- 17 June 2006
- 14,350
“…He walked on stage calmly, with the sober, knowing, probably more than resigned air of a man who has been there and back, seen the whole cycle and ended up just about where he started out. You see lots of ageing musicians with that look: it’s tired and very, very set. But it’s not as cynical as it seems or probably should be: it even carries a certain taint of majesty, the kind of authority or even wisdom built up by hard dues paid steadily, boringly, soul-crushingly, on the road, in bars, waking up in strange rooms in the middle of the night and not even knowing what country you’re in; never having enough money and having to do gigs you loathe just to get enough to try to catch up for once; countless nights lying awake, knowing that – though you’ve put out a dozen brilliant records and have fanatical fans around the world – it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference…: because there’s no new record coming out and they ‛ve been deleting all the old ones steadily.
At least, I thought, he doesn’t look pathetic. He looked very good – in fact: very strong – in a dark brown suede hat from a bandito movie. The lines in his face and his air of solemn assurance were saying that unlike most rock ’n’ rollers he wears his age very well. But then: he was never a rock ‛n’ roller, was he? Perhaps part of the trouble with public acceptance of the man’s music was that he always resisted easy pigeonholing…his band set up, plugged in – all new young kids, not an original magic bandman in the lot. They’re dressed kind of funny: one wears a sort of priest’s robe – like in the old days, though not so freakish.
They began to play: it started with one guitar player, whanging out a jangling, angular solo. A kind of wave seemed to roll across the room – everyone at my table felt it, at any rate – a tidal blast of recognition in dank centres in the mind and heart long since shut down, stirring as of some love supreme rekindled. Then the whole band began to play, rolling at and ricocheting off each other in that familiar beloved paradox of how such caterwauling cacophony can be so tight, packed with swing and rock solid as oak, broad enough to span decades on end, slithering up to recoil off the banshee blares and hottentot honks of the captain’s soprano sax from which he hurls the most monstrous growly reptiles.
And just when you think it can’t get any more intense, he begins to sing – no: bellow like a bull in heat, caw like a crow, laugh like a wolf one half second from tearing his prey to shreds, growl like a bear, then grunt and snort like a hog. As we whooped and cheered and beat our beer bottles on the table – when we weren’t agape in astonishment – we might have wondered how long it had been in these poisonously sterile times since we had seen a stage full of humans who played like beasts? Who threw themselves with such animal gusto into what they were doing that they fell out of themselves entirely and into a collective riptide with a momentum of it own?
Here take this, New York, and all you cats that sit around practicing at raising one weary unflappable eyebrow because you think nothing can ever knock you off your cool highchair again. Because this was it: the real raw-faced unalloyed hoodoo devil jive-drive – which felt even better because for some stupid reason we hadn’t expecting it at all. Yet there it was, naked and looking for nothing but trouble.“
Lester Bangs: The Kook Who Fell To Earth (Growing Up with Captain Beefheart) - NME, 27/11/1977
Don Van Vliet
15/1/1941 - 17/12/2010
