Friday, January 15, 2021

Vlietymology: Captain Beefheart 80


Bat chain
Puller

Bat chain puller
Puller, puller

A chain with yellow lights
That glistens like oil beads
On its slick smooth trunk

That trails behind on tracks, and thumps
A wing hangs limp and retrieves

Bat chain puller
Puller puller

Bulbs shoot from its snoot
And vanish into darkness

It whistles like a root snatched from dry earth
Sodbustin’ rakes with grey dust claws
Announces its coming into morning

This train with grey tubes
That houses people’s very thoughts and belongings.

Bat chain puller
Puller puller

This train with grey tubes that houses people’s thoughts,
Their very remains and belongings.

A grey cloth patch
Caught with four threads
In the hollow wind of its stacks

Ripples felt fades and grey sparks clacks,
Lunge into cushioned thickets.
Pumpkins span the hills
With orange Crayola patches.

Green inflated trees
Balloon up into marshmallow soot
That walks away in faulty circles
Caught in grey blisters
With twinkling lights and green sashes

Pulled by rubber dolphins with gold yawning mouths
That blister and break in agony
In zones of rust
They guild gold sawdust into dust.

Bat chain puller,
Puller puller.

Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band
Wolf & Rissmiller's Country Club
Reseda, California USA
1.29.1981

01 Hair Pie
02 Nowadays a Woman's Gotta Hit a Man
03 I Wanna Find a Woman That'll Hold My Big Toe 'Til I Have to Go
04 Hot Head
05 Ashtray Heart
06 Dirty Blue Gene
07 The Smithsonian Institute Blues (or The Big Dig)
08 Best Batch Yet
09 Safe As Milk
10 One Red Rose That I Mean
11 China Pig
12 Sue Egypt
13 Doctor Dark
14 Bat Chain Puller
15 My Human Gets Me Blues
16 Sugar N' Spikes
17 Sheriff of Hong Kong
18 Kandy Korn
19 Veteran's Day Poppy
20 Big Eyed Beans from Venus

Total time: 1:19:54

Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet) - vocals, gongs, harmonica & soprano saxophone 
Jeff Moris Tepper - guitar & vocals
Richard Midnight Hatsize Snyder - guitar, bass & vocals
Eric Drew Feldman - bass, mandolin & keyboards 
Robert Arthur Williams - drums & percussion 
Denny Walley - guitar on "China Pig"

master soundboard cassette
1st second of "Doctor Dark" patched from the JWB "Best Batch Yet" 30th Anniversary remaster of this set;
edited for dead air throughout, start of Track 01 repaired, tape flip between Tracks 12 & 13 smoothed, 
and boosted +1.25 dB throughout by EN, January 2021
490 MB FLAC/January 2021 archive link


There are different versions of this this ultra-definitive bootleg, and a contradictory history as to where each version was sourced. But I won't trouble you with all that. 
OK, maybe I will. This is the original soundboard dub, that goes all the way to 20 kHz. There's others that claim to descend from reels made from this master soundboard cassette, but those only go to 15 kHz, as an off-air FM tape would. 
All I did was cut out the dead air and tuning -- it fits on a single CDR now, not that the 20th Century matters much anymore -- and performed a couple of subtle repairs utilizing the existing materials already there. I also turnt it up a smidge.

So in case you haven't figured it out yet, Don Van Vliet -- the madman musician and painter better known as Captain Beefheart -- would have been 80 today. 
There's nothing to say except that if he showed up at the record company offices today, they'd probably go right past calling security and just summarily execute him, right there at the reception desk.
You better not miss out on this (holy shit it's brutal in its precision) tape or he will take you for a ride in his Tarotplane.--
J.


1.15.1941 - 12.17.2010