Captain Beefheart

California, 1968. The tyrannical Captain Beefheart keeps his Magic Band for eight months in a house in the San Fernando Valley, LA. The windows are blacked out. One of them is allowed to leave once a week to get food. They spend 12 hours a day rehearsing a new album. If Beefheart thinks one of them isn’t good enough, he puts them ‘in the barrel’, psychologically abusing them until they break down. (Later, he threw his drummer down some stairs after he failed to ‘play a strawberry’.)

By the time the band got into the studio, they knew the material so well they recorded the 80-minute album in four and a half hours. However, when Trout Mask Replica was released, many people were confused. It sounded like a tuneless, out-of-time jam session. However, Beefheart had carefully worked out these arrangements, and this was exactly what he wanted them to sound like.

Trout Mask is what many people will remember Beefheart for, but he also made some much more listenable music. His first album, Safe as Milk, is a very pleasant half-hour of blues rock.

Similarly, his albums The Spotlight Kid and Clear Spot are fantastic, and only a little odd.

His later efforts were even less surreal, and not very good. After releasing Unconditionally Guaranteed, he advised buyers to ‘take copies back for a refund’. Beefheart gave up making music in 1982, as he was hoping to be taken seriously as a painter.

He always had an interest in other types of art, and was sculpting from the age of four. Born Don Glen Vliet in California, 1941, he was a childhood friend of Frank Zappa, who described Beefheart’s childhood thus: “part of the time Don was helping out by taking over [his father’s] bread truck route, driving up to Mojave, and the rest of the time he would just sit at home and listen to rythym and blues records and scream at his mother to get him a Pepsi.”

Before founding the Magic Band in 1964, Beefheart worked as a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. He claimed to have tried to sell one to Aldous Huxley with the line: “Well I assure you sir, this thing sucks.” However, Beefheart made a lot of unlikely claims. For example, he said he taught his band how to play their own instruments, and recorded an album worth of material with Miles Davis.

Beefheart used to sign any contract put in front of him, without reading it. This meant that in the mid 70s, he was in a legal mess, and not allowed to record anything. Zappa helped Beefheart out by taking him on tour. During their shows, Beefheart sang a bit, but would mostly sit on stage drawing in his sketchbook.

By the time of his death last year, Beefheart had become well respected for his paintings. Fans of his music can’t have been at all surprised that his style of painting was very abstract.

What to hear... Trout Mask Replica, Safe as Milk, The Spotlight Kid, Clear Spot

Why... If you can bear to sit through his albums the first few times, you’ll be a lifelong fan

A brief history of the blues

Mississippi, 1903. Musician WC Handy is waiting for a delayed train, and trying to sleep. He notices a man singing and playing guitar, using a knife to bar the frets. In a mournful style, he repeats the lyric: ‘Goin’ where the southern cross the dog’. It was an obscure reference to a railway crossing in Moorhead, Mississippi.

This is the first written record we have of the blues, though it is much older. The genre originated among southern slaves sometime in the 19^th century. Though its early history is not known, it was clearly influenced by the West African tradition of musical storytellers (‘Griots’), and early African-American religious songs.

The blues style developed in plantation fields, as slaves sang to pass the time, motivate themselves, and express their feelings. These tunes had simple ‘call and response’ patterns, and were strongly rythmic, even though they had no instrumental backing.

Having ‘discovered’ the blues, WC Handy helped popularise it, publishing the first blues tune, Memphis Blues, in 1912. It was recorded two years later: 

However, Mamie Smith’s 1920 hit Crazy Blues is considered the first proper blues record:

This sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and encouraged other record labels to cash in on the genre. In the early years, labels would often give blues artists a jazzy backing band, and censor their lyrics. Fortunately, many legendary blues artists escaped this treatment, leaving a vast body of one-man-one-guitar blues masterpieces. Blind Willie McTell, Mississippi John Hurt, and Leadbelly are particularly memorable. Among the women, it’s Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey who stand out as early pioneers.

The next major development in blues was another move away from acoustic solo work. A group of bluesmen in Chicago, faced with noisy audiences, started playing electric guitar and using a backing band. Muddy Waters is generally credited with starting this movement with his 1948 hit I Just Can’t be Satisfied.

The guitar/bass/drums combination used by the Chicago bluesmen was borrowed by almost every major rock band, most of whom were heavily influenced by the blues. It has a good claim to being the most influential genre of all time.

The last word goes to George Carlin: “White people have no business playing the blues ever, at all, under any circumstances. Ever, ever, ever. What the fuck to white people have to be blue about? Banana Republic ran out of khakis?... The espresso machine is jammed? ...Hootie and the Blowfish are breaking up?”

A history of sampling

San Francisco, 1964. A Christian preacher called Brother Walter is talking about Noah:

“He began to warn the people. He said: after a while, it’s gonna rain after a while. For 40 days and for 40 nights, and the people din’ believe him. And they begin to laugh at him, and they begin to mock him, and they begin to say it aint gon’ rain.”

Anyone else might have ignored him, but Steve Reich was interested enough to record it on two tape recorders he was carrying. He then took a short section of the speech, and put it in a repeating loop. He set two loops playing at once, and made one go gradually out of sync. This created a fascinating and revolutionary piece of music; It’s Gonna Rain (1965).

The next year, he made Come Out, using a recording from the police testimony of Daniel Hamm, who had been involved in the 1964 Harlem Race Riots. 

These pieces sealed Reich’s reputation as an innovative composer, but he was not the first to use sampling. That honour falls to Pierre Shaeffer. In 1948, he produced a series of pieces called Five Studies of Noises. Here’s the first:

Another early figure was the Karlheinz Stockhausen, who often used ‘found sounds’ in his compositions, or came up with other ways to use non-musical noises, such as helicopter whirring.

These classical musicians’ experiments were all a bit weird, and sampling took a while to catch on in other genres. No pop musicians used sampling until John Kongos included a recording of African tribal drumming in his 1971 hit He’s Gonna Step on you Again:

In 1981, two innovative albums made heavy use of sampling. The Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Technodelic, and David Byrne and Brian Eno’s superb My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Eno sampled recordings of an angry radio host, an exorcist, a preacher, and Muslim chants, and Byrne added funky guitar backing in the studio.

Nowadays people would rightly associate sampling with hip-hop artists, who mostly sample other songs. A personal favourite is DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing, the first entirely sampled album.

Brian Eno

London, 1975. Brian Eno is crossing Harrow Road, and gets hit by a taxi. He spends several months in hospital, hardly able to move. A friend brings him a CD of some Renaissance harp music, puts it on, and leaves. The speakers aren’t very good, and it’s raining heavily, so Eno can hardly hear the music. Unable to reach the record player, he decides to listen anyway. As the quiet harp music blends with the rain, he thinks the effect is quite nice. He decided music doesn’t need to grab the attention, but can just hangs around in the background, creating an ambience. He calls it ambient music, and a genre is born.

Oddly, the master of subtle background music started out as a glam rocker. After art college he played synthesiser with Roxy Music for their fantastic first two albums. In a band of poor dressers, he managed to stand out as easily the worst. He’s on the far left in this video:

After Eno left Roxy, the band became fairly dull, while Eno released a trio of stunning solo albums. The first was Roxy-ish glam rock, but in the second and third he started moving towards a more downbeat style:

He is perhaps best known for his atmospheric ambient music, which is sometimes written for a specific purpose: in 1978 he released Music for Airports, and then Music for Films. He also wrote the Windows 95 theme tune. In a 1996 interview, he explained:

“The thing from the agency said, ‘We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah- blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional’, this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said ‘and it must be 3 1/4 seconds long.’”

As well as making his own music, Eno has been a serial collaborator and producer since the 70s. He produced three Talking Heads albums, helped on Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy (Low, Heroes and Lodger), and has made seven albums with U2.

Nowadays he experiments with ‘generative art’, sings in a gospel choir (though he’s an atheist), and is still making and producing music.

Why to hear... He invented a genre. He also made some pretty fantastic music in genres which already existed.

What to hear... For Your Pleasure (Roxy Music), Taking Tiger Mountain, Another Green World, Music for Airports

Frank Zappa

London, 1971. A Royal Albert Hall employee named Marion Herrod cancels a sold-out Frank Zappa gig, after hearing that his material is obscene. Zappa sues for breach of contract, and ends up in the Old Bailey, being questioned at length about several lyrics, including the line “I’ll buy you a taste and you can sit on my face.”

Judge: [Is that] a sensual reference?

Zappa: Not necessarily. It could indicate a piggyback ride in an unusual position.

Judge: Are you being serious?

Zappa: Certainly

Zappa’s lyrics were often filthy, and his songs can be very funny. His song titles are often better. For example: Why Does it Hurt When I Pee?; Help, I’m a Rock; and Evelyn, a Modified Dog.

However, Zappa was a serious musician, and even his joke songs are musically interesting. His work touches on the many genres which inspired him, from RnB and doo wop to avant-garde classical music. When he was 15, he used his birthday money to phone the 72-year-old experimental composer Edgard Varese. What they talked about will remain a mystery.

Zappa’s first few albums, with the Mothers of Invention, were trippy pop records which quickly became a hit among hippies. They may not have realised, but Zappa’s albums were actually mocking hippy culture, particularly their drug-taking, which he hated.

Because his music was so unusual, many assumed Zappa was high most of the time, but in fact he had only smoked weed a few times. He said it gave him a sore throat and made him sleepy. He never tried harder drugs, and banned his backing musicians from using drugs while on tour. In Zappa’s view, “when Americans consume drugs they are instantly transformed from regular, normal human beings into raging assholes.”

Zappa was born in Baltimore, 1940, but moved to California aged 10. He played in his school marching band and composed for the school orchestra. After school, he wrote scores for B movies. During this period, a policeman entrapped him into making an audio recording of fake sex noises, and he served ten days in prison for ‘conspiracy to commit pornography’.

Perhaps it was this experience which made Zappa a passionate opponent of censorship. In 1985, he vigorously opposed the campaign to put age certificates on music with explicit lyrics. Zappa called the idea “an ill-conceived piece of nonsense [which is] the equivalent of treating dandruff by decapitation.”

Zappa was a keen political commentator, who encouraged people to take an interest in politics. On his 1988 tour, he brought electoral paperwork to shows, and told people to register to vote during the interval.

The following year, he was almost able to take on a more active political role. Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution put a Zappa fan in power. Vaclav Havel wanted to appoint Zappa as a special ambassador, but was unable to, allegedly because of pressure by the US government.

Zappa died in 1993 of prostate cancer. His final album was a bold move into purely classical music. Here he is conducting:

What to hear... We’re Only in it for the Money, Hot Rats, Joe’s Garage, One Size Fits All

Why... Zappa’s music is some of the most creative and unusual of the 20^th century. You’ll laugh, and be impressed

Philip Glass

New York, early 1970s. Art critic Robert Hughes walks into his kitchen and discovers that the man mending his dishwasher is minimalist composer Philip Glass. Hughes is stunned: ‘But you are an artist’, he says. Glass replies that he is an artist, but also ‘sometimes a plumber as well’. He asks Hughes to ‘go away and let me finish’.

Another time, Glass was working as a cab driver when a woman tapped on his window and said that he shared his name with a ‘very famous composer’.

Glass worked a string of normal jobs in New York before he finally started making a living as a musician, aged 42. It’s not surprising that he struggled to make money: his music is odd, and not always accessible. During part of his opera Einstein on the Beach, the singers recite numbers at random. Einstein is five hours long, and has no interval. One of its pieces uses this repeated lyric:

“I was in this prematurely air conditioned supermarket and there were all these aisles and there were these bathing caps you could buy that had these kind of Fourth of July plumes on them that were red and yellow and blue and I wasn't tempted to buy one but I was reminded of the fact that I had been avoiding the beach.”

Another opera, Akhnaten has lyrics in Akkadian (an extinct Middle Eastern language) and Ancient Egyptian.

As well as art music, Glass has become well known for his film scores, including The Hours and Kundun. His best is probably Koyaanisqatsi, for Godfrey Reggio’s 90-minute slowmotion photography film.

Born in Baltimore in 1937, Glass was classically trained at the Julliard School of Music, but his style radically changed after he met Ravi Shankar and learned the techniques of Indian music.

Glass’ pieces are made mostly of patterns of repeated arpeggios evolving slowly over time. It’s extremely repetitive. Writing about Glass, his collaborator Robert Wilson wrote:

Phil is Philip is this is Phil is Phil is is this and this Phil is so so clear Glass clear is to b clear as a/b clear this is Phil and his is this is this and that is is Phil for me

That about sums it up. You’ll love it or hate it.

What to hear... Music in Twelve Parts, Einstein on the Beach, Glassworks, Koyaanisqatsi

Why... Glass is a founding father of minimalism; his music can be extremely hypnotic and beautiful. If you only listen to three-minute chart hits, this could come as a real shock