Apathy for the Devil (9 page)

But then in 1969 Beefheart went into a whole new orbit of otherness. He replaced his old band members with some teenaged acid casualties and brainwashed them Charles Manson-style into doing whatever he told them to. He bashed out some music on a piano - an instrument he couldn’t play - and then browbeat his new charges into replicating every nuance of these ‘compositions’ on guitars, bass and drums. Amazingly, they succeeded - though it took more than six months and almost all their remaining sanity to do so. Beefheart next alerted Frank Zappa, who took them to his studio and engineered two sessions, one for the backing tracks, miraculously captured in a single three-hour session, and a later one for Beefheart’s vocals. When it came time to do the latter, the singer made a point of not wearing headphones so he couldn’t actually hear the music as he was vocalising over it.

By all standards of conventional logic, it should have sounded like caterwauling cacophony but the resulting album,
Trout Mask Replica
, was inspired cacophony at the very least and a completely unique musical statement to boot. Beefheart still did his Howlin’ Wolf-abducted-by-aliens vocal routine but his band had somehow struck out on a whole new musical hybrid: Delta blues in a surreal head-on collision with free jazz. You’d listen to it with your mouth agape, trying to locate a conventional beat or groove, being accosted instead by a succession of fractured rhythms that seemed to have been designed for a ballroom full of
one-legged patrons. It positively defied you to dance along to it. Nor was it something you’d want to throw on the turntable to set up a romantic mood - unless you were deeply disturbed in the head. I recall reading a Kurt Cobain interview once when he claimed he and wife Courtney Love had enjoyed ‘great sex’ whilst listening to
Trout Mask Replica
. I knew then that their relationship was doomed.

Beefheart and his new Magic Band had recorded and released two more albums by the time our paths crossed. They were still largely unknown quantities in the States but John Peel’s unstinting patronage via the UK radio waves had provided them with a healthy cult following throughout England, and so they chose February and March of 1972 to undertake their first-ever tour of the country (Beefheart had actually played the same circuit once before but with a different Magic Band). Old Blighty would never know what hit it.

My father once told me a story about
Citizen Kane
’s illustrious director Orson Welles. Either he or a colleague had to follow Welles around some picturesque Irish village in the early sixties and record his every spontaneous utterance as he wove his way uncertainly from pub to pub. Welles’s glory years were far behind him at this juncture and he’d become reduced to living off his legend by talking whimsical blarney for travelogue TV shows. Yet his reduced circumstances had no visible effect on his self-image. Everyone he encountered that day he’d regale with the same priceless piece of information: ‘I’m a genius.’ He said it countless times - to his long-suffering co-workers, to uncomprehending barmen and waitresses, in fact to anyone he came directly into contact with. I only mention this because Captain Beefheart was exactly the same, utterly smitten with himself.

The world at large might have been blissfully ignorant of his accomplishments to date but Captain Beefheart was still 110 per cent convinced of his own artistic pre-eminence. He told me he was a genius at least twice within the first five minutes of our interview. Another five minutes passed and he started telling me that he was so in advance of all other living artists - be they painters, sculptors, poets or composers - that ‘I’m going to have to create a whole new art form just to express myself in for the future.’ He believed in himself with the same nutcase totality that propelled him to believe that he could converse meaningfully with shrubbery and insects. Again like Welles, he was that infuriating combination: part authentic creative visionary, part outrageous bullshitter. Still, I couldn’t help but find his self-besotted boasting deeply entertaining and, more important, he warmed to me - enough anyway to extend an invitation the following day to travel with him and his band on their rented tour bus up to Brighton, where they were booked to play a concert at the Dome.

I arrived in the early afternoon to find Beefheart and his co-workers already dressed up as if about to take the stage. They were all wearing such retina-scorching colours and fabrics it was hard to look at them seated before me on the bus without getting dizzy. As soon as the vehicle started moving, Beefheart sat down next to me and began talking virtually non-stop. Several subjects were clearly transfixed in his mind. One was Frank Zappa: he couldn’t abide the man and called him a ‘charlatan’ and an arch-manipulator. This was a bit rich when you consider that Zappa had been the childhood friend of Van Vliet’s who’d actually invented the whole Captain Beefheart moniker for his young pal and then bankrolled the creation of
Trout Mask Replica
. But Beefheart was unimpressed by this largesse. He was on the
warpath against his old colleague because Zappa had dared to release an album by a mentally ill street singer called Wild Man Fischer on the same label - suitably named Bizarre - that he’d released
Trout Mask
on. Beefheart found this unpardonable: ‘He was trying to market me as a goddamned freak! The gall of the man!’ he kept repeating. At one point, his attack on Zappa became so vitriolic that his new bassist, a quiet Mexican named Roy Estrada who’d played with Zappa on all the Mothers of Invention’s late-sixties albums, tried to intercede on his former boss’s behalf. ‘Aw - c’mon, Don,’ he offered meekly, ‘Frank’s OK.’ ‘Frank’s OK?!’ Beefheart parroted back with a thunderstruck expression on his face. ‘Frank’s OK?! Listen to yourself, Estrada. He’s got you brainwashed too.’

The other subject that got him all hot under the collar was drugs. He couldn’t tolerate the perception that his music was - in any way - drug-related. ‘Look around you - none of my band takes drugs. We don’t make music high on LSD or anything else. That’s all just vicious misinformation.’ I looked around and immediately noticed the eerie thousand-yard stares beaming out of the eye sockets of his Magic Band accomplices. Collectively speaking, they made a singularly unconvincing advertisement for drug-free living. Years later I’d read a biography on Beefheart and discover that certain members had imported PCP-a mind-befuddling tranquilliser used to stun farm animals - into the country to smoke during their leisure time on this tour.

The bus they’d hired to transport us started malfunctioning as we approached Brighton itself and completely gave up the ghost just as we started coasting along the seafront. This meant that everyone had to suddenly disembark and walk the half-mile distance to the venue itself. I suddenly found myself in a brand-new
role - that of Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band’s resident shepherd. I felt like I’d been abducted into an episode of
The Twilight Zone
. Everywhere we walked, fellow pedestrians would stare at us open-mouthed as if we’d just landed from some far-away galaxy. Beefheart was dressed up like some Las Vegas nightclub conjurer complete with flowing cape. I kept expecting him to produce a couple of white doves from out of his sleeves at any given moment. And no one had even the remotest sense of earthly direction. I had to keep checking that one of the Magic Band hadn’t strayed off and gotten himself hopelessly lost.

Finally, we reached the concert hall just as dusk was starting to settle in the sky. In due course, the ensemble walked out on stage and plugged in, whilst the drummer - whose real name was Art Tripp III - seated himself behind possibly the smallest kit ever commandeered for a live performance-a single bass and snare drum alongside one cymbal. Beefheart - in full evening dress - then entered to much acclaim from the audience and gruffly counted in the first song. As soon as the first notes were struck, time stood still. Music like this had never been heard before - or since. The group performed most of ‘The Spotlight Kid’ and a couple of selections from
Trout Mask Replica
but the studio recordings barely hinted at the mind-scrambling majesty of their live renditions. Like Thelonious Monk, Beefheart had a totally unique ‘out-there’ aesthetic sensibility and the scary strength of personality to project it directly onto not only his band but also his paying public. There was a genuinely superhuman power coming out of the PA system. People just sat there slack-jawed and pinched themselves to see whether they’d fallen asleep into some alternative dream dimension. None of us could believe we were hearing music this visceral and dementedly alive. You could
practically see the electricity coursing through their instruments and taste the phlegm bubbling in Beefheart’s larynx. He wasn’t kidding when he called them the Magic Band.

Another ‘magic’ band from America’s West Coast who’d adopted LSD as a means to break down existing musical barriers and create a more wide-open sonic sensibility were San Francisco’s Grateful Dead. Ever since 1967 they’d been fondly recognised as psychedelic-rock pioneers and all-purpose community-minded righteous hippie dudes by John Peel’s lank-haired listeners throughout the British Isles, but they’d only ever managed to play one concert in England to date, at a festival in Staffordshire in the early summer of 1970. In early ’72, though, the group and their record company Warner Bros. bankrolled an extended gig-playing trek through Europe that included a short tour of England. In late March, they and their extremely large ‘extended family’ moved into a swanky Kensington hotel in anticipation of the shows and duly became my third interviewees.

In stark contrast to their reputation as championship-level LSD-gobblers, they seemed a pretty down-to-earth bunch when confronted one-on-one. They dressed like rodeo cowboys and talked like mature overseas students checking out foreign culture. The drugs had yet to bend their brains into some inexplicable agenda like Beefheart’s bunch. Their music may have been further fuelled by a healthy desire to embrace utter weirdness but none of them was weird per se. Jerry Garcia in particular was totally exasperated by their image and reputation and the way it constantly impinged on his privacy. Every acid casualty in Christendom wanted to corral him into some ‘deeply meaningful’ conversation and he’d simply had enough of indulging all these damaged people. Hippies the world over looked up to him
as though he were some deity or oracle but Garcia was really just an intelligent, well-read druggie with a deeply cynical streak who felt increasingly ill at ease with the role he’d been straitjacketed into by late-sixties bohemian culture. In time it would get so intolerable that he would withdraw from society in general by compulsively smoking high-grade Persian heroin. This in turn would prove fatal: after twenty years of addiction, the drug would end up hastening his death in 1995.

At the same time, he was one of the most singularly gifted musicians of the latter half of the twentieth century. The Grateful Dead were an odd bunch in that they were always being called a rock band but they couldn’t play straight-ahead rock ’n’ roll to save their lives. They’d started out instead as a jug band before branching out into folk and electric blues and playing long jazz-influenced jams whenever the mood struck. By the end of the sixties they’d even morphed into a credible country-and-western outfit. By 1972 they meandered between these various musical genres, performing sets that rarely ran for less than three hours in length; there were - inevitably - valleys and peaks. You’d sit there for what seemed like an eternity watching them noodle away on stage silently praying that they’d actually finish the song and put it out of its misery. But then - all of a sudden - the group would take off into the psychedelic stratosphere and Garcia would step forward to the lip of the stage and begin navigating his way to that enchanted region where the sagebrush meets the stars. Cosmic American music: Gram Parsons coined the phrase but it was the Grateful Dead who best embodied the concept even though - after 1972 - they began slipping into a long befuddling decline.

Both Beefheart and the Dead turned up to play at a three-day
festival held in the Northern town of Bickershaw during the first weekend in May ’72. The event’s shady promoters had envisaged it as a grand unveiling of the whole West Coast live rock experience to the John Peel demographic but it soon degenerated into a sort of mud-caked psychedelic concentration camp filled with miserable-looking young people on dodgy hallucinogenics being lashed by torrential wind and rain and sold inedible food. Beefheart and the Dead performed splendidly, the former delivering a sudden earth-shaking a cappella version of Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Evil’ that struck terror into the hearts and minds of several acid casualties at the lip of the stage who reacted as if suddenly struck by lightning - but there was no getting around the fact that the whole ugly debacle was destined to be acid rock’s last hurrah here in the British Isles. A relentless downpouring of bad weather, bad facilities, bad drugs and (mostly) bad music: it had worked like a charm three years ago at Woodstock but it wasn’t working any more.

Mind you, I had a great time. A bunch of
Frendz
collaborators had hired a large van we could all sleep in and had succeeded in getting VIP passes, so we were always close to the action and safe from the inclement storms raging over the bedraggled spectators. I remember on the first night standing at the side of the stage smoking a joint and watching some underwhelming folk singer braying into a microphone when a rotund, Afro-headed figure dressed head to foot in frayed blue denim suddenly approached me. ‘Are you Nick Kent?’ the figure enquired; he seemed to be on speed and was also suffering from one of the most pungent outbreaks of body odour my nose had ever encountered. When I replied in the affirmative, he added, ‘Well, if you write any better than what I’ve read of yours lately, I’m going to seriously have to
consider breaking your hands.’ This was my first-ever conversation with Charles Shaar Murray, my soon-to-be collaborator at the
New Musical Express
.