Issue 83 / November 2017

CAPTAIN
BEEFHEART –
TOTAL ART
The Zig Zag Wanderer’s legacy as a total artist is celebrated with a weekend of events across
the city, exploring his groundbreaking music, writing and art, as well as his links to Liverpool.
An artist whose influence on Liverpool music and
culture has impacted successive generations, the
work of CAPTAIN BEEFHEART continues to inspire
legions of Merseyside acts. While the UK as a whole
was far more receptive to his work than his American homeland,
sending Trout Mask Replica and Lick My Decals Off, Baby into
the album charts, in Liverpool especially, his music along with
that of fellow stalwarts Pink Floyd and Love are highly treasured.
Tracing a clear line from The La’s in the early 1980s through to
The Stairs at the beginning of the 1990s on to The Coral and The
Zutons at the dawn of the millennium (the latter deriving their
name from guitarist Zoot Horn Rollo), all have drawn inspiration
from the artistic output of the man born Don Glen Vliet. The same
trend has continued over the past decade too, with a.P.A.t.T., The
Cubical and present day noiseniks Rongorongo and Pale Rider
extrapolating the Beefheartian legacy in some form or another.
The multitude of genres these outfits scan and the devotion to
his records showcase how strongly Beefheart’s music permeates
Liverpool culturally.
CAPTAIN BEEFHEART WEEKEND, an upcoming celebration
of his work programmed by The Bluecoat in early November, will
see a handful of events come together in perfect synergy. Held to
commemorate the 45th anniversary of Beefheart’s first ever art
exhibition at The Bluecoat in 1972, the weekend coincides with
the venerable institution’s 300th birthday. Beefheart’s estimable
backing group THE MAGIC BAND also call at the Philharmonic
Hall as part of their last ever tour to round off proceedings.
In addition to celebrating his music, his art and his lesser
known work as a writer through poetry, a symposium titled
DIGGING BEEFHEART, exploring his work as a ‘total artist’ will
discuss his works and will doubtless explore just why Beefheart
is so popular in Liverpool. A meeting to tackle all the above is
convened with Bryan Biggs, artistic director of The Bluecoat and
independent curator Kyle Percy, who, alongside poet and writer
Chris McCabe, are organizers of the weekend’s events. “I got
into Beefheart in London as a teenager and then when I came to
work at Bluecoat I discovered that he had an exhibition here in
1972,” Bryan explains, sat in a room overlooking the arts centre’s
gardens. “We had a little bit of information in the archive, not
a lot, and I had tried to do an exhibition quite a few years ago.
What we’re doing is condensing it into a weekend, him as an
artist, musician, performer, writer. It proved difficult to do as an
exhibition cos the gallery that looks after his estate don’t wanna
play cos they see him as Don Van Vliet – painter, not as Captain
Beefheart – multitalented musician. We could do an exhibition of
his paintings exactly as they are without anything else, but we
couldn’t do this bigger thing.”
“Chris McCabe came to see me a few years ago and said, ‘It’s
45 years since he had the exhibition at Bluecoat, why don’t we
try and do an event?’ So, we talked through some ideas and then
we brought Kyle [Percy] in, who had previously contacted when
he was a student when he was doing his final dissertation on
Beefheart. So, the three of us met and we hatched this plan to do a
concentrated weekend that looked at Beefheart as all those things.”
The 1972 exhibition in Liverpool formed part of possibly
Beefheart’s most productive year. Alongside the event at The
Bluecoat, he toured and issued two albums, The Spotlight Kid in
January and Clear Spot that October. “The show he had here in
1972 was a bit of a freak really,” Biggs explains. “It was ten years
before he became an artist properly. Lucy Cullen, who was the
then artistic director of The Bluecoat, had seen Beefheart on The
Old Grey Whistle Test with his paintings when it was leading
up to his ’72 tour… he said he’d never shown his work and she
wondered whether he’d show it in Liverpool since he was doing a
gig here at The Stadium. It was turned around very, very quickly.
We’ve got some of the letters and telegrams with his agent in
Los Angeles and the work was shipped over to Liverpool. It may
have been shown in London after that, but Liverpool was the first
showing.”
“He occupies a weird position because he’s known principally
as a musician and I think the art world distance themselves from
him a bit,” Biggs continues. “The art world is mainly about fashion
and what he was doing was quite an old-fashioned approach,
expressionist painting, a bit after the event. What makes it
interesting is he’s got this wild approach, a bit like his music; it’s
untutored.”
While Beefheart is principally known for his music, art was
his first love, as Percy explains. “He could have had a scholarship
when he was a kid in Europe to study sculpture but his Mum
and Dad didn’t want him to go. He had a prodigious art talent,
without ever having any training, then he met Frank Zappa and
the rest is history. I think it’s that period in culture when ordinary
folks could get into the arts and do stuff, slightly outside of the
mainstream.” Like most, Biggs and Percy discovered Beefheart’s
artwork through his contributions to his album sleeves, Biggs
citing the back cover of 1970 LP Lick My Decals Off, Baby as the
first he remembers.
“It must have
an edge in
Liverpool
because that
is the nature of
the city”
Dave Keight, one of the founders of Probe Records with
Geoff Davies, who also met Beefheart, will be speaking at the
Symposium. “Probe Records is very, very important,” Biggs
stresses. “Dave was saying that Trout Mask Replica was the
‘Record of the Shop’, so if you associated Probe with one record
of that period it would be that. They were real proselytizers for
this music.”
“The Casual scene in the early 1980s was about finding
something different – clothes and music,” Percy continues. “A lot
of the fellas I know in their fifties who were around back then,
they made a point of looking out for more obscure music to say,
‘Look what we’re into’. It was a subculture of the city.”
Gig promoter and DJ Roger Eagle, a figure who was the
wellspring for scores of music scenes in Liverpool, was a crucial
element in Beefheart becoming popular in the city. Friends
with the Captain after booking him for a score of appearances,
Eagle’s influence continued when, after ceasing operations at
the Stadium in 1976, he founded legendary club Eric’s with Ken
Testi and Pete Fulwell just as punk began to surface. “Even at the
height of punk when all that music had been rejected, groups like
Can, Beefheart, Love, Mothers Of Invention were really popular
still with the DJs in Eric’s,” Biggs states. “People like Pete Wylie,
who went down there as a young disaffected kid into The Clash,
he got all this stuff about Beefheart and dub music from Roger,
so he’s really pivotal.”
Celebrating Beefheart’s oft forgotten work as a writer,
Liverpool-born poet Chris McCabe presents the Doped In
Stunned Mirages strain of the weekend. “Chris came up with the
idea to commission a poet to come up with a response to each of
the albums,” Biggs explains. “It’ll be inter-generational, featuring
performers from their 70s to people in their 20s,” he notes. The
youngest performer, Matty Smith, founder of the Jarg poetry
fanzine, will be also producing a special edition to tie in with the
celebration.
Beefheart’s backing group The Magic Band have kept the
weird flame burning since the Captain died in 2010, and they
make a fitting pitstop at the Phil on Friday 10th November as
part their final ever tour. The following evening then sees the
city’s denizens step up to the plate as Fast ‘N’ Bulbous takes
place at District in the Baltic Triangle. A stellar cast of Beefheart
aficionados spanning a smorgasbord of styles are slated to take
part, including Edgar Jones And The New Joneses, Strange
Collective, Dave McCabe, Psycho Comedy, The Cubical, a.P.A.t.T.,
Pale Rider and Karm, alongside a special appearance by former
Magic Band guitarist Gary Lucas. Rounding off the weekend at
the Invisible Wind Factory on Sunday, an exhibition of artists
inspired by Beefheart work’s titled Ice Cream For Crow will be on
show, alongside performances from music from Inland Taipa, The
Murmurists, and John Hyatt’s Plastic Reality.
When they formed in the 1980s, The La’s provided a window
for many into Beefheart’s music, ultimately inspiring renewed
interest in the Captain’s work. Solo musician and artist Mike
Badger, who is part of the Beefheart Symposium and co-founded
the group with Lee Mavers, takes up the story. “It was 1981 I had
gone to see a Wyndham Lewis Exhibition at Manchester City Art
Gallery and Beefheart was in the foyer swearing at his sketch
book as he drew. I thought I must talk to this guy, so I asked if I
could see his sketches, which were angular, freeform abstractions
but with figures and animal shapes. We talked for about 20-30
minutes and we hit it off. I was 19, he was sage, compassionate,
friendly and a character you could never forget.
“It was confirmation of those deep-rooted feelings you have,
it made me feel less isolated and that other people thought
outside the box too!” Badger continues. “I dug out all I could
read about the man, and his interviews, philosophy and thinking
was just as important to me as his music. He confirmed with me
a deep-rooted primal understanding that’s in all of us but was
latent.”
As someone who has seen Beefheart’s legacy continue in the
city long after he retired from music in 1992, Badger has a theory
on why he was such an impact on Liverpool. “It says a great deal
about the psyche of the city. It’s a melting pot Liverpool, as all
great ports are. We need something with depth and meaning
here for it to satisfy our needs. You could also say that about
another great Liverpool talismanic band – Love. Both Beefheart
and Love, though different in many ways, created beautiful
gentle music as well as fraught, cutting masterpieces. It must
have an edge in Liverpool because that is the nature of the city.
Remember Captain Beefheart writ large on a wall at the bottom
of Park Road in the 90s? I doubt you’d see that anywhere else –
not just in this country, but the world.” !
Words: Richard Lewis
Illustration: Tim Devas / @timdevas
Captain Beefheart Weekend takes place between Friday 10th
and Sunday 12th November at various venues across the city.
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