The Travesty of the Tragic Band!
Following the exhilarating, triumphant storming of the country by the superb Magic Band in 1973, I was delighted to see that the good Captain was returning once again to our green and pleasant land in the summer of 1974. With heart still racing, ears ringing and head full of exciting memories I spent much time gabbing wildly to my friends about how good they were! I had played them the albums incessantly without extracting great interest. They simply did not get it. But my enthusiasm must have been extreme and I soon had a bunch of them interested enough to give it a go.
One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that it is the live experience that seems to get people hooked. I can back this up anecdotally. Living out in the sticks I used to have to drive my teenage sons into school every morning. A half hour with a captive audience (it wasn’t all child abuse – I did alternate music occasionally and let them select a tape). I was none too impressed with their chosen listening which seemed to centre on Madonna and Durex Durex and decided to widen their appreciation. Hence they were regaled with the likes of Roy Harper and Captain Beefheart. They remained unimpressed by the good Captain though. It wasn’t until I finally cajoled my younger son to come with me to see the Magic Band live in 2011 that he finally got it. I think that experiencing the power of the band’s performance, being able to actually see the musicians interacting, weaving those intricate patterns and ‘feeling’ the music as a visceral/cerebral explosion forges a unique connection. My son came out of that gig raving about them and rounded up a group of his friends for the next gig, all of whom were also suitably smitten.
That 1960s gig at Middle Earth had switched me on! No looking back. I’d been thoroughly tuned in.
Thus it was that, back in 1974, a cohort of us set off to immerse ourselves in the wonder of Magic at the unlikely venue of Waltham Forest Technical College!
I, of course, buoyed up on expectation, had not done my homework. I had not yet purchased the Unconditionally Guaranteed album (what a strange title for such a substandard record) or I might have had some forewarning. I had not read anything in the music press about how the real Magic Band had walked out shortly before the tour. I was expecting to see a caped Zoot with hair flying, a pogoing Rockette with thundering bass strings, a flailing Drumbo or Ed Marimba spraying out polyrhythms like supersonic confetti and either a Snouffer or Winged Eel intermeshing those steely riffs and slices of super slide with Zoot.
We were confronted with a bunch of unknowns who didn’t even look the part. I was initially bemused and downhearted but the Magic Band had been through personnel changes before and each new carnation had come up trumps. I wasn’t too concerned.
I didn’t know that the new incarnation was a soft rock outfit, drawn from a band called Buckwheat, who were under-rehearsed and unable to perform the jagged, raw-edged music we were craving.
I stood and stared in horror as the softened, smoothed-out arrangements made a mockery of the cliff-edge dynamics and heavy blues groove of the ‘real’ Magic band. These were a bunch of impostors who just could not cut it. They did not have the feel for the music or the expertise to carry it off! As far as I was concerned this was a travesty! They’d transformed the edgy Beefheart numbers into standard rock! Unforgiveable!
However, we did have the Captain with his incredible voice and that was some compensation. He really did seem to be trying his best to pull it together, but then, he needed to. They were pedestrian.
The band played a number of Beefheart classics and managed to pulverise all of them. It felt painful to hear such diamonds reduced to dull pebbles. All the jagged complexity had been ironed out to create a middling boring arrangement that I found hard to accept. These weren’t rock songs! These were songs from the Magic world of Beefheart. To treat them like this was worse than not doing them. The heart had been torn out of them.
I think the final nail in the coffin came with a lame rendition of Sweet Georgia Brown. I mean, Sweet Georgia Brown – hardly a Beefheart-friendly composition. In later years I often wonder how the real Magic Band might have deal with that jazz classic. I imagine they would have injected it with their fire and venom transforming it into something else, bringing it to life – just as they had done with other blues and gospel numbers. I felt like yelling out – ‘Give me that Old Time religion!’
This sent me reeling into depression. Sweet, saccharin and bland. Nothing approaching the raw outrageous, adventurous extremes of the real band, nothing like! I felt embarrassed to have dragged my friends along to this.
I came out feeling deflated, apologising profusely for exposing all my friends to such a travesty. Of course, you guessed it. They thought it was great and were extolling the virtues of a great performance.
A further irony was that it was this hopeless bunch of impostors who were recorded for that inglorious live album – Live In London – that I can’t bear to listen to. Why oh why oh why couldn’t they have properly recorded a live show from the 73 tour? The 68 tour? The bootlegs and live albums that have since surfaced are great but a properly recorded show in all its glory from 1973 or 68? Wow! That would have blown everything away!
As it is The Tragic Band proved to be a blip. The Captain still had a few more gems to pull out of that mysterious bag and future incarnations proved themselves more worthy of the epithet!
As for me – I’m just sad to have witnessed such a fall from grace!