top ten albums - no. 10

Dear Sheddists,

I've always adored left-field artists, and they don't come more left-field than the late Don Van Vliet, AKA Captain Beefheart.

He burst onto the music scene in 1967 with the awesome debut, 'Safe as Milk' channeling the spirit of Howlin' Wolf on peyote.  Things got progressively weirder from then on in, culminating in 'Trout Mask Replica', widely regarded as the Captain's master-piece. 

I beg to differ.

Trout Mask is a fantastic mix of blues, rock, free-jazz, beat poetry and goodness knows what else but it lacks the beautiful love ballads for which the Captain had such a deft touch. The utterly brilliant, 'Clear Spot', combines both in a tightly scripted album produced by Ted Templeton. Its inter-locking drum patterns, slide guitars and the rich, deep voice of Beefheart combine in an album utterly sublime and almost totally ignored on its release. 

If you want to explore more of Don Van Vliet's amazing musical legacy try this documentary hosted by John Peel.  You won't be disappointed!

'Mister Zoot Horn Rollo, hit that long lunar note and let it float.'

Don Van Vliet 

(January 15, 1941 – December 17, 2010)

Tales from the Apocalypse - the wolf's eyelashes

He watched her like an animal - lycanthrope howls, needled and cooking up some fine free-base sun in the early hours.  He pined for her.

Every stretch, every shallow, sullen yawn as the hours broke across the top of yet one more turpentine forest morning.  There were saws coming this way, chained and skeletal chanting, easing down the trees in a line of least resistance. The startling flower in some dark, foreign soil that called this fresh field holler…

'Just like a tree, planted by the waters, I shall not be moved.'

Yet he was circling her, scratching out the ground in deep longing. He watched them pass and she danced like fine-spun dew as the skeletal chorus chanted …

'I'm choppin' in this bottom with a hundred years,

Tree fall on me, I don't bit mo' care.'

He marked his territory carefully, claw-cut patterns sundered in the bark, repeating the colour of the glistening flanks he would deem possess.  The feral perfume traces still lingered in his nostrils, musky beckoning.

The skeletal party now no more than the dying echoes of raddled chain in an oily, mosquito haze, he advanced. She was there, sunning as he pounced, pinned to the warming mossed ground. Flying fur and bloodshot eyes roiling under the lashes. She was taken, howling.