Captain Beefheart’s five easiest entry-level masterpieces
It’s absolutely fine for fans to have certain areas of music that simply defeat them. As much as a record might be heralded as the next coming of David Bowie or promises to set the world on fire, it’s only your choice about how it strikes you that determines whether it’s good or not. And compared to the other rock artists that have come before him, no other artist has made fairweather listeners collapse more than Captain Beefheart.
For his iconic status as one of the primary art rockers of his day, there are more than a few times when fans don’t get so much introduced to his music as much as they are shoved into it. Even with some fans that appreciate his music, it’s easy to admit that an album like Trout Mask Replica isn’t exactly for everyone, what with its spoken word passages and tangents that sound like people playing completely different songs.
However, there is a way to ease someone into everything properly. There might not be that many songs that stand out on first listen, but the minute that you hear the softer side of what Don Van Vliet can do, you start to appreciate the nuttier side of his music that much more, almost like it’s a gateway drug to the more outlandish stuff he would do later.
Whereas most people just see Beefheart as this eccentric weirdo that we all just accept for some reason, his approach feels closer to Tom Waits and Frank Zappa than just dissonant noise. If you were to sit with him for an extended period of time, the beauty starts to show itself a lot more gradually.
Captain Beefheart’s masterpieces:
5. ‘Willie The Pimp’ – Hot Rats
OK, so it may feel like cheating to include a Frank Zappa album on a list like this. Of all Zappa’s mainline works, Hot Rats already tends to get the most praise, sounding closer to a jazz fusion album than anything remotely connected with standard rock and roll. For the one track that does have vocals on it, Beefheart comes on to deliver the kind of Tom Waits growl for the ages, years before the piano-driven barfly even came on the scene.
While ‘Willie the Pimp’ is far from the most intelligent song in the world, Beefheart does at least have a sensible grasp of melody, almost twisting the words around in his mouth like he’s singing a guitar riff. Considering artists like Black Sabbath were just on the horizon, this feels like the natural progression when hard rock vocals start bleeding into heavy metal. And if you’re looking for an intro to Beefheart, getting Zappa to come along is the musical equivalent of putting broccoli into mac and cheese.
4. ‘Diddy Wah Diddy’ – single
No one really expects anything from Captain Beefheart to chart all that often. He may have had skills when it came time to go in the studio, but how are you supposed to make the case for a song like ‘Pena’ getting on the hit parade next to The Beatles? For a brief moment in time, Beefheart nearly managed to put together a second career as an R&B-infused hitmaker on ‘Diddy Wah Diddy’.
Taking the crux of the old Bo Diddley classic, Beefheart sounds like the kind of grizzly blues belter that was all the rage back in the late 1960s, almost as if you got someone like Robert Plant to inhale 50 cigarettes before telling him to go out and sing. That gravelly tone might be hard to understand in the context of Doc at the Radar Station, but this kind of thing was coming out of someone like Lemmy; no one would bat an eye.
3. ‘I’m Glad’ – Safe As Milk
When Captain Beefheart first rose to fame, rock was still just getting born. For all of the acts pointing the way forward for the genre, like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, ‘The Magic Band’ was concerned with making the kind of music that made people say, ‘What the hell was that?’ by the time the song was over. That doesn’t get people’s feet in the door, and when he first began, Mr Vliet was introduced with a bluesy stomp.
Safe As Milk may be the most commercially inclined Captain Beefheart album, but that doesn’t mean that it’s bad by any means. Across this song, there are riffs that feel like they could have come off an early Yardbirds record, as Beefheart starts getting used to the tone in his voice and how he will one day be shouting his brains once he finds his sound. We’re not in insane territory yet, but still a damn fine way to get everything going.
2. ‘Observatory Crest’ – Bluejeans and Moonbeams
For a man used to making artistic freakouts, how is something like this even possible? By the mid-1970s, most people either knew what Captain Beefheart was about and were along for the ride or got one taste of musical insanity and had more than their fill. And now here he comes in the middle of the age of soft rock with a song that actually feels like a lost relic from some long-lost singer-songwriter album.
From the opening strains of keyboards and orchestral strings, this sounds like it could have been something by any soft rocker of the day until Beefheart comes in with his gravelly tone. And the wildest part is he doesn’t actually sound that out of place, taking the medium of a pop song and managing to pull it off effectively. Other artistic weirdos may have tried getting freaky more than a few times, but considering how many strange detours Beefheart has gone down, this has to be the weirdest because of just how normal it sounds.
1. ‘Her Eyes Are a Blue Million Miles’ – Clear Spot
No one gets into a position like Captain Beefheart without having an eclectic taste in music. For all of the strange detours that he has taken his listener on, he would have to at least like more than a few genres to somehow smush all of them together every time he plays. Whereas the first albums saw him take on blues, ‘Her Eyes Are a Blue Million Miles’ is the first time it starts feeling like hard rock.
Since the guitars are tuned down just a little bit, Vliet’s guttural shriek on this song borders on Led Zeppelin territory, especially in the beginning, when he starts playing off the guitar and stretching his voice well beyond normal capabilities. Metal fans might be used to this sort of singing these days, but if you can appreciate what Beefheart brings to the table here, you’re in for a treat once you start to unpack the rest of their catalogue.