captain beefheart

Here's a rare and odd one, taken from the vinyl album You're A Hook: The 15th Anniversary of Dial-A-Poem (1968-1983), a record which came through the label Giorno Poetry Systems. The idea behind Dial-A-Poem was exactly that: call this phone number and hear a poem. The contributors included John Giorno (who initiated the project), William...
> fromthevaults/3057/frank-zappa-the-talking-asshole-1978/

While it is entirely possible to live a happy and fulfilled life without hearing any music by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, there really is no need to be so deprived given the extensive re-issue programme that was undertaken after his death in 1993. And, Lord protect us, here it all over again in 2012.  All the...
> essentialelsewhere/2087/the-mothers-of-invention-uncle-meat-1969/

It has become fashionable lately to speak of “post-rock” and cite bands such as Tortoise, Sigur Ros and Explosions in the Sky as being groups which use the tools of rock, but create music that isn’t identifiably within the rock genre. Of course nothing comes from nothing and there may just be precedents for post-rock --...
> essentialelsewhere/801/pere-ubu-the-modern-dance-1978/

The J Geils Band out of Massachusetts is best known for their terrific single Angel in a Centrefold (aw, c'mon, it's great, in a rock'n'roll Benny Hill way . . . see clip below) and Freeze Frame -- and in this country probably not a lot else. No one I know has ever had a J Geils Band album -- or has admitted to as much. I do. Just the...
> fromthevaults/3119/the-j-geils-band-no-anchovies-please-1980/

Understandably, many hail the Sixties as the greatest ever decade for popular music: the undeniable brilliance of the Beatles and what they spawned on both sides of the Atlantic, not to mention globally; the whole shift from pop to rock, and from singles to albums, which freed minds and arses that followed; the innovations of Hendrix, Cream and...
> essentialelsewhere/2654/this-heat-this-heat-1979/

Truly terrifying music is rare: there aren't that many pieces which make the hair on the back of your neck prickle, fill you with a sense of impending doom, make you feel uneasy somewhere deep within a part of your brain where rational thought no longer works for you. Pere Ubu -- whose debut album The Modern Dance appears at Essential...
> fromthevaults/3120/pere-ubu-thirty-seconds-over-tokyo-1975/

The primal, almost otherwordly moan most often over a relentless thudding rhythm – the sound of rural blues – or a gutteral growl which harks back to something more primitive have seldom been heard from New Zealand bands. Blues artists here generally aim for the raw edge of Chicago blues or the tough twang of Texas...
> music/4355/the-nudge-big-nudge-pie-keen/

Guitarist Phil Manzanera remembers very clearly how and when he first met the band that would give him his career, Roxy Music. “Yes, I failed the audition,” he says about that day in '71when he went to a house in Battersea and plugged in his Gibson ES-325 (“unfashionable for Roxy Music”) to play alongside singer...
> absoluteelsewhere/3720/phil-manzanera-of-roxy-music-interviewed-2010-when-work-is-play/

The irritation, pleasure and difficulty with Frank Zappa was that he was always part of rock culture - but not exactly a rock musician. Well, not when it suits him. “Being a rock star is nothing to aspire to," he once said. “Rock stars have to be cute and I`m a realistic guy. I shave this face every day. I know the...
> absoluteelsewhere/3874/frank-zappa-again-just-one-more-time/

Let's be honest, this is how we think Bryan Ferry spends his days: he rises just before noon after having tea, toast, marmalade and the daily papers delivered to his bedroom. His manservant lays out his crisply pressed white suit in his dressing room. He'll flick the pages of Vogue and Vanity Fair to see what his famous friends have been...
> absoluteelsewhere/3721/bryan-ferry-interviewed-2004-something-he-just-threw-on/

Blame punk’s redrawing of the map - or Yoko Ono, or the much more irritating Celine Dion if you will -- but the limits of our tolerance to the human voice have certainly shifted over the past few decades. We can now listen with impunity to Natacha Atlas’ careening Arabic trip-hop as much as be in awe of Whitney...
> absoluteelsewhere/3300/the-outer-limits-of-the-human-voice-2010-that-sound-it-haunts-me-still/

I'm pretty sure I shared an elevator with some of the Raincoats at a hotel in New York in the mid Nineties, but I may be wrong. And that's the end of my anecdote. This is a reissue (The second? Third?) of their important '79 debut album when this London group of Ana da Silva, Gina Birch, Palmolive and Vicky Aspinall were hailed as the first...
> music/2949/the-raincoats-the-raincoats-we-three-southbound/

The critics liked Little Feat -- and Dixie Chicken -- a whole lot better than the public. Today any number of greybeards will tell you how they were deeply into the band but (as with those who were always into the Velvet Underground) the facts speak for themselves. Only 30,000 bothered to go to a shop and buy Dixie Chicken when it was...
> essentialelsewhere/2765/little-feat-dixie-chicken-1973/

In the same series as the previously posted DVD overview of the Small Faces, but having more in common with the far superior Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention doco comes this chronological account of Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet) and his Magic Band. Van Vliet's idiosyncratic and revolutionary blues-based music is part of rock...
> music/2265/captain-beefheart-under-review-dvd-triton/

In the early Nineties Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead observed that Bob Dylan still wrote the most beautiful tunes . . . didn't always sing 'em of course, but the melody was in there somewhere. With Bone Machine -- Waits' best album Rain Dogs in '85 and clear contender for album of the year in '92 -- Waits penned a a bracket of melancholy,...
> music/2471/tom-waits-bone-machine-island/