The Magic Band on The Real Captain Beefheart

At the time I spoke to them, the Captain was living in the desert, a reclusive but successful painter known as Don Van Vliet who had been a minor star in the American art world for two decades. But many more still knew him as Captain Beefheart (read theartsdesk's obituary), revered for the matchless innovations he and his Magic Band offered rock with Trout Mask Replica in 1969, and the albums that followed, till his sudden retirement to paint in 1982.

Beefheart combined a blues growl stolen from Howlin’ Wolf, free jazz rhythmic collisions which outraged your brain, and fragments of Beat poetry bringing together The Beatles, absurd non-sequiturs and Nazi death camps. An unrepeatable underground explosion, flinging shards of influence from Tom Waits to The Fall, this music stopped with Beefheart. So his acolytes made do with rumours: that he had gone mad in the desert, perhaps.

At any rate, even as the Captain remained a tantalising black hole - musically, neither dead nor alive - his Magic Band are back among us, with an all-star line-up spanning their tumultuous career: John French and Mark Boston from nearly the start, Denny Whalley the middle, and Gary Lucas and Robert Williams the end. A new CD of them rehearsing old favourites, Back to the Front, faithfully reanimates old quirks, with French bravely impersonating Beefheart’s growl. “John wanted to do it as a tribute to Don”, Boston explains, “to bring this music back to life.”

Invitations to play All Tomorrow’s Parties by both Matt Groening and Autechre show the reverence they still inspire. Nor, once you know their terrifying history, does a Beefheartless Magic Band seem wrong. Its members contributed more than Beefheart ever dared admit; and suffered more fear and violence from him than playing music deserves.

When I met them in a north-London rehearsal room, they were swapping stories like this was a platoon reunion, a chance to discuss invigorating but traumatic events only fellow veterans will ever understand. And, for French and Boston, the battleground was the decrepit Californian bungalow where Beefheart trapped them in 1969, creating Trout Mask Replica from a brew of deliberately induced paranoia and desperate creative leaps: perhaps the greatest unfilmed horror movie, laboratory experiment, and avant-garde achievement in rock history.

The Magic Band’s true beginning, though, was in the Mojave desert town of Lancaster. A suburban sprawl based around the aerospace industry, during Beefheart’s adolescence as Don Van Vliet in the Fifties, it was an isolated place. “The freeway hadn’t reached us, and that affected the music,” remembers French who, like Boston, lived there too. “Because Don had no cultural input, no way of categorising or restricting things. He romanticised where he lived later, though - [adopting Beefheart’s gruff, staccato bark] ‘I live in the desert. In a trailer. Coyotes are my neighbours.’ It sounded good. He lived in tract housing, like everyone else.”

Though Beefheart was a big, imposing man, it was his voice which impressed French when they first met. “The only thing I could equate it to was Popeye the Sailor. When I found later he had listened to blues his whole life, his parents did too and were from the South, it started to make sense. But I asked him then, ‘Where did you get that voice?’ And he said, ‘Howlin’ Wolf.’” Williams adds: “One time we went backstage to see Muddy Waters in Boston, and Muddy Waters was standing right next to Don, and said, ‘Hey Beefheart - you still rippin’ off my shit!’ And then Don said, ‘Whatta you talking about, man - I never stole anything in my life.’” French: “In Muddy’s voice, he said that!”

Local Magic Band hit “Diddy Wah Diddy” (1966) was enough to bring French on board for the debut album Safe as Milk (1968), which added to the impression that Beefheart was a hardcore bluesman. That was what Boston was ready for when he auditioned.

But, in the rural bungalow in California’s Woodland Hills where Beefheart had moved the band by 1969, a far stranger, more frightening world awaited. Frustrated by the commercially remixed second album Strictly Personal (1968), Beefheart had signed with Frank Zappa (pictured right with Beefheart), also from Lancaster, to make music with complete creative control. He achieved just that in that bungalow, for 10 mad months.

The house sat at the top of a hill, “old and run down, with a spooky, haunted ambience”, French remembers. Huge rainstorms lashed it that winter, surrounding them with lush overgrowth. But they rarely saw outside, as Beefheart drilled Trout Mask Replica into them. When neighbours complained of the unearthly noise, the windows were covered with rubber, creating dungeon darkness, where time crawled unnaturally. Only one band-member at a time was let out for food, in case they didn’t return. At one point, Boston recalls, they “broke down” and painted each room different lurid colours, down to the furniture. “From one room to the next, your eyes went tttrrrrrrrrrr.” When French returned to the house, after Beefheart “sacked” him by hurling him down stairs, he found the Captain had covered every surface, fridge to floor, in pictures and poetry. If anyone had ever seen inside, they would surely all have been locked up.

At the back of this crazy-painted dungeon, Beefheart was the sleeping ogre. He would rise in the late afternoon, to reveal sketchy riffs and lyrics, which he would whistle or murmur to French. Musically unskilled, he relied on French to translate these intimations into something the band could play. But he showed no gratitude. Waking in unpredictable moods, he would scapegoat individuals for imagined errors, turning one against the other, ruling by fear. “If you made a noise while he was talking, reach over to get something and the hi-hat went chh,” recalls Williams of the later Band, “he’d go [angry, loud, bullying, fast voice]: ‘Someone’s had too much to think, someone’s puttin’ tinfoil in my radar.’ You had to sit there at attention, and ride on every word that he said.” Only 19, French was crushed, till his head had nothing left in it but music.

Watch Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band play "Upon the My-O-My"

“My personality had been encroached upon and nibbled away until there was a little bit of me left cowering in a corner,” he remembers. “I couldn’t express an opinion. I was afraid to. So I concentrated on music instead. When the others were playing by themselves, all at once, I could hear each wrong note. I was consumed. It’s an awful feeling.”

The strangest part of the Magic Band story may be how a non-musician, Beefheart, created such extraordinary sounds by relying on skilled players who he bent to his will by sensory deprivation and mind games - exercising tyrannical power over people he was helpless without.

“I think he was intimidated by the fact that we could play complicated things more than once,” French considers. “He always used to say, ‘If you wanna be a different fish, you’ve gotta jump out of school,’ to put down schooling. But I employed techniques I learned in school. We all had to. We had to be experienced players to finish Don’s fragments.” Williams: “Don described a beat to me, he wanted it to be like a cat trying to get out of a cardboard box. He wanted a snare drum like a ping-pong ball that was at the bottom of a jar of honey that when it rose to the top went fwoom!”

The others chip in with tales of vague musical instructions, and the paranoia the Captain created, so they wouldn’t bond and mutiny. Lucas: “He once said to me, ‘On the way over here I think, whose turn is it in the barrel?’” French: “You read about how Wagner was… I mentioned this to Don, and he said, ‘Yeah, well, you can handle reading about those guys in literature and history - but you can’t handle the real thing, man, I’m just like those guys!” They all start to chuckle and swap their most terrible Don tales. But French can only laugh for so long.

“It makes me shake,” he says, almost to himself. “It still makes me shake when I start thinking about it, it makes me… tense.” “I left once,” Boston adds, of the bungalow days. “Hid myself in the bushes and ran. But - they found me. Drug me back.”

Listen to "Ella Guru" by Captain Beefheart and The Magic Band

The question is how much Beefheart’s cruel undercutting of individuals protected his own position, and how much it was the key to the new cacophony they made.

“One of the things we’re proving by getting back together is that we play better without that tension,” French believes. “We achieved 1 per cent of what we could have done if he’d let us express ourselves, instead of making us claw and fight. The only good thing was that it allowed Don to impose his musical will upon us. And there did have to be walls between us, in order to play things that weren’t considered to fit together. One of the things he used to say is, ‘Everything goes with everything.’ That’s the way the world is. You listen, and there’s a cat crossing the street, there’s a car going by, and nobody can really control it, it’s all happening at once, it isn’t one tempo, it is dissonant, it’s an imperfect world. And that’s what he was trying to do with the music.”

“You should mention the word acid, too,” says Lucas. “In terms of how it takes away barriers that we all have to shield all of this information.” French and Boston differ on whether LSD played a part in Trout Mask Replica. But one of the Captain’s other mythic, perhaps apocryphal feats was acid-induced. “He was really great at creating this whole mystique around him,” says Williams. “And it was all wrapped in with staying awake for a year.” Lucas asked Beefheart about this outlandish, self-spread rumour. “He said, ‘Well, in England somebody dosed me. I was at [hippie venue] Middle Earth ready to do a show, and all I remember on the way up to the stage was someone saying, [sly voice], ‘Have a nice trip, Captain.’ I walked off stage, and I was 10 feet out before I fell down…’”

“He watched too many Road Runner cartoons…” comments French, with the dry lack of sympathy of someone who the Captain personally launched into space.

“It was the mental organisation, the will, that’s what he had, like a sculptor,” Lucas concludes of the Captain’s mind. “He was an artist - he’d seen Lust for Life, and never got over that. Made us all go to the Van Gogh museum.”The main thing that kept the Captain’s tormented crew with him till they finished Trout Mask Replica was, though, finally very simple. “We didn’t want to hear anything else that was going on,” says Boston. “We wanted to create something from scratch that was totally different, so we didn’t want the influence of anybody else. I think we succeeded,” he adds, his voice bashfully proud. “I think…”

“It was the music, really,” Williams agrees, of surviving latter-day Beefheart. “When you got out there on stage, you played stuff that nobody else had ever even thought of to play, and when the whole band would be playing it at once at a good show, no drug would make you feel so high. But this music was so difficult to play, there were train wrecks sometimes. At 5/8, 7/4, if someone missed a beat, it was a horrible feeling, hard to recover. It was like sending you out on the high wire, and shaking the other end.”

Watch Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band play "Sure 'Nuff 'N' Yes I Do"

When the Magic Band left their bungalow torture chamber, the album that resulted from their 10 months of astonishing effort made no ripple in the US charts of 1969 (though, helped by John Peel, it reached No 21 in the UK). “I thought it could’ve got bigger, if Don would’ve let it,” says Boston. “But every time we got real close, he’d do something to take it away.” French agrees. “Prior to the recording of Safe as Milk, I could see that Don was really afraid of success. I was 18, and I could see it. He had anxiety attacks, serious stuff where he’d go to the hospital. But of course he’d drive himself because he didn’t want anyone else driving his car, because they might hurt it.” Boston laughs. “He’d probably drive the ambulance!”

“When we did Clear Spot [1972], that was the closest to really making it big,” Boston remembers wistfully, “because we were with Warner Brothers. Ted Templeman produced it, a major producer back then. He handled Don really well in the studio, he was just a short little guy, but he didn’t take any crap at all. Put him in his place. That album turned out real good. But after that, I don’t know what Don said to Mo Ostin [legendary then-president of the Warner label], whether he told him how to run Warner Brothers or what, but the next thing I know, we were out of Warner Brothers. That really bothered me, because after all that work, his ego got the best of him, and we got fired.”

Beefheart bullied all his Magic Bands, till fine farewell Ice Cream for Crow (1982). Still, a mystery remains. They are still here. French, who Boston says Beefheart “scarred”, came back for more, almost till the end. This reunion was his idea. As they bicker and reminisce, they remind me of a family with an abusive head, letting off steam at the bad things he’s done - but still in love, and not wanting to leave him.

“Oh, I think a lot of Don, I always did,” Boston admits. “I wouldn’t’ve stayed in the band if I didn’t. Because I knew, even back then, that he was going to be one of the artists of the century. I knew it in my heart.”