In Search Of Captain Beefheart – Mirrors and Venom

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In Search of Captain Beefheart: Amazon.co.uk: Goodwin, Opher: 9781502820457: Books

Mirrors and Venom

Now we are in the heady days of 1967 and I am seventeen and eighteen and amid the huge experimentations and excitement of the times the quest gathers force. I am intoxicated by the hunt and buzzing with energy. It is driving me on to search in the clubs and second-hand record stores. I am always searching for something that will provide me with all the answers and sate my appetite.

All thoughts of education and careers are relegated to the box marked ‘incidental’. Life’s too full of life to waste. There is so much to be learnt, investigated, found out, appreciated, loved, experienced and enjoyed and you can’t find it in schools, answer it in exams or read about it in textbooks. There were too many people to meet, sights to see and mad conversations to be had. I was a madman. I scorched through life absorbing and burning up energy. It was like a chocoholic being let loose in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate factory!

My hair has grown and is bleached with peroxide. It looks like straw and contrasts with my dark beard. I never went in for hippy beads, keeping myself simple with shirt and jeans. I had met Liz and dragged her around with me. We enjoy dancing and one of our gigs is usually soul based, but we bounce around to Mayall, Floyd and Fleetwood Mac just as happily. We are to be found frolicking in the Marquee, Middle Earth, Toby Jug, Klooks Kleek, UFO or Eel Pie Island and are just as happy with the Psychedelic, Blues or Progressive scene.

I have already discovered Dylan and Guthrie and have gorged myself on their inebriating offerings. They will both continue to inform and sustain me. But still I am not content. I want more. The Underground is a glut that provides me with a happy hunting ground. I am a student and free in London and am about to launch myself headfirst into five years of musical gluttony.

But today is special. This is no ordinary faire but I had no inkling of what was in store for me.

I had made a new friend at college by the name of Mike. He was quiet and shy but extremely cool in his white plastic jacket with long corkscrew black hair. He tells me of this guy he has seen who he thinks I would be mad over. He tells how he is insane and full of energy just like me and that I have to go to see him.

I made a mental note. I stash it away. I forget about it.

I am heading for Soho, for Les Cousins on Greek Street. It is a small club in the basement. You go down these steep steps into an underground cellar where you are packed in among the crowds, seated and focussed towards a small stage in the middle. It was dark and intimate.

Les Cousins was no ordinary folk club in the traditional sense. There were no sing-alongs, no traditional songs with hands behind the ear. It was really a place that showcased the work of the new acoustic singer-songwriters of the day who were loosely termed contemporary folk singers. These included the wondrous Jackson C Frank, Paul Simon and even Dylan had made an appearance. I had gone along to catch Bert Jansch and John Renbourn.

They played and I enjoyed it. I can’t remember too much about it because those memories were blown out of my mind.

In the intermission there was a twenty minute slot and they put this new up-and-coming singer-songwriter on. He played three numbers and talked a lot about the songs and what was in his head.

It was the guy that Mike had been telling me about.

What he was saying was intelligent, sharp, funny and illuminating. More importantly was that it was like I was holding up a mirror and seeing my thoughts projected. There was immediate empathy. It felt to me like I was listening to my own self – except, of course, that this one could actually sing and play an instrument.

I was blown away.

I felt like I had found what I didn’t know I had been looking for. I had stumbled across Roy Harper the greatest British song-writer, social commentator, poet and auto-career sabotager of all time.

That was a meeting that altered my life.

Opher 1969

In Search Of Captain Beefheart – Bobbing around

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Bobbing around

The discovery of another hero took time. It was like discovering a heap of dirty gold ore. You don’t know what you’ve got until you’ve teased it all out.

If the Beatles were the driving force for Rock then Bob Dylan was the Fulcrum that turned it on its head. The Beatles provided the musical genius but Dylan provided the poetry and substance that enabled it to reach its apotheosis.

I came to Dylan late. It wasn’t until his electric period that I really began to appreciate what a genius he was. For me it was a slow burner.

I was not one of the guys who might have shouted ‘Judas’ in the Albert Hall or Manchester Trade Hall. I loved his electric period and none better than the driving, searing quality that Mike Bloomfield brought to it at Newport.

My friend Mutt first introduced me to Dylan. He played me his first album but it left me cold. I still find that first album a bit of a non-entity. Mutt assured me that if Dylan released singles he’d be in the charts. I pooh-poohed that but sure enough, shortly after Mutt’s prophetic words, Dylan released ‘The times are a changing’, it made the charts and I had to eat my words.

I am sorry to say that I was one of those people who could not get on with his voice. I liked the songs but I preferred them by other people like the Byrds and Manfred Mann. It makes me squirm to say that now because I have got so much into Dylan that I know his voice is just ideal for his songs and everyone else’s arrangements tend to sound Poppy and lightweight in comparison and you don’t get much more unhip than Poppy.

My subconscious quest for Dylan overlooked him for a couple of years. I was aware of his music but I never really listened to it. Then I bought ‘Bringing it all home’ in Kingston arcade and it blew me away. The good thing about this was that it meant that I could now go back and retrospectively absorb three genius albums all at once – ‘The times are a changing’, ‘Another side of’ and ‘Freewheelin’’. What a mind expanding time I had! There was everything! – The anti-war stuff, the civil rights, the songs for the oppressed and down and out. It made you think; it raised your sensitivities; it made you question everything; it was so clever and poetic. I read the poetry on the liner notes and checked out everything I could. Dylan was just what I needed. He’d taken Guthrie’s type songs a stage further into a new dimension. He was singing about the world I lived in and the society we were grappling with and trying to get to change. No wonder everyone was feeding off him!

I adored the snarling Dylan on ‘Positively Fourth Street’ which became my favourite song of all time for a while. But there was also the exceptional ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ and ‘It’s alright Ma I’m only bleeding’.

Then there was ‘Highway 61 revisited’ and ‘Blonde on Blonde’ and the poetry exploded with Beat Poet surrealism, like Kerouac, Ginsberg and Rimbaud were recording Rock songs. At the time I was reading Ginsberg’s Howl and Kerouac’s ‘Dharma Bums’ and it just seemed to sit in there.

Unfortunately I’d missed Dylan’s performances at the Albert Hall and around. If only…………..

I did get to see him four times at various gigs. Two were brilliant, one was mediocre and one was absolute shit.

He was a difficult, complex hero to have with a veritable mine of mind expanding concepts to be unearthed. He was also full of contradictions and obfuscations designed to throw you off the scent. But the reward for perseverance was immense.

Dylan’s fabled motorcycle accident in which he supposedly broke his neck was the end of what was an incredible run of six of the universe’s best albums (I am making an assumption here – I am not yet fully conversant with musical input from other regions of our galaxy or any distant Galaxies. Maybe they have even better albums out there? – Far out, man!). But I suppose that had to be. Dylan was freaking out on speed and stress. He looked so jumpy. I guess if he had gone on he would have gone under. Maybe he did go under? Who knows? Perhaps it was just a ploy to break away from the pressure and that tag of being ‘The Voice of a Generation’.

Anyway, the post accident Dylan was very unhip.

I bought ‘John Wesley Harding’ and it was OK. We’d all thought he was easing his way back in. The Underground was going and we needed Dylan’s spark. He was the guy. The next album would be great, right? No, not right. The next album was ‘Nashville Skyline’. I was so disgusted with it, having bought it with such high expectations on the day of release, that I smashed it and threw it in the dustbin (I only ever did that with one other album and that was Neil Young’s ‘Hawks and Doves’). After that there were two more dreadful albums – ‘Dylan’ and ‘Self Portrait’. It looked like he was a brain-dead spent force. The snarling hipster who spat bullets and was the scourge of the establishment was now an awkward geeky country singer.

It was so bad that when Dylan was due to perform at the Isle of Wight I shunned it as I really didn’t want to see someone so good reduced to a sham. I’m glad I didn’t go.

I wish I hadn’t gone to the Earl’s Court in 1981. I did it against my better judgement. I was persuaded by people who’d seen him in 1978 and found him in top form so I decided to chance my arm. They assured me that the real Dylan was back. The trouble was that Dylan in the intervening time had got religion; he was backed by a gospel choir and was utterly dismal. I hated every minute of it. If there’s one thing I can’t stand it is American saccharin evangelical nutcases. The country is full of indoctrination and shoves it down your throat before you can think. I hate primitive medieval superstition. I could not believe Dylan had succumbed. It was embarrassing – from ‘It’s alright ma’ to the trite ‘God gave names to all the animals’. Seemingly he’d burned his brains out and lost his balls at the same time. Ho hum.

Fortunately he worked his way back again and I got to see him a couple more times when he was good and rockin’. But he never hit the heights of that purple patch in the 1960s when he set the pace for both lyrics and musical innovation. He set the trend for everything that followed.

I’m still mining his lyrics, reading his books, listening to his concerts and radio shows and marvelling at the scope of the guy. If only ………

But Dylan helped me grow and develop as a man. He raised my consciousness. Without him I would not have become as good. We all need people who question what society is about. We need people who question our leaders. That is because people who seek power are often the paranoid sociopaths. We are often being led by people who are mentally ill. Time after time we put the Pol Pot’s, Stalin’s, Mao’s, Thatcher’s and Nixon’s in charge and think they have our best interests at heart. It takes a Dylan to point out the absurdities. That’s what he did for me; he helped opened my eyes.

In Search Of Captain Beefheart – Nowt so weird as Folk – From the Dust bowl to the Thames Delta

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Nowt so weird as Folk – From the Dust bowl to the Thames Delta

1965 was a hell of a year. Ready Stead Go ruled the TV and a non-ending stream of Beat bands took over the charts and the world.

It was the year I turned 16 and got a motorbike which meant I could finally get around and get to gigs.

Donovan appeared as a resident on Ready Steady go complete with his cap and sign on his guitar that said – THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS – both of which he nicked from Woody Guthrie. I liked Donovan and I had this girlfriend Viv who had his album which she later gave to me. I used to go round her place and play the Donovan album.

Viv had an older brother who was in to Big Bill Broonzy and Woody Guthrie. I’d never heard of Woody Guthrie but I was soon getting in to him more than the Donovan. The albums that Viv’s brother liked were Folkways things where Woody is playing fairly safe songs like ‘Springfield Mountain’ with Sonny Terry Brownie McGhee and Leadbelly. There was something about them I liked and I started seeking out other Guthrie stuff and soon found some Guthrie songs that were meatier – ‘The Dustbowl Ballads’

I loved the lyrics they weren’t love songs. Woody Guthrie was writing songs that meant something, that were poetic with an intellectual and political importance. They told stories. They were about people and disasters, organising and putting things right. I loved it. My mind buzzed with them. I soaked them up.

I had discovered someone who I felt sang real songs about real injustice. He was immediately one of my heroes and has never ceased to be.

I bought all his Folkways albums – his ‘Dust Bowl Ballads’ and ‘Columbia River Collection’.

Guthrie was the poet that put balls into the Folk movement. He not only inspired people like Seeger in the 1950s but was the whole basis behind the emergence of Dylan and later influenced Bruce Springsteen, Billy Bragg and a host of others.

Billy Bragg was straight out of the Guthrie mould and burst upon the scene with his rousing political anthems such as Leon Rosselson’s (another singer-songwriter I love) ‘World turned upside down’ and Seeger’s ‘Which side are you on?’ lapsed into more Poppy stuff but re-emerged when he’d been asked to put some Woody Guthrie lyrics to music and record them. He and Wilco recorded the memorable Mermaid Avenue.

Fairly recently I went on pilgrimage to Mermaid Ave in Coney Island New York. The house was no longer there but you could still walk around and pick up the feel of it with its Funfair Park and tackiness. I could feel him there and I breathed his air.

 Coney island 2010

Back in 1965 I’d discovered Woody and I’m still investigating to this day. I always go back to Guthrie. He is a legend.

For Rock to come of age it had to grow out of the love songs and teenage focus of early Rock ‘n’ Roll and start dealing with real issues in a sophisticated manner. The music had to become more sophisticated and complex and the lyrics had to expand. That’s where Woody came in. Almost single-handedly he raised the art of song writing and added humour and a social dimension through a poetry that was insufficiently rewarded.

Woody was a genius. I had found him and been moved by him but my quest was not over.

Woody got me into Folk and Folk, post Dylan, was undergoing a resurgence of interest.

There were two ways it could go. There was the contemporary field with singer songwriters like Bert Jansch and John Renbourn or there was the traditional with the Young Tradition.

It seemed to me that traditional Folk was stilted and set in the past while contemporary Folk was of the moment. Inspired from the roots of Guthrie and then Dylan they were creatively writing songs about the world I was living in. They were telling my stories.

Viv had got me into early Donovan and then two other people got me going into contemporary acoustic Singer-songwriters who were largely masquerading as Folk singers just because they played acoustic guitar.

Firstly Robert Ede leant me the wonderful Jack C Frank album. I immediately bought it and played it to death. It is one of those rare albums that are just perfect with beautifully crafted songs.

I loved Jackson he was a lovely gentle man with a great mind and welcoming smile. I got to meet him in 1969 in Ilford High Road at the Angel pub. It was a great little gig although there were only about twenty people there. Jackson stayed back and we sat and talked with him and told him how great he was.

Jackson had a really tough life. He’d been badly burnt when his school caught fire. Many of his friends had been killed. He’d come to England with the compensation looking to buy classic cars. He’d recorded the one fabled album, performed some gigs, got together with Sandy Denny and then was gone. He later ended up on the streets in New York, got his eye shot out and died penniless of pneumonia.

He didn’t deserve that. He was a lovely talented man.

Supposedly Jackson was meant to be performing with Roy Harper as a guest at Roy’s big break-through gig. He never showed up, never did another concert and faded away.

Then Neil Furby introduced me to Bert Jansch and John Renbourn. I loved Bert’s first and second albums with all the political stuff like ‘Antiapartheid’, ‘Do you hear me now?’ and ‘Needle of Death’. I liked the stuff I could get my teeth into. Folk brought that social bite.

It was the liking of Bert and John that led me to Les Cousins on Greek Street in Soho. Having a motorbike enabled me to get there. It was there that my quest took me to Roy Harper but that’s another story altogether.

Folk changed Rock by adding substance to it. You can see its influence in the Beatles later work. By the end of 1965 I was listening to Beat music that had begun to get more experimental and was getting into Blues and now Folk. The mid 1960s was a nascent period that was about to explode again and I was poised to become more active in my quest. A number of goals were about to be achieved.