12. Captain BeefheartSafe As Milk
Beefheart is like a completely instinctive, weird pirate. It seems like the way he worked on the first albums made him quite difficult to work with. Zappa had trouble working with him and so did his band. His strange way of working was not musical, it is like it came from a different place. You had to unlearn things. The musicians were being made to play in ways they hadn’t before. I love all that. It sounds unlearned or unwritten.
You don’t want to smell the technique – you don’t want to smell the musicianship, much as I spent a lot of my youth trying to learn the technical wizardry. More and more I find it less appealing – because there is the sense that anyone can do that. You can get really good at playing fast, or drawing in perspective, there is a level of ability that is in the end pointless. Something like Beefheart, you can’t get a formula together to write like that.
With modern music, it can feel very so brilliantly made, produced, written, the structure and musicianship is so incredible even if it has digital finessing on it. It can feel dead somehow and I like the aliveness of Beefheart. The warts and all.
Beefheart has his own genre. And I love his lyrics and his voice – it evokes a certain time. In my mind, I suppose, it’s a fictional funny seventies. I grew up in Leeds, so I got to remember the desert!
