Yes,
it has been a while since I last posted on this here blog thing. But I’ve finally found the time to pick an
unfairly maligned subject and try to prove that they have some worth. This time, it’s the turn of Captain Beefheart
& The Magic Band’s 1974 album Bluejeans and Moonbeams.
I
have been a massive Beefheart fan since I was a teenager, going in right at the
deep end with 1969’s monumental Trout Mask Replica. Even now, there’s still so much to unpack, savour
and marvel at – one-of-a-kind arrangements, supremely intricate musicianship
and a truly mad genius front and centre, throwing words and musical notations
around the room just to see what happens.
Enough has been written about Don Van Vliet – ranging from Bill Harkleroad’s revelatory “Lunar Notes”, Mike Barnes’ wide-ranging biography “Captain Beefheart” and John French’s long-winded “Beefheart: Through The Eyes Of Magic” – that there really is nothing worth adding, and let’s not forget Elaine Shepherd’s 1997 documentary “The Artist Formerly Known As Captain Beefheart” and the impeccable Captain Beefheart Radar Station website (www.beefheart.com) which is chock-full of information and resources. So instead, let’s turn our attention to an album of his that is considered the lowest point of his musical career. One that’s glossed over as quickly as possible.
The
infamous Andy DiMartino came on board and got Van Vliet and co. signed to
Virgin (in the UK) and Mercury (in the US).
The band at this time featured Trout Mask/Decals-era stalwarts Bill
Harkleroad, Mark Boston and Art Tripp, as well as the returning Alex St Clair
Snouffer, the man behind the original Magic Band’s formation. The resulting album Unconditionally
Guaranteed is a disaster.
To me, this album is THE worst Beefheart record. There is no life or spark to the album
whatsoever. The songs are trite, the
band have been shorn of their edge and creativity and even Don sounds bored and
tired.
The
Magic Band then quit on him prior to a European tour, so DiMartino corralled some
last-minute replacements who then had to scrape together a set within days of
departing. The resulting line-up has
often been referred to as ‘The Tragic Band’ but to be fair they did the best
they could at such ridiculously short notice.
In fact, their performance of ‘Upon The My-O-My’ on the Old Grey Whistle
Test is far superior to the LP version, if only for the more powerful and
snarling vocal performance. A live
version of ‘Full Moon, Hot Sun’ from a French gig, while pedestrian is still more lively than the official
cut.
In
an interview for the “Captain Beefheart: Under Review” documentary from 2006,
Ira Ingber explained: My brother, myself and a fellow named Mark Gibbons, a
very gifted keyboard player, got together here in Los Angeles and I think at
the time Don was still living in North California…so we started writing songs. It seemed innocent enough…Don had some ideas,
he had lots of lyrics as I remember. We
ended up rehearsing then started recording…I think consciously we were staying
away from [the] Magic Band because I think anything even remotely resembling Magic
Band for Don was something where he didn’t want to go…but because of who he is
they went that direction anyway.
Hitching
up with Tragic Band members Michael Smotherman (keyboards), Dean Smith (guitar)
and Ty Grimes (percussion), as well as
Jimmy Caravan (keyboards), Bob West (bass) and Gene Pello (drums), this
makeshift unit were shoved into Stronghold Sound Recorders, a budget studio within
North Hollywood in August 1974 to put an album together. Smotherman later recounted that the album
took 2 days to record.
When
interviewed for Mike Barnes’ 2000 book, Smotherman said: Don was just as
confused as he could be throughout the whole process. He would sit there in a chair and sing, and
he had no idea when to come in or when to stop.
Count-offs didn’t mean anything to him,
One time, about two o’clock in the morning, I had to go out and sit
beside him in a chair. When it was time
for him to sing, I had my hand on the back of his neck and I would push his
face up to the microphone and he would start singing. And when it was time to stop I would pull him
back gently.
Of
particular note, you may notice that aside from two co-writing credits, Elliot
Ingber is absent from the credits on the album. Van Vliet himself claimed that Elliot’s parts
were wiped from the tapes by DiMartino, but as the man made bizarre and
contradictive remarks about the same subject many times over who knows what the
real story is. If his claim is true and
Dean Smith is responsible for all guitar parts, he does a more than serviceable
job, with some neat Spotlight/Clear Spot fuzzy slide work throughout, and
unlike his contributions throughout the ill-fated 1974 tour, he kept his proto-Knopfler
licks to a minimum.
If
Van Vliet was considerably disorientated throughout the sessions, his voice
(for the most part) remains in fine fettle and is a damn sight more convincing
and confident than on the previous album, particularly in the opening number: ‘The
Party Of Special Things To Do’. Even if
the opening verse (“the cowboy wore a nightie in the party of special things
to do”) doesn’t have the same original spark of Trout Mask the
song is more than serviceable and still full of Southern-fried boogie involving
the Red Queen and the One-Eyed Jill (“all the cards”).
A
serviceable cover of JJ Cale’s ‘Same Old Blues’ comes up next, featuring a
reasonably gruff and moody Van Vliet vocal accompanied on the choruses by Smotherman,
who later elaborated to Mike Barnes that “All those obnoxious vocals that
you hear in the background – that’s me.
There were supposed to be some other people singing background and then
DiMartino thought he could get me to sing all the background for cheaper.”
‘Observatory
Crest’ follows shortly after and is possibly the highlight of the album for
me. The musical accompaniment is full of
open space and the guitar playing is appropriately tidy and tasteful. Van Vliet sings about him and his missus
watching a concert where they “heard all the best” before stopping near
an observatory where “the sand was hot/she wanted to dance.” Simple enough, but it has a nice
laid-back melody and was often picked out by reviews as possibly being the
brightest spark on the whole platter. Mercury
Rev later covered the session for a BBC Radio session in 1999, and even my wife
loved the song (this song was playing in the registry office while everyone was
being seated, so go figure…)
“Is
he talking to me? Right…” asks a befuddled Captain as ‘Pompadour
Swamp’ starts up. Another pleasant
(noticing a theme here?) number which is not as disposable as some reviewers
claim. For an album that was recorded in
a hurry almost as an afterthought, this track is a fine example of some effort
being made in song arrangement. On the
whole, the album has a bit more spark and life to it than the repetitive, uneventful
plod-plod-plod of Unconditionally Guaranteed. Van Vliet is in fine form with the rasping
delivery of yore conjuring an abstract tale, the title of which was borrowed
from one of many works-in-progress originally demo’d back in 1972 (the original
music was eventually revised as ‘Suction Prints’ on 1978’s Shiny Beast).
The
closing track on side 1 is still a bone of contention and somewhat of a
mystery. ‘Captain’s Holiday’ may not even be a Magic Band recording. Smotherman: “As a matter of fact, I think
that track was on a 24-track reel that nobody had picked up.” As an unidentified chorus of ladies coo “Ooh
captain, captain/play your melody” the instrumental track goes on as some half-hearted
harmonica playing and soft-rock guitar action take turns popping up here and
there. Maybe it’s me living in hope, but
there may be more to the song than that: Smotherman’s main choice of keyboard
during the Tragic Band tour was a clavinet which can also be heard on the
track, and the harmonica playing does have a slight hint of Van Vliet. There’s no doubting Andy DiMartino’s pragmatic
pilfering of the multitrack, but overdubs may have been attempted as a way of
trying to make it blend in with the rest of the album. Is it worth elaborating further? The track is nothing special. As Don himself sang on the previous album “lazy
music’s got me laying back and laying down.”
‘Rock
‘n’ Roll’s Evil Doll’ greets us at the start of side 2 with some fuzzed and
wobbly slide guitar playing and squelchy clavinet as Beefheart weaves a simple
tale of said doll chasing him down “rock ‘n’ roll’s evil hall”. Yet again, nothing special but it’s
serviceable enough. Co-writer Ira Ingber
makes a good stab at some bass work near the end, as does Dean Smith’s multi-tracked
guitar work.
Don
Van Vliet transmogrifies into the Walrus of Love for ‘Further Than We’ve Gone’,
a self-penned ballad that honestly cannot hold a candle to the genuinely beautiful
and tender ‘Her Eyes Are A Blue Million Miles’ from Clear Spot. There’s no denying that this song goes on a
bit and while frothy and syrupy it’s superior to the same year’s horrid ‘This
Is The Day’.
‘Twist Ah Luck’ brings the pace up a bit and is like a livelier version of Unconditionally Guaranteed’s closer ‘Peaches’, as if the latter has had a quick gulp of Lucozade to get some energy going.
The
closing number ‘Bluejeans and Meanbeams’ is a nice and gentle little slow
burner, replete with acoustic guitar picking and what sounds like a
Mellotron. Like the rest of the album,
there’s not much substance to this number but is a welcome change of pace to
the usual Beefheart aural assault (or the “exploding note theory” as he later described
it). It really is quite lovely with some
delicate electric guitar runs and a basic-as-basic-can-be snare and bass drum
accompaniment. Even the prominent
synthesizer twinkles near the end don’t spoil the overall atmosphere of the
track and is more proof that Beefheart could genuinely sing in tune when the
mood took him.
Upon
its release in November that year, reviews for Bluejeans and Moonbeams
leaned towards the negative. Melody Maker’s
Allan Jones (and future alt country-enabler) mentioned that the title track was
“almost worth the price of the album” but apart from that, he wrote that “this
album has some difficulty in justifying its existence”, all under the headline “NO
MORE MAGIC.” Lou Reed’s best mate,
Robert ‘Toefucker’ Christgau gave it a B-, preferring it to Unconditionally
Guaranteed.
Retrospective
reviews are still considerably negative but are not content to write the whole
thing off. In a 1999 review on the
Perfect Sound Forever website, Scott McFarland remarked “the record has its moments
of minor-league charm, but bears little relationship to the rest of Beefheart’s
extraordinary catalogue” and also says that Bluejeans is much
more preferable to its predecessor, though is still greatly flawed: “The songs are less overtly maudlin, and
the sound is more relaxed…the music is well recorded, which at times just
highlights the vacuousness of the whole project.”
As
for the musicians present in the sessions, Ira Ingber later commented: I was
disappointed…it sounded like there [were] way too much gratuitous effects –
there was some early synthesizer stuff that sounded just godawful to me. The crispness and the tightness of Clear Spot
was gone. It seemed very watery to me,
it didn’t seem to have the impact that I remember it having in the studio…I was
very disappointed [with] the way it sounded and very disappointed obviously with
the reviews that I saw here because they were predominantly very, very
negative. (Under Review, 2006)
As
for the Cap? Once the album was done and
dusted, he immediately went out into the desert and DiMartino exited the
picture. Before simply refusing to
discuss his DiMartino-produced albums entirely, he moaned that Mercury put Bluejeans
out without his knowledge, that the original drum parts he arranged were wiped
and re-recorded by someone else, etc. For
all of his unique talents, Don Van Vliet had a most unfortunate habit of
blaming others for any faults in his work – read up on his underrated 1968 LP Strictly
Personal for more details – but as Barnes pointed out, Van Vliet should’ve
been more honest and take an equal portion of the blame for how the record
turned out. He wanted a stab a
commercial success and despite the dispiriting path it took him down, it was
his decision and no-one else’s.
After
retiring to the desert to think about things (and not become a lumberjack as he
reported to the press at the time), he decided to put together another
iteration of the Magic Band (featuring John French, Elliot Ingber, Jimmy Carl Black
and Bruce Fowler) in time for a triumphant performance at Knebworth Festival in
1975 followed by a short European tour.
With these performances considered a true return-to-form, the reinvigorated
Beefheart and his conveyor belt of Magic Band inductees recorded four more wonderfully
inventive and spiky albums up until Van Vliet’s decision to retire from music
in 1982 and concentrate on his art.
Over
the past decades, a few affectionate nods towards Bluejeans and Moonbeams
have appeared. In an interview
with Smash Hits Magazine in December 1980, Kate Bush nominated the album as
part of her top ten favourite albums, claiming “…this is the Beefheart album
where he writes love songs like nobody else.” As well as Mercury Rev’s aforementioned cover
listed above, The White Stripes covered ‘The Party Of Special Things To Do’ for
a 2000 Beefheart tribute EP bearing the same title.
While
Bluejeans and Moonbeams certainly does not represent Captain Beefheart’s
oeuvre as a whole, and I am certainly not trying to claim that it is, it is certainly
worth reinvestigating and it has been a fun experience examining it and noting
that it does have some redeeming features.
In fact, if you squint a bit, it can comfortably sit beside 1978’s First Taste by
Juicy Groove, another gang of misfits including Mars Bonfire of Steppenwolf as
well Beefheart alumni Gary Marker and Elliot Ingber.
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