Marking
its golden jubilee this month is the ninth studio LP from Captain
Beefheart & the Magic Band, Bluejeans & Moonbeams, which was
released in November of 1974. It's an album that, arguably, could be
considered Beefheart's career low point. After the recording of his
previous LP, Unconditionally Guaranteed (1973), the entire Magic Band
quit in disgust with the results of the album. That left Beefheart
dangling on his own for his next album.
Don
Van Vliet never had any formal musical training, so he always relied on
having a musical director in the band who could interpret his abstract
musings into musical notation. This role had been successively filled,
in turn, by Alex St. Clair, John French, and Bill Harkleroad on his
previous albums, but now with no band, he was working with an unfamiliar
set of musicians and was pretty much lost in the studio. One of the
musicians, Micheal Smotherman, said "Don was just as confused as he
could be throughout the whole process. I would push his face up to the
microphone and he would start singing. And when it was time to stop I
would pull him back gently."
As
a result, the album is generally considered the nadir of Van Vliet's
musical career. Don's only concession to the album was that he liked
the cover painting by his cousin, Victor Hayden. Yet there are still
some folk who managed to find value in the record. An early White
Stripes EP contains three Beefheart covers, including this album's
opening track. Kate Bush, in a Smash Hits interview, considered this one
of her top ten albums. Personally, while I mostly dismiss it myself, I
did eventually come to recognize a sublime beauty in Observatory Crest,
so maybe it's not the utter failure that everyone often considers it. I
actually think it's a bit better than its predecessor.
The
album marked a turning point for Beefheart, or perhaps a "rock bottom".
He subsequently spent the remainder of the decade regrouping and
refocusing his music away from attempts at mainstream accessibility,
moving back into more angular experimentation. While his progress was
initially confounded by contractual issues on Bat Chain Puller (1976),
which eventually became reworked into the Shiny Beast LP (1978), his
efforts to get back to his essence eventually resulted in two
outstanding albums, Doc at the Radar Station (1980) and Ice Cream for
Crow (1982), his final musical foray before retiring to the desert to
focus on painting, which he did for the remainder of his life until his
death in 2010.
