Captain Beefheart and his Magic Bland

Hope you enjoy this one as much as Tim Jonze didn't.



2009 marks the 40th anniversary of rock's weirdest record. So how has it aged?

Come on, admit it. It’s still on the to-do list, right? Everybody knows that, deep in the late 60s, a lunatic called Captain Beefheart locked himself in a country mansion with four friends and came out with a fish on his head. Or something. Cue whoops of wonder from those in the know, subsiding over forty years into a quiet kind of respect. At parties you nod sagely. Trout Mask Replica? Mindblowing. Great album, great man.

Now don't get me wrong. I will listen to other Beefheart releases until my girlfriend is blue in the face. The Magic Band’s thumping debut, Safe as Milk, is my soundtrack to 2003, and my very own summer of love between high school and university - no other collection of songs I know is as good for staggering red-eyed around a smoke-filled bedroom. But I’m going to come right out and say it: has anyone ever actually listened to the whale that is Trout Mask Replica in its entirety? No you haven’t. No you haven’t because it’s impossible. Beefheart’s monstrous masterpiece is assured its place in the rock and roll Hall of Fame because nobody, not even the janitor, dares to go near it, for fear of losing their hand.

That is where I come in. I have braved this swill of tepid hippie vomit on the shore of Don Van Vliet's engorged psyche, and I have done so purely in the name of journalistic curiosity and money. Plus I needed to give the Hall of Fame the once over. The Man wants to find a plinth for Leo Sayer.

So to my task. Within the first minute of pressing play, I’m hunting for facts on the web to quell my rising panic. (Did you know it was billed on its release as ‘music from Venus’?) The album's opener, Frownland, is barely music. Jagged, atonal riffs march all over the Captain’s chunnering surrealisms. The drummer sounds like he learned to play immediately prior to recording on a whack-a-mole machine. The guitarist … is there a guitarist? A human one? Oh. The only thing that maintains my interest is Van Vliet’s remarkable voice, but even that quickly deteriorates into repetitiveness and inaudibility. Try as I might, I can’t keep my hand away from the ‘skip’ button.

Perhaps I simply lack an imaginative connection with the past.

Let’s try and historicise this record. 1969 was a grim year for the hippie ideal, with Hendrix arrested narcotics and Brian Jones found dead in his pool one month after Jagger forced him out of the Stones being too ‘free’ with his rehearsal attendance. Over at Apple, the world’s greatest band was tearing itself apart a row over business management. The Altamont stabbing that December is, to those in their pop anecdotage, the moment which marks the end of it all. ‘They’re selling hippie wigs in Woolworths,’ croaks Danny in Bruce Robinson’s classic period piece Withnail & I, indicating just the kind of retail savvy the store could have used 40 years on. ‘The greatest decade in the history of mankind is over … and we have failed to paint it black.'

Against this backdrop, Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band (‘Zoot Horn Rollo’, ‘Rockette Morton’, ‘Drumbo’ and ‘Antennae Jimmy Semens’) retreated to Van Vliet’s LA house and practised fourteen hours a day for eight months. That’s 3,400 hours playing time - astronomical whatever planet you're on. By the time they reached the studio, the band knew Beefheart’s space-jazz set so well that they cut the record more or less live. What at first, then, seems to be random self-indulgence, the kind of rambling jam that should never have been committed to vinyl, is in fact a scrupulously choreographed opera, designed to be heard in its sprawling, headache-prompting entirety.

Is this the greatest antidote to the three-minute pop song ever set down? I hastened again to my CD player, hovering over song nine (Neon Meate Dream of a Octafish): the furthest I’d managed to get without skipping. I pressed play and waited. That song spent itself noisily in a flurry of word-associations (‘…Squirmin' serum 'n semen 'n syrup 'n semen 'n serum/ Stirrupped in syrup…’) and still I waited, until, out of nowhere, came a sort-of riff and a set of lyrics of which I could make both head and tail. China Pig begins:

A man's gotta live
A man's gotta eat
A man's gotta have shoes to walk out on the street
I don't wanna kill my china pig.

And suddenly things are starting to make sense.

Is China Pig an anti-capitalist parable using the motif of a piggy bank? I haven’t a fucking clue. But that, I think, is what’s important. What I may have figured out is that, amid the death throes of the longhair dream, Don Van Vliet attempted a one-man crusade against accessibility, against the consolidation of music and commercialism, and thus against a future world where, thumbs poised above the iPod ‘skip’ button, listeners would manifest their dwindling attention spans daily in a million Nick and Norah’s infinite playlists. After all, 1969 was also the year in which Brotherhood of Man, chirping madly, took their first in-sync steps towards Eurovision stardom.

Jean Cocteau once wrote that ‘Critics judge the artwork and are not aware that the artwork judges them’. Rather than Trout Mask Replica seeming dated, I think it’s me who is showing my age – an age, that is, in which albums have become singles collections - a shorter, snappier and easier litter of songs destined to be wrenched apart forever in cyberspace. Well, I won’t get fooled again. Don Van Vliet, you're weird - your velvet jacket is covered in dust, and the fish on your head smells like Satan's flip-flop - but you might just have a point. The Man won’t like it, but you continue to remind us that there’s far more to life, and to music, than accessibility.

Sorry, Leo.