Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band • Trout Mask Replica (Straight, 1969)

I completely missed the anniversary. Earlier this month, 40 years ago Frank Zappa summoned the Captain and his Magic Band to his home studio for a preview of their assembled album. Dressed in Sunday best (after all, it was Easter) intently they listened. The Captain was overjoyed, the Band relived. Perhaps now they would be free of his artistic and physical cruelty. A year of living in absolute poverty and under near cult like circumstances had payed off. Little could they imagine that in the years to come, in reverent awe, people would still speak of this work.
For as wild as free jazz was, and that by 1968/1969 it was perfectly OK to sit and play your bongos in the dirt, nothing sounded like this. Keeping to the credo of mutations, with their awkwardly placed limbs causing a shambling gate, causing fear and revulsion to all they encounter, the music has the same frightening assault on the senses. To the untrained ear the music sounds wrong. Clashing time signatures - every instrument sounds in conflict. The Captains wounded animal howling vocals laying lyrics that are products of schizophrenia yet are deeply insightful. Ironically they seem to be concerned about how mean humans can be to each other. This is just too much for dull minds...
There have been scores of musicians that have attempted to incorporate the Magic Band sound, but it just hasn't worked. What makes the playing here so unique is the amount of control that is cleverly disguised. To the untrained, this just seems like a sonic free for all. If it was it just wouldn't have worked.
Little hints of regular rhythm here and there, but the melding of free jazz and delta blues seems to obscure anything below the surface. But if you stick with it you'll get it, just throw out the preconceived notion of what comprises a song. This is the sound of nature. Anima does not compose straight lines, and that rule applies here. A melody may only need to play 7 bars even though the song is 24 long, but it works. Any more and there would be excess, and in reflection of the times when album tracks were getting longer and longer the songs are economical. Can you imagine any other band getting 28 pieces on a double album?
1969 was the watershed year for 60's wretchedness - Woodstock, the accession of the Grateful Dead come readily to mind, but thankfully we have from that year an album that transcended music and became art.

Please click on the review title for the track: Hair Pie I / untitled / dialog / Hobo Chang Ba. These were taped at the Trout Mask House when the album was to be recorded there as a "Ethnic Field Recording". While they lack Vliet's vocals, his absence shows how complex and almost Rites Of Spring like the music is.

Sun Dial • Other Way Out (Tangerine, 1990)

What are the elements of Deja Vu? It was once isolated to a fine gauze not unlike ectoplasm but some how less definite. As my colleagues and I finally were able to get the filament to materialize in the sterile confines of the glass tank, a cleaning person opened a window in the research facilities hallway and that very motion came a vague hint of a draft. With that seemingly insignificant action, the element was some how able to be whisked away and we were left with the feeling that we had seen this before, but couldn't tell why...

Sun Dial's Other Way Out album has that same quality. While released in 1990, with eyes closed you would swear that you were listening to a contemporary of early Pink Floyd or Czar. Didn't this band play U.F.O., why do I think I saw them open for The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown? I think I even have the concert poster around here some where, it was an Osiris production...

Their act of confounding time travel must be applauded. It was fashionable to embrace psychedelia then in idea, but the secrets of the kingdom was still slumbering. For as many portals were sighted, very few would open enough to let two people though at a time. Some how this three piece band was able to. The whole album reeks of a lived in past. Guitars are thick and intelligently distorted, real drums pound with conviction, straight forward bass playing, fazed vocals, and exotic flutes and percussion abound.

Knowing a good thing and being incredibly prolific in their first year of existence, head Sun Dial Guitarist Gary Raymond released a number of compilation tracks and reissued Other Way Out with different covers and track listings. Here is where things get confusing. No mention is made of what tracks were from the above mentioned compilations. As of 2006 Other Way Out is on its fourth reissue, now a double CD with the second disc containing outtakes and compilation tracks. The well know version of the album released on UFO Compact Discs was a relative contemporary of the Tangerine issue but had different mixes of the songs.

Either version is a stunning debut that very few pull off, and the lauding offered at the time was well earned. About the time of release, they made a short tour of the United States with The Fur and Skin Trading Club and I was lucky enough to see them. This would be I believe their only tour, and if they toured again in this configuration. Subsequent Sun Dial recording would have only Raymond as a mainstay and the quality of records suffers. His side project Quad continued the same lysergic quality that has made Other Way Out a perennial favorite among connoisseurs, but regretfully the Quad recordings were limited issues and are now hard to come by. Hopefully he will one day release them on CD.

Until then we still have these recordings to sit back and let the intangible element known as Deja Vu to caress your ears.

Please click on the review title for selected track: Plains Of Nazca take one