjoyed much of anything so far, it's all downhill from here.

I watched this doc on Amazon Prime recently about Frank Zappa's record labels. It featured some very in depth discussion with John French about Beefheart's early albums and covers all the other artists in a lot of detail as well.

You can also watch it in 5 minute chunks on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8flSFeCsFvL4TVFypWCptZ6mASDufeI2

Over halfway thru this now. (The story of the writing and recording of) Trout Mask Replica is a horror story and Spotlight Kid isn't much better (esp. not for Bill Harkleroad). Despite all that, ca. 1975 (which is where I've got to) John and Don are palling around again, swapping ancedotes about the mad old bad old days (and when I say mad and bad, believe me I mean mad and bad), like a pair of old geezers sitting on a park bench feeding the pigeons (tho Beefheart would probably be feeding them LSD, if the portrait painted of him throughout this book is anything to go by). Anyway, something I didn't know is that after the Magic Band had split from Beefheart and were trying to make it on their own (by getting John French to sing "Dancing in the Streets"... no, seriously), Beefheart and Mrs. Beefheart (the radiant Jan, who Drumbo almost drools over whenever she's mentioned) were wont to come along to their gigs and they even asked the Not Good Captain up on stage to sing with them: not sure if that happened more than once but when it did it happened behind Alex Snouffer's back/ over dead body etc.

Millard?

Mallard?

Dear touchpad spelling corrector, why is "Mallard" considered an erroneous spelling for "Millard" ?

No, this was before Mallard, I assume they were still billing themselves as the Magic Band. Personnel was Harkleroad, Snouffer, Mark Boston with French on drums and vocals - pretty damn impressive line-up! This is about the time of, or maybe slightly before, the Tragic Band but, contrary to what I'd read before and as I implied in my previous post, there doesn't seem to have been that much animosity from the Magic Band towards Beefheart and vice versa. Then the lawyers got involved.

HI DERE

One of these days need to go see Gary Lucas. He is doing a free show next Wednesday. http://www.garylucas.com/

Never finished this btw, gave up ca.1976 when French started listing the various fast food restaurants he had eaten in with Don and (short-lived) Magic Band member, Greg Davidson. However I have since seen the French fronted Magic Band playing... underneath Chelsea FC's football pitch.

I saw Gary Lucas once. I thought it was bad but I am a disgusting savage probably.

Not dead, folks. Not dead.

One of the most ill-edited and organized books in history. I guess no reputable publisher would take it on? Or did French even try to go that route? A terse account of how that music actually got made would be something of interest. You have to wonder how much perspective French has on life, if he actually thought a book of that length would be the way to tell the story. Ironic that French says he edited Beefheart, in a sense, that he couldn't see the value in a hard-headed edit and trim of his book.