Christmas 2010: Of Bootstraps and Beefheart

by Jim Washburn

T’was the week before Christmas, when all through the House

The lame ducks just languished in the Republican rout,

The stockholders had vetted the candidates with care,

To get vexatious regulations out of their hair,

Their funds were all nestled inside of a hedge,

In hopes that democracy soon would be dead.

 

Mama’s accelerating Camry, and my salmonella cluck

Are now sharing a mug of shit out of luck,

‘Cause in the halls of Congress there is such a clatter,

To gut legislation ’til it no longer matters,

For killer cars, collapsed mines and food that is trash,

The addressing of which isn’t good for the cash,

Flow they adore more than the baby Jesus,

Away in a manger where the Arabs displease us.

 

Why, what to my wondering eyes should appear,

But a tea-stained rabble and orange John Boehner,

On a mission from God he tearfully came,

And whistled and shouted and called them by name,

“Now, birther! Now, Bachman! Now, Palin and Paul!

 Let’s tear it all down and Gipper it all!”

Visions of bootstraps now dance in their heads,

And smokestacks and cutbacks and a new hunt for Reds,

They took to the air, yet the image does linger,

Of that crew one and all giving the finger,

To any not possessed of wealth or of might.

But to whom we here say,

Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

Sure, merry, happy, how ya doin’, but if you read a newspaper you can’t help noting that our holiday season has been marred by some folks actively lobbing turds into the nation’s eggnog reserves.

Along with continuing to threaten the START treaty, Congressional Republicans in the past week have blocked new mining regulations, despite 25 West Virginia miners who could testify to the need for those regulations, except they died in a mine in April. Since then the Republicans also decided to ignore the thousands who were sickened by tainted eggs this year, and have blocked new food safety regulations. And while they were all for new auto safety regulations earlier this year—after rampant Toyotas killed all those folks—they’ve this week backed away from their previous position so quickly they hit a Pinto and it exploded.

But enough of that. I just heard today that one of my heroes died, Don Van Vliet, a.k.a Captain Beefheart, at age 69 from complications of multiple sclerosis. “Genius” is an overused word, but that’s what Don was. His sometimes musical partner Frank Zappa was a very, very clever musician who worked very hard, but Don? He just pulled brilliance out of a hat. He saw the world differently, and was able to bend reality with music and paint to make others see it that way.

It doesn’t take much argument to assert that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is irrelevant, and no more so than in its ignoring Beefheart. It’s like leaving Bunuel or Fellini out of the history of film, or Dali and Picasso out of an accounting of 20th Century art.

Trout Mask Replica is justly hailed in many quarters as an iconoclastic masterwork, a sprawling, two-album sketchbook that pushes at every inch of the freedom rock and roll music promised. But my favorite albums were Lick My Decals Off, Baby and Clear Spot.

The former terrifies me, in a wholly good way, like heading into a jungle where you never know what’s going to come at you. To some ears—certainly those of a profusion of ex-girlfriends—the album sounds abrasive and psychotic. I hear something else.

I did acid a few times, back when it was a Humanities Core requirement, and one of those times it was some speedy, creepy stuff that just wouldn’t wear off. I felt like I was losing my mind. So I put on Decals. What I heard didn’t seem like chaos, but, rather, it seemed like the musical version of a forest floor, crawling with tangled roots and vines, alive with tendrils and lichen. And it helped pull me back to earth. The music was also an example that the human mind can go pretty far out there and still hold it together.

I love Clear Spot because it is an all-out, quixotic assault on the FM radio sensibility. Paired with Warner Bros. producer Ted Templeman—who was soon to helm hits by Van Halen and the Doobie Bros.—Beefheart and his Magic Band crafted an album that is as surreal and strange as all get out while rocking like a son of a bitch. The guy could sing like Howlin’ Wolf, and his band could take the most intricate, jagged lines and swing them. They really tried to make an album normal people could like, but it still sounded like blues from the canals of Mars.

I got that album for Christmas in 1972, one of my favorite presents ever, and saw Beefheart and the Magic Band for a couple of nights at the Troubadour not long after. These many years later, it is still some of the most vivid and magical music I’ve ever heard. That’s when he had the fabulous Zoot Horn Rollo and Rockette Morton on guitars, along with bassist Roy Estrada and drummer Art Trip, who’d recently jumped ship from the Mothers of Invention to play with Beefheart.

Beefheart could evidently be a real son of a bitch. I’ve heard of great acts of kindness on his part, but he was also known for locking band members in a shed in the desert heat to make them practice, then browbeating them for hours on the correct way to hold a cigarette. But somehow the result was one of the greatest bands on earth.

He had subsequent, less magical Magic Bands, but was sufficiently fed up with the music industry by the mid-1980s that he quit music for good to concentrate on his painting, which was also pretty swell. Suffering from MS, he eventually drifted out of the public eye if not out of many of our hearts.

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