Beefheart as repertoire

December 17 this year will mark ten years that we've been living on a planet without Don Van Vliet aka Captain Beefheart. His idiosyncratic music -- in which, at its most extreme, declaimed Beat poetry and aleatoric saxophone collided head on with rock band instruments playing jarring dissonance and multiple simultaneous time signatures -- is the only music I listened to as a teenager that I still hear with the same sense of wonder today, possibly because 45 years down the road, I'm just beginning to comprehend some of it. Back in '77, when I saw a different group of musicians than the ones that played on the records performing songs from Trout Mask Replica -- Beefheart's 1969 magnum opus  -- note-for-note, I realized that this occasionally chaotic-sounding music wasn't just ordered; it was through-composed. 

Since the pandemic quarantine started (of which I am very mindful because I have heart failure I got from a virus, and don't kid myself I would survive three weeks on a ventilator), I've been playing guitar at home more than I have in 20 years. (Thank Ceiling Cat for the looper pedal; I'm glad I didn't sell it!) Among other things, I've been woodshedding music that I'd always wanted to learn to play but never got around to figuring out. Among those pieces were two from Beefheart's catalog that I posted as YouTube videos: "Peon" (the uncharacteristically lyrical guitar-bass duet from the 1970 LP Lick My Decals Off, Baby that I learned from a tab transcription a friend did for me about 20 years ago) and Elliott "Winged Eel Fingerling" Ingber's solo from "Alice In Blunderland" (the instrumental from 1971's The Spotlight Kid -- the first Beefheart record I owned -- that my last college roommate taught me, minus the solo, while he was schooling me in musical structure the semester before we both dropped out 45 years ago).

The "Alice" solo is unique in Beefheart's discography because he wasn't a fan of guitar solos, and generally wouldn't allow his musicians to improvise; Ingber was an exception. (After improvising the solo nightly on the road, he subsequently learned it note-for-note off the record and played it that way, rather than extemporizing. Go fig.) Ingber's solo -- modal, but suffused with the blues, replete with slides, bends, hammers, glisses, and double stops, a distorted tone that generates light as well as heat, and an attack that throws off jagged shards of notes before winding down to a wistful conclusion -- was edited down to about three minutes from a studio creation that was much longer, according to John "Drumbo" French, Beefheart's drummer and musical director at several crucial points, whose encyclopedic 2010 memoir Beefheart: Through the Eyes of Magic is an essential read and reference. 

It sounds like a whirlwind or an electrical storm, but upon examination, Ingber's wild ride consists of 17 four-bar phrases that I sat down and "transcribed" in my musical illiterate's way, to help me memorize it. (I'm a lot more analytical today than I was as a drug-addled teenager when I first encountered this music.) The key to learning Beefheart music, I think, is to first cop the licks, then learn the forms. Because the forms can be so different from what one is accustomed to, this might mean counting bars of repetition. The learning task can be complicated by the fact that harmonic dissonance can cause the ear to hear a third note that isn't actually played. (Magic Band musicians have spoken of this in interviews.) I'm just beginning to scratch the surface. All of the dozen-odd Beefheart tunes I've learned, in whole or in part, over the years are relatively straightforward harmonically, lacking the complexities I alluded to at the start of this. I'm working my way up to something from Trout Mask.

For those who would study Beefheart, there are a lot of useful online resources, starting with the Captain Beefheart Radar Station website I linked to at the top of this post, and The Drumbo Club Facebook group. I have a Beefheart videos playlist on YouTube that includes muso/fan performance videos (the Italian guitarist Maurizio Curadi's are particularly good), live performances from the Magic Band reunion that French led from 2003-2017 (their pro-shot Indiegogo DVDs Magnetic Draw and Singing Through You remain tantalizingly elusive), and tutorials (of particular interest is one in which a muso from Beefheart Project Toronto, who had access to the isolated instrument tracks, teaches the arrangement to "Doctor Dark" from Lick My Decals Off, Baby, an instrument at a time. When he shows how Bill "Zoot Horn Rollo" Harkleroad managed to flow 16 bars of guitar over 17 bars of everything else in the same time signature, your head will explode, if you're like me.

Listening to a recent podcast interview with French, in which he recounts an incident during the making of Trout Mask Replica when he was assaulted by his bandmates at Van Vliet's instigation, it was clear how vivid those memories remain for him. Reading the description of the same incident in French's book, one realizes that it was during the aftermath of the attack that Van Vliet first recited the lyrics to "My Human Gets Me Blues," a song from Trout Mask that the reunion Magic Band played throughout its existence. It seems incredible that French could still stand to hear it, let alone play it, with that association so fresh in his mind. But French was sufficiently dedicated to the project to spend hours transcribing compositions Van Vliet -- who had no musical training -- played on piano, whistled or sang, then arranging them and teaching them to the other musicians. In his maturity, French retained enough of that spirit to re-teach the music to new musicians for the Magic Band reunion. (He says the original transcriptions, which Van Vliet kept when French left the band, were destroyed after Van Vliet's passing. A pity.)

I think of Beefheart the same way I think of Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman, two other 20th century musical titans who were able to communicate their unorthodox approaches to other musicians using non-literary means. Because Taylor had no living musical "heirs," his music was silenced with his passing. When the surviving members of Coleman's Prime Time group reunited at a 2017 festival in San Francisco with some big names in the front line, it felt like there was something missing without Ornette's singular saxophone voice in the mix. Having video documentation of the Beefheart material, performed by musicians who either played with Van Vliet or acquired the information from others who did, will help to preserve his legacy. As remarkable as Van Vliet's poetic, vocal, and instrumental gifts were, his most durable contribution is the musical forms he created. As long as means exist for new generations of musicians to take up their challenge, these will endure.