Captain Beefheart

the time signatures in beefheart are not 4/4 like in blues but they are not quite the same. the way the instruments 'grate' against one another in TMR aren't like in a blues record. that's even before you get to the field recording shit.

the blues is at the heart of TMR but to call it simply a blues rec is to kind of simplify things a bit.

So amend my list to add "Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller)" at #9.

'shiny beast' are the half-hearted attempts to re-record everything and I'll agree it's a bit tame, but the original 'bat chain puller' has moments that rival anything. 'brickbats' alone.

'Doc at the Radar Station', with its leaner more polished sound, still has a very angular feel but seems more informed by Zappa's take on XX century atonal music than Coleman style free-jazz (just listen to those instrumentals on Doc)

Yeah, like Zappa informed Beefheart's music one iota.

hey colin not logged in: fair enuff so why did you say that ''It's all blues'' (I mean from what you're saying it is blues + x something).

I rank them:
1-Decals
2-Doc
3-TMR
4-Clear Spot
5-Safe as Milk
6-Ice Cream
7-Spotlight Kid
8-Shiny Beast
9-Strictly Personal
10-Mirror Man
11-Bluejeans & Moonbeams
12-Unconditionally

I've listened to him a lot and I couldn't tell you what it is or what it isn't. There is something incomplete about a lot of it, which isn't a bad thing; the production is almost always bad, except on the last 3 and "Clear Spot." "Decals" really suffers from the shitty bass and drum sound, since the bass and drum playing on that one is amazing. I regard "Decals" as the best because it's the most concise and focused. "Doc" sounds flat (esp. on the Caroline CD I have) but "Dirty Blue Gene" pretty sums up what I like about Beefheart, and overall I think the words on that one are his best by far. Only thing that makes it less than perfect is his voice--he's still funny but the old power and range just ain't there any more.
Zappa once said that CB had a bad sense of rhythm. FZ generally makes me urp but he's right in this case. The weird thing about Beef is the way the music works against itself; there's something horribly thwarted in a lot of it and you sense he's just impatient. The thing that saves it, usually, is the sense as well that he's aware of it but can do nothing about it except to mock his own impulses, constantly, and only occasionally does something really unifed and fairly un-neurotic emerge, like "Click Clack" or the "Clear Spot" album or the great "Best Batch Yet." But Beef's bad rhythm is not really bad in the sense that ordinary folks have bad rhythm--it's more like Howlin' Wolf's slightly off sense of what's happening, metrically, and I've always thought that Beef internalized some of this, and actually did a very strange and cool thing by internalizing all the wrong and oblique aspects of "blues" and came out with what he came out with.

-- J

No--I like it a lot too and it's cool as a response to various things happening at the same time (Beatles, blues revival shit, etc.). In many ways it's his most rockin' album before "Clear Spot."

sounds OK to me.

-- Dadaismus (kcoyne3...), April 23rd, 2003. (later)

anyone care to discuss this?

sounds OK to me.

-- Julio Desouza

Sounds OK but not good. Barely acceptable. Sorta works to reinforce the weird vaudeville vibe of the record, I guess. The pitter-pat of little tap-dancing feet or something.

Beefheart uses undistorted guitar sound. I can def hear the bass on this. It may not be as 'full on' but it doesn't need to be here.

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