You go down Zepp Street, you go down Beatle Alley, you can roll with The Stones, or go all Claptonese for a time, and never find The Cure, but there sure comes this moment when you say, I think I've had enough of this kind of noise!
When I first heard Captain Beefheart, it was shortly before the man's demise, and I was dismayed. I put 'Trout Mask Replica' on, it was in my apartment, and the year was 2010. And there it was, all this wonderful craziness pouring out of my speakers. These idiosyncratic polysemantics. The lovely idiotisms to clear your ears of cob-web. And I felt betrayed, 'cause what I heard was what I did, to much popular disclaim, some 20 years before. I didn't know at the time that someone else in America had already covered the area I was mapping out here in Russia.
Had I heard Trout Mask Replica then, I would have been gone.
What prevented us from going bollocks was the fact that everybody else was bollocks. And our war-cry was, I'm not like everybody else. Thus, the defensive side of you chokes eventually what makes you creative. You either die, or become like Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd.
Everybody was saying, you are not singing in tune, this is home minimalism. We have never made it to the recording studio, because we didn't have the push. And all the Epsteins or McLarens were busy elsewhere. So, we dropped it at that. This is why you don't have us in your speakers, but Captain Beefheart, and he's not singing today.
It's a sad thing. It's like you died, and come back, and nobody speaks, 'cause everybody had been dead a long time before you keeled over. Not that I'm angry about it, or anything.
Don Van Vliet, a.k.a. Captain Beefheart, died on Friday, December 17, 2010. He WOULD have played his way out of this world on a Friday, some weeks short of his 70th birthday, to be remembered by the few who ought to know better.