Well, this is a bona fide Night of The Living Van Vliet Miracle! Hallelulah and Amen!
You never know what you are going to find once you start looking. This is a really bad quality, badly lit tape of an almost incoherent, but what is coherent? performance by Captain Beefheart and The Magic Band at the long gone legendary Mudd Club in Soho...well now more fashionably, Tribeca below Canal Street in Manhattan. The Talking Heads refer to the Mudd Club in Life During Wartime and it was the club that Scorcese's After Hours was shot in.
This was shot around 5 am after they had played at The Irving Plaza, the night John Lennon was assassinated. How do I know so much about this? I was there. I have to thank this bookhaven fellow for posting so much incredible archival Van Vliet stuff! He has piano rehearsal sketch tapes by The Captain...
3 comments:
Wow. What history. I really love your first-hand experiences.
Zappa had a Mudd Club song as well, on "You Are What You Is". Twist and Frug in arrogant gestures!
The Mudd Club was a kind of amazing place....If you did a bit of roadie work, like I did then, it was a logistical nightmare.
You had to descend into a rather Dickensian 19th century cul de sac...Cortland Alley, which was gap between buildings on Canal Street. The address said White street, but I assure you, the only way to get in was to go down the alley. It closed in 1983. I played there twice, once with a band called Ping Pong....I was part of a chorus...and then again with the composer, Glenn Branca in one of his guitar symphonic orchestras....perhaps that is when my tinitus really set in....In it's prime, it was a pretty great place. unisex bathrooms, a gallery curated by Keith Haring....the ultimate anonymous grungy place in a location in Lower Manhattan that you could only get to or know about if you actually went there. That was the great thing about New York City...the most mythologically famous place on the planet, every body has some kind of mental road map to NYC in their brain, but if you lived there, there were so many nooks and crannies and really unusual places that every day could be an adventure.
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