I just posted Captain Beefhearts 10 Commandments of Guitar Playing. Perhaps you aren't familiar with the fellow who went by the name of Captain Beefheart. He is Don Van Vliet, who now is a painter, but in the mid 60's throught the early 1980s, he was one of the most original other visionary voices of music.
A true surrealist, he created music which composed and decomposed it self as you listened to it. The blues? Jazz? Pop turned inside out? His work is still confounding and influencing generations of musicians.
This is the track Ice Cream For Crow from his last record in 1982 by the same name.
1 comment:
Thanks for this post. Extraordinary music and video.
The repetition in this has me curled up rocking back and forth like an autistic professor I used to work with. I now feel where he was coming from.
Yes you’re so spot on about decomposition and recomposition here, the theme that's repeated musically, visually, symbolically. I love the way those crazy transformers appear and multiply in the desert like mutants. Reminds me of the way artists such as Delaunay interpreted La Tour Eiffel when it first dominated the skyline of Paris. Not as a monolith (or ‘metonym’ as we’ve all been taught) but broken apart, shown from many mobile perspectives/guitars, and the only common perspective is a recognition and repetition of pattern.
This liminal setting of the wild west is perfect for the magical Captain Beefheart and his hat (the western hero!).
Dennis Hopper, in his introduction to “The Fine Art of Separating People from Their Money” (about advertising) copies so many elements from this clip, including the display of art works and large canvases in the desert.
Post a Comment