Near the end of the 100-page history that came with the 1999 box set Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band: Grow Fins, there's a heartbreaking story from one-time Beefheart guitarist/manager Gary Lucas, which happened in the early 1980s, close to the end of the Captain's (aka Don Van Vliet) recording career. Lucas and Van Vliet approached the latter's old high school pal and kindred 1960s iconoclast-crank Frank Zappa to retrieve the master tapes of Bat Chain Puller, an album the Magic Band had recorded for Zappa's label in 1976, before a lawsuit with Zappa's then-manager Herb Cohen stopped its release. When asked about taking the masters back, Zappa flatly replied: "I thought there might be a higher market value out there in 'BeefheartLand' if I didn't split up the set." By this point, Zappa had held the tapes for over five years, and the Band needed to fill the side of their last album, 1982's Ice Cream for Crow, so Zappa cut them a deal: "Well, I got a track about 12 minutes long called 'Do You Want a Pepsi?' Don sings on it. I wrote it." Needless to say, they declined.
Zappa passed away in 1993 and Van Vliet retreated to the desert for the last decades of his life; the tapes never emerged. It seemed the hatchet had never been buried between these old friends. When John Fahey's Revenant label approached Zappa's estate to include this missing album as the last disc of the Grow Fins box, they were rebuffed with a ludicrously high fee. So when a review from Edwin Pouncey appeared in a recent issue of The Wire proclaiming the legitimacy of this disc, it still seemed unlikely that these could be the missing tapes. Another bootleg had been released earlier in the decade, a woeful-sounding disc called Dust Sucker, and even with both men gone, the argument seemed forever unresolved.
But lo and behold, this is the real Bat Chain Puller, as recorded in 1976 and released by a subsidiary of the Frank Zappa estate via their website, complete with liner notes (and more importantly, approval) from longtime drummer John "Drumbo" French and guitarist Denny Walley. It was to be the album that would restore Captain Beefheart to critical acclaim after two loathsome cash grabs often attributed to "The Tragic Band" by his spurned devotees. In the lore of lost albums, Bat Chain Puller is the good Captain's Smile, a fragmented text never quite assembled. Six of these songs were reworked for the Captain's "comeback" album, 1978's Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller), another three were re-recorded for 1980's barbed Doc at the Radar Station, and two of the darkest tracks resurfaced on swan song Ice Cream for Crow.
For many listeners, Captain Beefheart has always been a hard, even taxing, listen. In the mid-1960s, the Magic Band's tough, aslant blues held promise for commercial success, but by the time of 1969's enigmatic and still-inscrutable double album, Trout Mask Replica, it seemed the kind of thing to be launched into space (whether that reads as a statement to scare off alien invasion or to find sympathetic intergalactic ears depends on your own perception of that album). By the early 1970s, after the playful yet prickly Lick My Decals Off, Baby, Van Vliet couldn't seem to cash in no matter how sweet and sharp his Clear Spot and The Spotlight Kid albums were.
Strangely, the first half of Shiny Beast might have been his most accessible album side, reminding fans of why they signed up with the Captain in the first place while hooking in new listeners with a cunning blend of surrealist lyrics, tricky rhythmic play, and latent melodicism. The title track is vintage Van Vliet, dappled with skronk and splatter, yet at the same time curiously subtle, with dribbles of synthesizer and a rhythm legendarily concocted from his car's windshield wipers. From there, an almost jazzy song called "Seam Crooked Sam" appears, with gentle guitar lines from John French following Van Vliet's poetic vision as closely as possible, no line or melody repeating or resolving. "Harry Irene" is a bittersweet, shuffling near-standard with an accordion solo from Walley, and features Beefheart at his most lyrically straight-ahead and nuanced. A grim spoken-word piece, "81 Poop Hatch", leads into a delicate guitar miniature titled "Flavor Bud Living".
It's only on "Brick Bats", with Van Vliet's adenoidal soprano Ornette shrieks and wails, that we're finally back in "BeefheartLand." The furious "Floppy Boot Stomp", with Jeff "Moris" Tepper's stinging slide guitar, imagines the Devil going down to Georgia years before Charlie Daniels did. And the blues rise up on "Owed t'Alex" with a Tepper solo reminiscent of Mick Taylor's slide work on Sticky Fingers. The disc's most beguiling moment is bonus track "Hobo-Ism", a stunning eight-minute acoustic blues cut with Walley that sounds like the follow-up to Trout Mask's singular-in-the-canon country blues "China Pig". It's that all-too-rare glimpse at the Captain as the bluesman he always was at heart.
Yet historical perspective and what-ifs somewhat alter the perspective of this document. The album that was later re-recorded with a new band, Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller), put Beefheart back on the map just fine and was an adventurous blend of tropical swagger and spikiness. It remains one of his best-received albums of that decade. Perhaps the shelving of Bat Chain Puller better positioned Beefheart for the end of the decade, as it rendered him relevant and hinted at paternity to other artistically "bent" late-70s acts like Devo, Pere Ubu, and Public Image Ltd. (Curmudgeon that he was, the Captain naturally disavowed such "children.") And the lean and whetted Doc at the Radar Station showed quirky new wavers how to really shatter notions of rhythm and rhyme (tales abound about rhythmic patterns gleaned from windshield wipers, dropped car keys, and courtside seats at Lakers' games).
Had Bat Chain Puller marked his return with its mix of blues shards and safe play and been greeted with open arms in the marketplace, it might have taken the edge off the man. By being spurned, Beefheart instead gave us three irascible, irreducible albums that marked the end of his discography. That he remains a totemic figure for two generations of our finest pop nonconformists speaks to Beefheart's influence still. It's hard to imagine the discographies of iconic folks like Tom Waits, Jack White, and PJ Harvey (not to mention adventurous sonic knot-makers like Sonic Youth, Pere Ubu, and Deerhoof) without him. Were it not for his cipher of African-American country blues, allowing for a personal absorption of that musical form rather than the regurgitation of 12-bar licks that now passes for the blues, our finest weirdoes might be living in ZappaWorld rather than BeefheartLand.
