captain beefheart's safe as milk
DON "CAPTAIN BEEFHEART" VAN VILET
january 15, 1941 – december 17, 2010
r.i.p.
i've decided to do a Captain Beefheart album review. not to honor his death, mind you, but to celebrate his life and the indelible texas-sized smoldering crater he left on the face of pop music.
(...as i am writing this, the word 'review' becomes less-and-less accurate. this is more of a booze-soaked rant than an album review. a long-winded tangent, both ludicrous and grotesque, in true Beefheart form...)
i think i loved his music before i ever heard a single note. his influence on countless great artists is nothing short of remarkable. that low-down vocal growl and the blues-soaked sensibilities you hear in post-1980 Tom Waits, for instance, or the grease-monkey grunge and angular rhythms of early PJ Harvey, or how about the out-of-this-world absurdity of the Pixies' lyrics...or, better yet, the one-part-progressive two-parts-regressive musical style of the White Stripes that's on the one hand, as cutting-edge as the space-age while, on the other hand, still knee-deep in the muck of the delta-blues swampland. this is one hell of a legacy Captain Beefheart has left behind. i think Tom Waits said it best:
'once you've heard Beefheart's music, it's hard to wash him out of your clothes.
it stains, like coffee or blood.'
ok, so the album in question is his debut Safe As Milk, one of his more (and i use this term loosely) accessible albums. don't get me wrong, it's out-there alright, but it's still within reach of the casual music listener. a perfect stepping stone into the utter chaos and absurdity of Beefheart's later work, like the infamous Trout Mask Replica. you've gotta crawl before you can walk, after all, and listening to this album is kinda like musical calisthenics prepping you for the grueling triathlon to come. riding with training wheels, so to speak.
BEWARE:
jumping right into an album like Trout Mask is downright dangerous. first you need training. you can't expect to circumnavigate the whitewater rapids of its stream-of-conscious rhythms or traverse the steep slopes of its densely-layered electro-blues polyphony right off the bat. no, many great minds have been blown that way. to grasp the colossal mindfuck that is Captain Beefheart is no easy feat. it takes careful study, constant practice, and, yes, repeated listenings of Safe As Milk is a must.
this album certainly paints a picture, but not like your budding van gogh or wannabe picasso would, not by a long shot. it paints not with delicate brush strokes, painstaking attention to detail, or a subtle palate of colors. it paints a picture like an avant-garde artist would, by hurling entire cans of paint angrily at the canvas, stabbing violently at it with a broken brush, lunging nude and paint-covered at the picture full-force, and when the paint runs out, smearing the canvas with the artist's own blood, hurling putrid buckets of fecal-matter onto the grotesque dripping masterpiece, until the starving artist finally collapses utterly exhausted into a sweaty heap on the grimy cigarette-littered floor of his/her studio apartment.
yeah, this album's so post-modern it's post-mortem. so post-modern it's compost-modern. in one word, SAVAGE. this is an album that, once you've heard it, you can't unhear it. no amount of easy-listening jazz or the coma-inducing muzak of Enya can rinse this twisted audio-mung from your ears. it festers in your brain, swelling like a tapeworm until it becomes a part of you and you're infinitely better for it.
to call this album blues-infused would be putting it lightly.
this is electric-neon blues incarnate.
THIS...IS...THE DELTA-BLUES ON STEROIDS!
drenched in muddy waters, it reeks of testosterone, from the gravelly two-pack-a-day vocals of Beefheart, to the macho punches of the bassist, like some deranged prize-fighter past his prime shadow-boxing amidst the heavy tumult of the scatterbrained tribal rhythms of the drums. hell, even the guitars have five-o'clock shadow. when combined, they mold a sound so dense, so heavy and distorted, it sounds like how a juiced-up bodybuilder looks: grotesquely muscular, blue veins bulging, muscles twitching.
yes, the whole album's bluer than a mississippi-delta barroom at midnight, but none so bluesy as track 11: Grown So Ugly, a raunchy lopsided blues number. a Robert Pete Williams cover that's shed its humbler cotton-pickin country-stylings in favor of a fuzzboxed day-glo instrumentation. a cover that's been possessed by the devil. electrified-radioactive-subterranean-mutant-blues.
some simple-minded listener might call this album psychedelic, when nothing could be further from the truth. it's not so much psychedelic as it is purely PSYCHOTIC. psycho-delic, if you will. as manic-depressive as music can get. take, for example, the out-and-out 'roid rage of Dropout Boogie's super-distorted blues that rampages for a few verses until, out of nowhere...
a giddy little harp plucks out a dulcet waltz
smack dab in the middle of it all,
smack dab in the middle of it all,
like some beethoven scherzo,
a sick joke, undermining the black-out rage
of Dropout's fierce boogie
a sick joke, undermining the black-out rage
of Dropout's fierce boogie
...and then, to take such a ninety-degree turn from this gruff-albeit-bipolar blues to the slow bubble-gum doo-wop ballad I'm Glad is freakin' schizo. it happens so fast and so sudden you get whiplash for christ's sake.
yeah, this album's so batshit-crazy that if it killed you in cold-blood, a jury of it's peers would vote unanimously and find it not guilty by reason of insanity...and all things considered, this album is, believe it or not, relatively sane in comparison to Beefheart's later works, like Trout Mask &co., which would embody the raving lunatic off his meds, as opposed to on them. and yes, its rather odd title couldn't be further from the truth. it IS safe as milk at least when compared to the full-moon lunacy of the albums to come, but that's not saying much. in reality, it's about as safe as milk to someone whose lactose-intolerant or, god forbid, lactophobic.
alright, Walt Whitman, quick say something inspiring and profound so i can end this review on a high-note...
O CAPTAIN! My Captain! Our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
godspeed, Captain Beefheart, we salute you.
