You know, I have tried on numerous occasions to get into Beefheart and it never lands. Fans of his stuff describe it as some higher level of musicianship and sophistication but it just sounds to me like a band that can't play and is just kind of owning that.
I watched a Beefheart documentary once where a fan said something to the effect of "It sounds like noise but if you listen closely, each band member is playing a totally different time signature and key". I mean yeah. That's pretty much what it sounds like lol.
I dare you to try once more with the album Shiny Beast. IMO this is the best starting point in to Beefheart. Fun fact: I never liked rock music, close to hating it. I'm into soul, disco, jazz, hiphop and house. But Shiny Beast is one of my all time favourites.
This is excellent advice. I started off with Trout Mask Replica and thought "hm, maybe this isn't for me", but then I listened to the song "Love Lies" on a whim, then the rest of the album, and was hooked.
There's a story my uncle told me about meeting Beefheart after some gig in Phoenix in the early 70's, where he literally bumped into him outside the stage door after the show. My uncle, basically awestruck, offered Beefheart a smoke, which the great man heartily accepted and promptly ate.
Trout Mask Replica was a top-100 album on Rolling Stone's list until 2020 when it got tossed out in the Great Purge of Boomer Trivia That Sucks Actually, and to be quite honest I don't disagree.
I don't really get trout mask and I rarely listen to it, but I feel like it needs to be crazy and uneven to be that legendary.
If it was just good, it would be like any other record.
I would say that it is so hyped that it is been evaluated by almost everyone, but that most people give less-than-a-full-listen and conclude "I'm out."
I respect their decision.
Sometimes I tell people to watch the Vox Earworm about it. I find it expensive to engage with, so usually I do not--but I never feel like a listen is wasted time.
Undoubtedly. Pretty sure that Neutral Milk Hotel is now holding the place that Captain Beefheart previously occupied, and future generation will be puzzled.
I love this sort of stuff. Here's some advice that the famous jazz pianist and composer Thelonius Monk gave his musicians as written down by the Saxophonist Steve Lacy in 1960. It's not quite as off the wall as Captain Beefhart. Still great stuff and also idiosyncratic. "They tried to get me to hate white people, but someone would always come along & spoil it." might be the best line for non-musicians: https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/thelonious-monk-25-handwritten-...
Thelonius Monk is a source of amazing quotes. Apparently he came offstage one night and someone said to him "That was fantastic!" and he said "No. I made all the wrong mistakes."
Well now that site is a crock of gold from the Old Web, isn’t it? Just the kind of thing I enjoy exploring in my idle minutes, and far better for my state of mind than doomscrolling Reddit, Facebook, instagram, TikTok, and the rest.
Some are great:
When you're not playing your guitar, cover it and keep it in a dark place. If you don't play your guitar for more than a day, be sure you put a saucer of water in with it.
Some are weird:
Don't wipe the sweat off your instrument
That water tip might be a good idea if you live in a desert climate, but in a lot of places it's only going to make your guitar go warped or moldy. Ideal humidity for acoustic guitars is usually stated as 50% relative humidity. It's not so important for electric but you still want to avoid extremes.
Captain Beefheart music is the type of music you’re _supposed_ to like , but really doesn’t live up to its reputation.
Zappa music, otoh, reveals the genius behind it once you pay attention. Then again, half of his catalog is just self-indulgent wankery he himself admitted he funded through the juvenile songs.
Listen to “Inca Roads” or the whole “Zappa in NY” album and you’ll see Zappa’s greatness.
Normally, I avoid YouTube comments like the plague, but gotta give it up for the top comment there:
@bigman1688 4 years ago
oh ok, when captain beefheart does advanced polyrhythms and experimental time signatures he's a "visionary" and "avant-garde musician" but when i do it i'm "annoying" and "need to leave guitar center"
Edit: I wanted to add that the first few times I listened to Trout Mask Replica I really didn't like it and didn't get why anyone would think it was good.
I would defend Bluejeans & Moonbeams by itself, it is pleasant enough and I like the laid back vibe of the whole thing. But in comparison to everything else he had done, it was a low point.
Zappa is technically breathtaking; for instance, Steve Vai is listed in a few of his orchestra tracks as "doing impossible guitar stunts", and there are many more examples.
But Zappa was never, like, serious, he always was ironic, sarcastic, or downright clownish, and always, it seems, looked down at the audience. This makes his music sound great at a Saturday night show, and less so elsewhere.
Always been a Zappa fan since the first Mothers album. I always found is humor in music and words appealing. His band was always tight, great musicians. I many of his albums but I have to say Live at the Fillmore East (1971) is my favorite.
What makes you think he looked down at his audience? It always seemed more like the audience was the people that didn't take it too seriously and thus that is why they were fans.
> In the old days it wasn’t like that. At that time the audiences were hostile to what we did. They gave us a bad time. Now, historically, musicians have felt real hurt if the audience expressed displeasure with their performance. They apologized and tried to make the people love them. We didn’t do that. We told the audience to get fucked.
There are many more snarky comments which Zappa directed at his audience, and any audience in general, and likely the humankind as a whole. I think this is the reason he created technically brilliant and invariably ironic pieces: he did not think that a worthy audience exists, maybe except his orchestra and a few other musicians.
That might have been 1968. It's not like he worshipped his audience later, but he did get to a point where the fan base was large enough and more "in tune" with his thinking, organically. He made the comment that nobody could get 100% of what he'd do, simply because everybody's life experiences are unique, but maybe someone somewhere has enough context for 50-60% of his output. In later interviews he said that he offered a certain kind of product, which many might not like, but enough people did like, kinda employing him for entertainment. He just wouldn't go out of his way to cater to them. And he did know that the people at his concerts or buying his records were not a monolith. The most he might have done for them was when the band learned Whipping Post a whole seven years after a fan had interrupted the 1974 concert in Helsinki to request it. :-)
(If you think he liked orchestras, you should read about his LSO recordings and how he had to rescue them by editing tapes with razor blades. He wasn't actually happy until he recorded with the Ensemble Modern at the end of his life.)
Zappa in New York… it is truly amazing to me how exceptionally skilled his ensemble his. Without exaggeration, that’s one of the most skilled ensembles I’ve ever heard, and I’m not just talking rock music.
The purple lagoon! That amazing lineup had a lot of the usual suspects, PLUS the Brecker brothers, yes, but... by the 80s, his bands had to rehearse even more: eight hours a day, for months, until they had mastered over 120 songs. On stage, he could make just one gesture, twirling his hair or grabbing his crotch, and they'd switch whatever tune to reggae or metal, because why not?
His 70s bands might have a slight edge in terms of pure talent, but they might have not survived the grind of the 80s (which contributed in no small part to the implosion of 1988...).
I tried to like Zappa. I like the idea of Zappa. My brother got a tattoo of Frank Zappa's face on on his bicep in the army, and we agree on a lot of music. Imagine my dismay when I admitted I couldn't like any of it. On the other hand Trout Mask Replica is at least an interesting album.
I feel the same about the Grateful Dead. I like jam bands, I like all of the bands and musicians that hung out with or played with them, all of my friends like them. Ripple is pretty nice. I should absolutely like them, but whatever magic is there my ears don't pick up on. Their studio version of Good Lovin might be the worst thing a "good" band I have ever heard recorded, like a shitty band at the community 4th of July party that 17 people are dancing to and the other 2000 are trying to ignore.
Zoot Allures was pretty good. besides that the only thing I like by him is his earliest stuff, like Lumpy Gravy. 90% of the his discography is unlistenable to me, and I listen mostly to stuff that people would classify as unlistenable.
There's not one Zappa, either. There's the one that gave us Hot Rats, which is quite different from The grand wazoo & Waka/Jawaka, which are different from Yellow Shark and Everything is healing nicely. Then there are all the guitar solo albums...
I prefer Beefheart to Zappa. Beefheart was a genius with a vision from another planet. Zappa was talented but his smugness and middle-school humor ruin it for me. His freakiness feels showy, like he's trying to prove how different and smart he is. Beefheart on the other hand was a being who absorbed different chemicals from Earth's atmosphere.
He was abusive to his TMR bandmates though - to the point of running a cult. They resorted to shoplifting just to eat.
I never understood Zappa until I listened to his orchestral and chamber music. I thought he was a rock guy and doing the usual trite “with Symphony Orchestra” music that rock guys did. I was wrong. He knows what’s he’s doing, and he’s outstanding.
I find his later compositions for rock ensemble are way out there but brilliant. Earlier stuff like in Burnt Weeny Sandwich (Igor’s Boogies, Prelude to Holiday in Berlin) I find brilliant and hilarious. I don’t understand the attraction to some of his pure rock music, but I can understand his interest in the vernacular.
Beefheart bore obvious similarities and parallels with Zappa in some respects, but I don’t think one way or the other about his music. He’s clearly one heck of an all round artist though.
Wikipedia: "With no income other than welfare and contributions from relatives, [Beefheart's] group barely survived and were even arrested for shoplifting food (Zappa bailed them out)."
I understand that Ian Underwood was also not really at the same level as some of the others, so I think that Zappa had a "Personality Quotient" that he used.
What I heard, was that he wasn't really a "top shelf" musician, but I never heard anything about his composition, which, I suspect, would have been even more important to Zappa.
Feelings are certainly part part of it, and hard to teach, so I appreciate the Captain's efforts. But music is also largely engineering and math, and it won't sound good if you haven't done a lot of intellectual homework (although plenty of good artists will claim otherwise, because claims like that are appealing).
Zappa did do his homework. There's some anecdote about him conducting an orchestra in the studio, and one of his musicians asked, "How did you learn to do that?"
> and it won't sound good if you haven't done a lot of intellectual homework
Before you can create a language or theory around music, there must be music. The math didn't come first. First came the music, and the math simply describes what is already there.
The first person who had a smidgeon of an idea that if they put two sounds together it might sound pleasing to the ear, probably didn't run to grab a pen to mathematically describe the concept of how frequencies behave together before discovering sounds that are pleasing.
You speak of doing intellectual homework in order to make music sound good, but the homework you mention required its own homework. Determining if something sounds good is not a mathematical operation, but a subjective and visceral one.
I watched a Beefheart documentary once where a fan said something to the effect of "It sounds like noise but if you listen closely, each band member is playing a totally different time signature and key". I mean yeah. That's pretty much what it sounds like lol.
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