Although time has already rendered most of Captain Beefheart's studio recordings magnificent at best and reluctantly inspired at worst, there's never been a successful method of conveying what must have been one of the great live shows in the history of rock. Even if it hardly needs to be mentioned at this point, The Magic Band's music aspires to a confluence of all the most visceral and kinetic forms of music in the last century: sliding, sling-shotting Chicago blues, cindered rockabilly brannigans, eviscerating free-jazz convulsions, and spontaneous "turn on, drop out" happenings. One would imagine a Magic Band at their prime could, at the very least, challenge the galvanic pandemonium of a Ronnie Hawkins/Albert Ayler double-bill. If the U.S. could harness this kind of energy, we wouldn't be in Iraq right now. Unfortunately, for the last three decades, the official live Beefheart concerts have been pretty dismal: They either document some of the less interesting permutations of the band in the 1980s or are marred by poor recording technology. There was a slight consolation for the wealthy businessman who happened to find themselves in the German bootleg market; the rest of us suffered in silence.
Until now. Or, actually, three years ago. In 2000, Rhino Handmade released an Internet-only 1.16-disc recording of the Shiny Beast-era Magic Band at a November 1978 show in Long Island. Now it's being re-released all over Amazon.com and your local Blockbuster Music, permitting all those off-line backcountry hippies to relive their glory days without sacrificing their bizarre commune lifestyles. Most of the selections in the 85-minute show are drawn from 1978's Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller), Beefheart's return to form after three previous lackluster albums. However, there's also ample material from 1967's gorged garage masterpiece, Safe as Milk, 1972's eerily approachable Clear Spot, and Trout Mask Replica.
For a band often accused of an overly abstract exploitation of rhythm and blues, this particular Magic Band incarnation can growl like a toasted bar-band or keep the sort of lock-step dance percussion that later generations would ignorantly deem "post-rock." On "Owed T'Alex" and "Tropical Hot Dog Night", the guitars are weightless, flickering, and muted. Robert Williams' drums are given prominence and Bruce Fowler's epically metal trombone plunges straight to the Earth's core. And, of course, there's also Beefheart's deranged grumbling of lyrics that even Freud would shake his head at. The yelping crowd, alternately entranced and exasperated, drives the Captain to ever-further limits of howling depravity. His voice is more carcinogenic than Bob Dylan's, more drunkenly spastic than Hasil Adkins', and more sinisterly sepulchral than Johnny Cash's.
Even more interesting than the Shiny Beast tracks, however, is the band's rendition of songs written by an earlier Magic Band. Guitarists Jeff Tepper and Richard Redus never try to simply ape Zoot Horn Rollo's legendary lunacy on Trout Mask Replica. Instead, on "Old Fart at Play", "Moonlight on Vermont", and "Veteran's Day Poppy", the new band folds the cuttingly arrhythmic honks and squawks into traditional blues arcs that are only apparent after the "riff" is over. This perfectly captures the whole point of Beefheart's music: not to sound crazy, but to sound one step away from normal, like a jigsaw puzzle that coincidentally fits together without making the intended picture. Though Beefheart's vocals on the older Safe as Milk songs aren't always up to his usual standard, the songs themselves seem faster, leaner, and, on "Dropout Boogie", even more self-parodic, like a teenage anthem played from the bottom of a well.
Nevertheless, the most enticing aspect of this might be Beefheart's between-song banter. He somehow manages to sound even more unhinged than he sounds in the studio. By the end of the second song, he's already rambling about Roslyn's Hollywood telephone cords to a clearly hostile audience. At other points, he breaks off a performance to yell (at an audience member?) about assuming a song is in 4/4 and blames the death of poetry on a 24-hour Denny's.
Obviously, then, this is a damn good time. Still, I'm Going to Do What I Wanna Do certainly doesn't recommend itself to Beefheart neophytes. Although it's surely the best official Beefheart live release on the market right now, I will be personally offended if you listen to it before hearing his studio albums. At the same time, isolated milliseconds of a song like "Suction Prints" have been converted into entire albums by indie cognoscenti in the 80s and 90s. There are one or two moments on this show, towards the end, that are as close to a pure distillation of rock energy as this sad world is ever likely to get. It comes down to this: one of the best bands of the 70s playing some of the most intimidating and irrational songs of the century in front of a crowd of acidheads and hooligans.
