The Kid is gonna Booglarize ya

The Kid is gonna Booglarize ya

RECORDS

THE SPOTLIGHT KID

CAPTAIN BEEFHEART

REPRISE

That Captain Beefheart presented us with The Spotlight Kid in the opening minutes of our battle with 1972 — perhaps the very time when we needed its reassurance the most — says a lot for the healthy development of his vision. That he would even attempt the directional changes so much in evidence here is further indication that he is worthy of every inch of our respect. He has lived up to everything we ever took him for, but The Spotlight Kid demonstrates that he can be even more: those few of us who have stood staunchly beside him aren’t going to be alone very much longer. Captain Beefheart has arrived.

Before The Spotlight Kid was delivered, there was one crucial challenge which he had not faced. He had made his aesthetic mark almost from the time his name was first circulated, and the brilliance of Trout Mask Replica (which, until now, has been his signature work) was a climax rather than an eruption. The unique Beefheart artistry was reinforced by last year’s Lick My Decals Off, Baby, but not long thereafter he came to the realization that — while there remained an artistic void which he alone seemed capable of filling — the real challenge lay in another direction. Like the late Albert Ayler, whose third-stream ruminations also reached a climax with a brilliant album fronted by a cover of esoteric beauty (Love Cry), Beefheart’s most artistically challenging proposition now lay within range of the mass audience.

This is perhaps the most difficult task that any artist can set for himself. To makd music on his own terms and yet capture and hold an audience large enough not only for financial success but for the end success of that music itself, Beefheart has had to reach what seems to be an entirely new understanding of his work. He had to apprehend it at its root and then re-route the process by which he originally reached this third-stream state (of consciousness, music and self) to relay the message back to an audience largely ignorant of the man’s previous work and even, perhaps, the very existence of that level of consciousness.

The Spotlight Kid is not only Captain Beefheart’s way of doing this, it is almost a statement of ideology: a how-to-do-it set for anyone who borders on getting too far out and thus losing track of their audience and, conversely, a means by which most any Mainstream kid can begin to see possibilities beyond his frame of reference. Don Van Vliet has finally closed the circle. From the time of Safe As Milk (his first album, released in 1967), he had taken off in vertical motion: straight up, but without a solid base audience to make the journey meaningful to very many people. This album will give him the base he’s never had, a gate through which his new audience can extend themselves and eventually find access to his earlier work.

This does not imply a commercial or aesthetic retreat on any level, but only that for the first time Captain Beefheart has faced his audience and is taking their limitations into account. He has come to terms with the fact that art is not created in a vacuum; he has learned to accept the responsibility that any art which hopes to extend the grasp of its audience' must provide the means by which they can reach that end. It is no coincidence that Beefheart and Grand Funk share the same potential audience, and it is no mistake that Beefheart has had to simplify the terms of his vision in order to reach an audience that, while not avant-garde by strict definition, is certainly the farthest out mass audience available to any artist.

Having discovered the audience that he wants to reach and a method of reaching them that seems - to at least Beefheart and us, anyway - potentially viable, the only thing that does matter is what he has to say to them. The Spotlight Kid contains music that is remarkably textured, and if you were looking to be witty (or merely accurate) you’d term it heavy music. It is music of impact and anguish, and there is as much anguish in, say, “White Jam” as you’ll find in any of Mark Farner’s vocals on Survival, and Survival is a record of protean teen anguish.

The Beefheart apprehension that is perhaps most important is that what matters isn’t just being adventurous: it’s being lucidly daring. The songs here are the equal of any Beefheart’s presented us with, still in his general scope but not locked into his personalized framework. If Beefheart was considered beyond pop comparison before, he certainly can’t be now. The first side of the album seems especially directed toward the audience all the third-generation bands are aiming at. (Beefheart, in fact, may be a sort of paleolithic fourth generation rocker.) Does the Captain mean something harmless when he sings “Time’s running out/and all you ever do is/blabber and smoke”? I doubt it.

The most attractive feature of this album — that Beefheart has made himself accessible to people he never considered before — is also its most potentially dangerous. Over the years, Beefheart has managed to gather a relatively small but vocally ferocious band of followers; the kind of people who might conceivably even resent having to share their hero. They are the kind of people who seem able to focus only on one end of the limb, and although we all seem to agree that the best artist is the one who’s on the most dangerous end of the aesthetic branch, we sometimes have a hard time seeing that that end is often the one that’s closest to the trunk. This past August, a friend and I braved the colorless bullshit of the Troubador in Los Angeles to catch a Linda Ronstadt set, supposedly being recorded by Capitol for purposes of a live album. My friend could by no means be classified a Linda Ronstadt fanatic (or certainly not to the extent I am; I went back twice), yet he remained stationary through the entire set, his attention fixed on the power of the music and the presence of the singer.

Beefheart remains rooted in the obtuse: you can construct theoretical walls around him, but words still fail to accurately convey the power of the music. The basic sound is still physical (read: heavy, if you choose), but where Trout Mask was improvisation in metal and glass, the construction of The Spotlight Kid makes use of other materials. Wood, perhaps, or is it bamboo; certainly more synthetic substances, or maybe it’s just whole cloth. Whatever his materials, he has never failed to fashion from them something rhythmically and emotionally sharp yet always, at the core, humanly lyrical. “Alice In Bhmderland” is Captain Beefheart’s lyricism, as much as Coltrane’s “Welcome” on Kulu Se Mama was, or as much as Van Morrison’s “Tupelo Honey” is. What all three have in common is a softness of basic emotion which is neither saccharine nor gentle.

“Alice In Bhmderland” is easily among the best songs Beefheart has ever recorded, because no matter how complex it becomes, it can never lose anyone who’s not totally lost in the first place. Winged Eel Fingerling (known in previous incarnations as Elliott Ingb'er) gives perfect explanation to one critic’s assertion that he is “one of the finest rock and roll guitar players in the world,” and his return to the group on full-time basis cements the Magic Band’s maturity perfectly. Had “Alice” been released in 1967, all of the people at the Avalon Ballroom would have freaked out and cried, and the English demiGods would have wet their pants with sheer terror.

The obvious place for newcomers to start is “Click-Clack”, a tune which conjures up and then tops nearly all of the railroad musicals you can remember. (Before jet planes took over, remember, music was set to a railroad beat.) It fuses rock and roll, R&B and blues in a way that they’ve never been fused before and demonstrates, once and for allj that Captain Beefheart truly understands the components of the fusion. In addition, Zoot Horn Rollo gets off some of the most effective slide guitar you’ll ever hear, and his continued relationship with Winged Eel Fingerling should prove to be considerably more than explosive.

In a strong sense, the difference between this and previous Beefheart recordings is the difference between the harmonica and the sax. This doesn’t mean that he has come riding out of the sunset to claim his “rightful” title as the king of white blues (he has yet to escape one nearsighted critic’s assertion that he has “the potential to record the ultimate white blues album”), but only that the image of, say, Paul Butterfield is still more accessible to the middle-class audience than that of Ornette Coleman. Beefheart has always used the blues, not as a rigid form, but as a humanist tool for the development of a music beyond any classification.

Everything you’ve ever liked about Captain Beefheart, in fact, can be found in ample quantity on The Spotlight Kid. Beefheart’s vocal faces change throughout, and he runs the gamut so skillfully that no one pose alone could begin to define his style. He doesn’t merely sing words, he interprets them — breathes color into black and white propositions — and each song becomes a showcase for the theatrics of sound. This is where the essence of his humor shows itself best: Beefheart approaches words as divisions of sound which may be manipulated or arranged to make a point or — better still — just for fun. And if this doesn’t make sense, just give one listen to “I’m Gonna Booglarize You Baby.” The title alone should tell you enough.

i In addition, for the first time the members of the band are permitted to take steps toward evolving individual personalities. The guitar duo has already been discussed, and, even though they’ve only begun to define themselves in terms of each other, it’s already perhaps the most exciting combination since Bloomfield and Bishop in the old Butterfield band. Rockette Morton’s talking bass lines are just as accomplished but more fully integrated. (A conservative bassist friend of mine, upon seeing Morton perform live last year, promptly junked all visions of Jack Bruce stardom to form a Beefheart-styled ensemble as tribute.) Ed Marimba makes his usually high marks with his piano and marimba, but the drums aren’t always as full or mixed as properly as they should be, a situation he will hopefully remedy as the dangerous drummer Ted Cactus.

The cover picture tells the story (don’tit?): a slightly bearish Robert Mitchum playing a classical composer at a Lyndon Johnson bar-b-que, and it’s all framed in that yellowish glow. The effect recalls several traditional myths, yet adds something substantial to each and all of them. The cover is so gorgeous, you’re stimulated to play the record. The paintings on the back are wonderfully nonliteral, but they convey enough of what they’re about that at least one two year old of our acquaintance has named the package “the pretty record”.

And so Captain Beefheart grapples with more here than just about anyone you can name. Albert Ayler might have been striking for the same ground with New Grass, but Don Van Vliet has had the guns to see it through. His understanding of the rock and roll audience, whether or not it is merely intuitive, is startlingly comprehensive; The Spotlight Kid should be required listening for most rock technicians. He has regained the capacity for lyricism which was seemingly lost after Safe As Milk, and has managed to capture everything that Strictly Personal should and could have been. When he jangles my nerves now, I know - or at least believe - that he does so with a definite motive, and not just as an exercise in the limitations of my central nervous system.

The most important point to be made, however, is that the vision of Captain Beefheart does not spring from, some cosmic yodeler at the farthest reaches of the universe; it is a warmly human one and, in the end, a vision which his audience can and must share:

The stars are matter

We’re matter

But it doesn’t matter

The principal command is still “lick my decals off, baby”, and that is also our challenge. Beefheart’s challenge was to make us hear it, all of us (or as many of us as have the courage to meet a vision that’ll come at least half-way to ours). Captain Beefheart has met that challenge, and we’ll be damned if he hasn’t made it entertaining on any — or every — level to boot. Your move.

Ben Edmonds

Dave Marsh

LINDA RONSTADT

CAPITOL

Linda Ronstadt’s like that. She’s unquestionably one of the very finest vocalists we can lay claim to, her live performances are of a uniformly high caliber, yet the recognition one might assume for an artist with her credentials has always managed to escape her. The primary methods of escape are catalogued all too well on her recorded work.

First of all, she has never been exactly prolific in terms of product output. Her album release calender has been marked by empty spaces of well over a year, but this would not be the least bit damaging if the product she did deliver was sturdy enough to weather the blank streaks. Now we’ve arrived at the second part of the problem.

Her first two solo albums were adequate showcases, each featuring highpoints which were somehow always noticeably higher than whoever they happened to be hyping at the time. Neither of the albums, however, could sustain the impact of their high water marks, and neither owned up to the consistency of brilliance which true Ronstadt devotees knew she was fully capable of. I could justifiably recommend the two albums to anybody, but never with the unqualified passion which my instincts fueled. This new album marches right in step with the first two.

The live album blueprint was apparently abandoned somewhere along the mix-down route, as the majority of songs are Studio takes. (Don’t ask me the reason; the live energy level was a constant exhiliration, but perhaps too much of the exhiliration was lost in the transition to tape.) Ironically, the live cuts which escaped the cutting floor rank among the album’s best, but more on that later.

Every song on this album in unfailingly well produced and played, and Linda’s vocals hold up all the way through. On a purely musical level, the album is very close to flawless. Any problem, therefore, must rest with the songs themselves and the capacity they afford Linda for excellence.

Not being a songwriter, Linda is in a position where she has a world of selection to outfit her musical personality, and it is easy to assume that this slices the possibility of weak material. Not necessarily so. Either she allows somebody else to select her material or her guage of her talent is at best erratic, because half the songs on this album fall short despite their near-impeccable delivery.

Songs like “I Won’t Be Hangin’ Round” and “I Still Miss Someone” are the land of songs that you hear once, make a quick note that they’re kinda nice and then skip over the next time you play the record. These songs are basically insubstantial — they don’t muster much sticking power - and they’re so essentially because they make demands on only a fraction of the talent she’s got to offer.

There are examples of where she makes her slower-paced material work effectively, the two most obvious examples being “I Fall To Pieces” (which I saw her perform even better on David Frost’s show) and Neil Young’s “Birds.” These songs in particular work because they challenge Linda - they aren’t easy vehicles for a pretty effect - and they force her to push past the boundaries of vocal expediency. Too many of the other songs don’t require enough emotional involvement, and their beauty is revealed as superficial. They are, more than anything, in the realm of the folksong, with a comparative energy that is seldom any more than static. Refer all calls to Joan Baez.

She almost acheives the perfect meeting ground with Jackson Browne’s “Ro.ck Me On The Water,” but barely misses by rushing the chorus a noticeable half-beat. Where she scores most strikingly is with “Rescue Me,” perhaps on strength of intent alone. Like “Lovesick Blues” or “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” from Silk Purse (the latter perhaps the best amalgam to date of country sentiment with rock and roll energy), it is a song that allows her to rip loose and belt you like you always knew she could. It is a sqng of power, and power is a game Linda Ronstadt plays to win. When she lets herself play, that is.

It is no accident that the live songs (“I Fall To Pieces,” “Birds” and “Rescue Me”) are also the most successful songs, and that many of the tunes which don’t come across on the album are often, inspiring live. She is a lot more forceful with a band behind her, and her bands are usually good enough to push her in that direction. Her supporting group on these three cuts contained most (or all) of a damn fine band called the Eagles which you’ll undoubtedly be hearing more of the next time you turn around.

And she works best of all in front of an audience, sometimes to the point where I’m almost certain that she’s yet to really conquer the pervasive cpldness of the studio. The transmission of pure emotion — as opposed to situations like “In My Reply,” where the emphasis rests on conveying words rather than feelings — seems more powerfully realized when there’s somebody on the receiving end. Her classification may be under country singers these days, but she creates a unique place for herself when she gives in to that part of her that releases energy so easily and loves to rock and roll.

In all, you could do considerably worse than this album, and I’d not really hesitate to recommend it to anybody. But she had still failed to produce the conclusively convincing Linda Ronstadt album for non-Ronstadt fans, and her followers must once again bear the burden of converting the people unfortunate enough never to have seen her perform live. I’m one of her most loyal followers, and she didn’t make it all that much easier with this album.

Ben Edmonds

MUSIC

CAROLE KING

ODE

I resisted the big Carole King ballyhoo because I was instinctively suspicious of any singer-songwriter hype, especially one that hinged on the contention that since this person had penned such yards of golden goodies for others, he/she must naturally have the god-given knack for churning them up through the vocal pipes and spewing them out with style and professionalism, especially since he/she is the author and knows what the words mean better than any other mortal soul.

That’s bullshit, of course, because it’s just obvious that some people know how to project and some don’t, just like some writers and poets (Dylan Thomas, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs) make great spoken word records of their work and others simply can’t bring it across (Ferlinghetti, Frost).

So Tapestry, that most celebrated of elpees, got by my almost completely even though “It’s Too Late” was all over the radio. Somehow all this stuff, not just Carole’s but that of her peers in the genre as well, seemed to have a sameness about it that made me impatient in a way that the .sameness of heavymetal bands didn’t.

Well, it’s all just pop music, right? Or at least that’s what I think these days. It’s made to have fun and mark time and change with and by, so when you get tired of one form of stimulation, such as the feedback soldering iron applied to the crazed nerve, all vou have to do is move over to the next place at the table for some good balm, like Carole King singing these extremely intelligent, adult, well-made - but that’s not ALL, if it was I’d hate her as much as the Taylor dork! - and energetic, alive pop songs.

All the time Tapestry was out I just kept listening to Carole dressed as Little Eva doing “Locomotion” on my old Roulette Golden Goodies bargain-bin album and thinking how much better that was, how much less sodden than “You’ve Got a Friend” with its tepid professions of loyalty. Bah! Like which would you rather do, the Locomotion or just hold some peacenlove sap’s hand? But if I had actually listened to Carole’s new stuff I might have found out, as I did with the release of this album, that she still knows how to rock, she just does it a bit differently now.

Music is one of the most substantial collections of songs I can recall in some time. On the cover Carole sits behind her piano with a smile, no murky mullings or poetic profundities clotting up the space between us. Fresh in her own airy house, suburban even, and why not, Carole puts on no discernable airs, and the music is the same. Substance it’s got aplenty, but windy ruminations on the state of the cosmos ain’t Carole’s game, nor digging into her intestinal tract in search of the neurotic roots of the stasis she’s not afflicted with, unlike some methodically melancholy minstrels I could name.

The first song to sink in is “Music,” which is about just that in the simplest and most direct terms possible, yet somehow deeper and extremely touching. The song’s set is clear, clean, waltzlike, refreshing like a sweet bath on a dog day: “Music is playing inside my head/ Over and over and over again/ My friend, there’s no end to the music.” And like the most profound piece of program music, this song will resound in your head long after you’ve heard it, as will much of the material on this album. It is not just a matter of catchiness, but rather a certain distinctively haunting quality that is quite subtle but supremely effective and had me hearing certain of these songs literally in my sleep for awhile. And in this one there’s the added bonus of Curtis Amy’s sax solo, which really makes the song with its lapping, playfully growling echoes of Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders.

But it’s “Goin’ To California” which truly and finally shows that Carole can cook. That’s what I don’t like about Joni Mitchell, basically I guess, is that I feel that she could never really bring something like this off. It’s a tough little chart with a train rhythm and locomotive whistle imitations in the instrumentation right at the beginging. Little Eva lives in the vpcal: “I’ve been feelin’ down in Atlanta/ Immobile in Alabam/ I’d rather be in traction/ Than to be just where I am/ Oh you Georgia red clay/ And green Virginia pines/ I’ve got to make it home somehow/ Before I lose my mind!” Okay! Just the way she says “lose my mind” is enough to indicate to you that she hasn’t forgotten how to do the thing, and this song also benefits from another fine jazz-derived solo, this time by Ralph Shuckett on piano, who sounds better here.than he has since his days with Clear Light. And if you think about it, “Goin’ To California” sounds a lot like Chuck Berry’s “Promise Land,” which is great all by itself.

On the more pensive side is “Carry Your Load,” which I wasn’t paying much attention to until this bit leaped out at me: “Thinkin’ alone on a Thursday morning/ Of peace and love and the war/ I still don’t have any answers/ But I don’t get high anymore.”

I don’t know exactly why that part should stand out so, except that its basic banality becomes a strength and even profound in the context of the melody and Carole’s delivery. Which is one of the things rock ‘n’ roll is all about: giving flesh to the bones of trite words with pure sound (like don’t ever look at Dylan’s lyrics written down in a book if you’re really serious about him). Just like Dylan, Carole King has the basic wealth of artistic flair that enables.her to take the most seeming throwaways among her lines and bring them straight to the forefront just for the hell of it. Which, the forefront that is, not hell, is probably where they belong. It was enough for me just to believe that I could like a lyric with the words “peaoe” and “love” and “war” conjoined in one line, but the more I listened the more I took those cliches to my own experience. Like Carole and everybody else, I think about all of that sometimes myself, I just don’t talk about it as much as some people, and neither does she. But when I ruminate lately I’ve come to the same conclusion: “1 still don’t have any answers/ But I don’t get high anymore.” Which is some kind of a start, or at least a sense that the real desolation is behind.

Fortunately, however, the depth of introspection or social concern in this album is far exceeded by its quantity and quality of immediately accessible pop songs. “Growing Away From Me” will tpuch you if you’ve ever had the feeling that someone you needed was doing just that through no fault of either of you and “Too Much Rain” is a great melancholy ballad in a classic mould. And all the rest are just as good, with instrumental backing that pomes as close to absolute perfection as it’s safe to go.

Music is one of those rare albums that, once you’ve heard it, you’ll actually go through your day wondering when you’re going to get. a chance to play it again, and that’s the best kind of testimonial I know. In fact, this is the first time I’ve felt that way about a record since, well, since Black Sabbath released Master of Reality.

Lester Bangs