Captain's crunch

I got my first Captain Beefheart album when I was 13. This was in the days when album covers would leer out from record racks at young consumers such as myself, practically daring us to discover what might be inside. The album was “Trout Mask Replica,” and the cover featured a dude in a fur coat wearing a large fish mask and a top hat against a background of fuchsia, his hand raised up in an alien greeting. I had to have it, even asked my parents for it for Christmas.

The track that first made me a believer: When Big Joan Sets Up. Set in motion by a jazz drum riff, it’s topped by layers of Delta slide blues, circling around again and again as the Captain scats lyrics about a woman with a “head like a ball” whose “hands are too small.” Around 42 seconds in, the band drops out completely as a soprano sax weaves a free jazz melody that sounds like sex talk between geese. The bass and drums spurt out interjections until the circling riff returns, all of it coming to an incredible break at 2:28 that sounds like someone has unplugged the turntable — the singer, drums, bass and jagged bursts of guitar starting and stopping, the band pausing to collect its thoughts. Beefheart recites, “A turquoise scarf and silver rolled up over a Merc Montclair…” Dead silence for three seconds. A couple abstract guitar notes burst in. Then the jazz bass rumbles, the drums resume, and the barrage of horns solo all the way home.

What was that? I wondered, at age 13.

Captain Beefheart (born Don Van Vliet in Glendale, California) passed away Dec. 17 after a long battle with multiple sclerosis. Long retired from making abstract expressionist rock music, he’d taken up abstract expressionist painting instead. Ironically, his retirement (after 1982’s “Ice Cream For Crow”) coincided with a groundswell of acts citing Beefheart and his Magic Band as a big influence. Not only John Lydon of the Sex Pistols was a fan, but scores of punk and new wave bands — from Magazine to Devo — took up the Captain’s weird compositional navigation, attention to guitar parts, and off-kilter rhythms. Tom Waits radically reconsidered his own sound after his wife exposed him to Beefheart’s music. (It shows. Everything beginning with “Swordfishtrombones” in 1983 owes a debt to Beefheart.) Matt Groening was a believer, saying when he first heard “Trout Mask” at age 15, he thought, “They’re not even trying! Then, around the sixth or seventh listen it clicked, and I thought it was the greatest album I’d ever heard.” Stephen King named a cat in his novel Christine after Beefheart.

XTC. Pere Ubu. The Pixies. The White Stripes. PJ Harvey. The B-52s. Sonic Youth. You can hear traces of Beefheart in all of these bands. And it’s hard to imagine the post-rock sound of Slint, Tortoise, Primus and others without the gumbo of jazz, punk and abstract music that only scratches the surface of Beefheart’s sound.

The teenage Van Vliet dubbed himself Captain Beefheart around the time he met up with a teenage Frank Zappa in Lancaster, California in the mid-‘60s. Each was starting up a band. Zappa was impressed with Beefheart’s vocal range — he could moan low like John Lee Hooker and scream high like Howlin’ Wolf — and eventually signed him to his own Straight Records in 1969. The resulting “bush recording” they produced — a double album of Beefheart songs eventually titled “Trout Mask Replica” — had been intricately mapped out months in advance (sometimes using drawings) for his band, which included Zoot Horn Rollo on slide guitar and John French on drums. With hints of psychedelia, blues, free jazz, field hollers and sea shanties, it’s safe to say there was never anything like it in the rock world — before or since.

Beefheart loved Delta blues and Ornette Coleman especially, and this is what he brought to his own brand of rock, rejecting the steady 4/4 drum beat of most of his contemporaries. He called it the “mama heartbeat” and a lot of his music was devoted to circumventing metronomic rhythm. His most abstract material is like the aural equivalent of a De Kooning painting or a Calder mobile: organic yet meaty, chunky, crunchy. You can’t quite dance to it, but you know it’s there.

Yet there’s a soft side to Beefheart’s music too, and a great sense of humor, something you might miss amid the splatter-paint approach of abrasive tracks such as Flash Gordon’s Ape (off 1970’s “Lick My Decals Off, Baby”). The Captain did write some truly touching ballads, such as Her Eyes Like A Blue Million Miles (used in the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski) and the almost radio-friendly My Head Is My Only Home Unless It Rains (both tracks from 1972’s “Clear Spot”). It appears there was a heart beating beneath that abrasive, growling exterior: songs like Nowadays A Woman’s Gotta Hit A Man (To Make Him Know She’s There) even seem feminist.

But it’s a solo track from “Trout Mask Replica” (again) that really gets me: Beefheart before a microphone, taking on the voice of an old sailor turned hobo who wanders into town to discover a young girl who, he realizes, is his long-lost daughter. He ends up weeping “saltwater tears” by the end. With its sharply observed details (“a jackrabbit raised its folded ears”; “an oriole sang like an orange, his breast full of worms, and his tail clawed the evening like a hammer…”), it’s practically free-form poetry, another glimpse at what Beefheart was capable of.

Unlike his sometime collaborator Frank Zappa, Beefheart’s music seemed to emanate from a more organic place: while almost every note of Zappa’s intricate compositions seem to strive for an effect, Beefheart’s music is almost naïve, built from the ground up: he used charts and drawings to visualize song parts, and wrote most of “Trout Mask Replica” on a piano, an instrument he didn’t know how to play. As improvisational as the result sounds, the parts are intricately rehearsed, almost military-like, befitting a man who adopted “Captain” as his title. (For their part, many Magic Band members report that Beefheart was oblique and difficult to work with.)

Though the early ‘70s seemed like an era when even the avant-garde leanings of Beefheart might be capable of storming the airwaves (check out the YouTube video of the Captain performing I’m Gonna Booglarize You Baby on TV, for instance), it was not meant to be, despite the band trying to tap a more commercial vein by the mid-‘70s. Eventually, the mama heartbeat prevailed, as The Eagles (and other laidback rockers) landed.

But it wasn’t over yet. It’s fair to say Beefheart’s “comeback” album (1980’s “Doc at the Radar Station”) bristled with renewed venom at punk rock’s appropriation of his sound, with lines like “Open up another case of the punks” from Ashtray Heart. But, as with the best of art, it was fresh venom, and it felt like a punk valentine: in any case, it was solid proof that the heart of the Captain still beat strongly.