He is the great Beefheart.

When the radio’s fast casket and mild rage hit all-time crumbling, the high-hat’s pollution and drums plunged like a hacksaw through an ice age.

He chipped the rust off his hat and blew off his chaps like a breeze burned on a dustpan. Where hell bottomed out near the rusted hulls of the let-go burnable ground, he singed the sinking continents.

He bled The Magic Band face-first over the fires.

They endured the hellion only to end up razed while Beefheart hawed and pricked, reducing them to tears with the end of a crossbow’s caw.

The music itself scathed to life.

Who else but The Magic Band (with hats in hand) could null the dentured, piped-in music so prevalent throughout? Not even God’s cold, dark trumpeting Son.

Their royalties withheld for decades while Don and God braised each other’s flesh with human nails. Muscles and jugulars scoured, and four lungs scoured, though not before the brute, cuffed dangling of their audience beheld the last three albums. (All of them with howling, cooing hearts.)

Captain Beefheart and The Magic Band: their blouses matched the sun’s speckling on the water, reflecting the entire gamut of life.

Tags: blouses, captain beefheart, crossbows, dustpans, hacksaw, jugular, life, magic band, music

“The Wind” by PJ Harvey. Who invented whisper rock? This is the epitome. I’m fairly sure “The Wind” is my favorite PJ Harvey song. The spell this song casts can’t be denied. Listen to the first few seconds: words fail here. From the outset, the insistent bass and skittery drums behind the hushed, ghostly vocals. Add to this whale sounds, screams, and wind brushing in the background and the effect is perfect horror cinema. I love the “listen to the wind blow” refrain at the end, the way the strings tremor followed by the two-note whale response.

“Trouble in This Town” by The Bats. New Zealand came close to speeding up the continental drift when The Bats released Daddy’s Highway in 1987 – way, way before its time. “Trouble in This Town” is eclipsular pop: seemingly frivolous at first, the layered hooks-on-hooks give this song its kick. The bass is all inhuman bounce and bubble, like lava popping on the sidewalk. The same can be said for “Calm Before the Storm”, awash as it is in Kaye Woodward’s lead guitar and stellar backing vocals. Listen to the way she sings “there’s calm before the storm” behind Robert Scott’s gravelly lead. I wish I was in this band — and in a parallel universe fever dream I’m reincarnated as Kaye’s guitar.

Here’s a live version of “Trouble in This Town.” I love how nervous they look, seemingly unaware of their tectonic-shift greatness. ‘Ecstatic’ should be saved for music like this. (Dig the shmohawk.)

Tags: continental drift, ecstatic, horror, kaye woodward, pj harvey, robert scott, tectonics, the bats, whales, wind

One of my most valuable life lessons arrived wrapped as a drunken spect/deb/acle on February 21, 1991. This was the night Bob Dylan was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award on the Grammy Awards. I remember it like an assassination: I was 19 years old and a pretty big Dylan fan – well, big enough to have anticipated the rare real-live network television appearance of my hero for weeks beforehand, and I was primed with a specially-marked “Bob Dylan ‘91” VHS tape to capture the historic (what I so desperately wanted to be) comeback a la Elvis in ’68. Sure, Dylan himself wasn’t exactly primed to win over the hearts of mainstream America, even if his performance that evening had been half-way decent. He released Oh Mercy in ’89, and that won him back some love. But Under the Red Sky in 1990 didn’t exactly put him with Bell Biv Devoe. That album was awful, but there was no reason for Dylan fans not to think the man couldn’t be relevant again. Somehow. Nevermind the cover of Spin magazine around that time which posed the heart-soddering question, “Is Bob Dylan Dead?”

Well, he wasn’t dead. Just comatose, that evening at least. I didn’t know it at the time, but his performance and acceptance speech would sear something awful into my consciousness, something weirder and more—forgive me—profound than I ever expected. It’s the accidental gift from Bob Dylan that keeps on giving: unmitigated ugliness.

I won’t go into the fabled scene itself. Much has been written on it, and it’s been mocked and parodied to death. Here’s what I will say about it, though: there’s something to be said for failing spectacularly in front of millions of people and living to tell the tale. Most people who watched this six and a half minutes or so of prime time television were stunned and disturbed. Dylan’s speech itself—something his “daddy” once told home about becoming “so defiled in this world that your own mother and father will abandon you” and God believing in “your own ability to mend your own ways”—was, shall we say, unconventional for a Grammy Award recipient. (Perhaps this was Dylan’s acknowledgment of one of the lowest periods in his public and private life, which, according to his memoir Chronicles, Volume One, he was experiencing at that time.)

This kind of weirdness doesn’t sit well with the Bud-n-pizza crowd, to say nothing of just about everyone else repelled by the unapologetic ugliness on display that night. Aye, there’s the rub: “truly awful” is surely subjective. But the lesson learned that night was that, as Robert Pollard once said, you can suck and still rule. Embarrassing yourself so horribly in front of your most ardent admirers is only the best excuse you need to triumph later on. As I would in the intervening years since that evening in ’91, and still do fairly regularly to this day, fail so profoundly at just the worst (right) times, I remember Dylan At The Grammies. As a result, those knuckles-scraping-the-ground periods of my life scare me less. Failure—be it public or intimate—is absolutely essential, and essentially human. That Dylan can go from the gone-cold depths of the ‘91 Grammy Awards to something as great as “Huck’s Tune” is all the proof I need.

Tags: Bob Dylan, failure, Grammy, Robert Pollard, ugliness

When I was a preteen – barely out of my mid-sixties in the early ‘80s – I owned two telescopes, a reflector and a refractor. I’d get up early each morning (I wasn’t allowed to stay up past 8PM), go out in the yard, set up the tripods and usually aim toward the moon or whatever star system glittered in the void. By morning, if the sun plopped out sans clouds, a special sun filter fit nicely on the eyeball lens of the refractor. The sun looked green with black sunspots. I didn’t know it then – I hardly had words it – but the association with the abstract began its pull. Sitting there in the backyard with my notebook, where I made delicious scratchings and non-linear notes on whatever popped out, was like swimming. At night I’d dream of benevolent UFOs swarming within scope of my ‘scopes, or the moon would show something weird, or being able to see to the cliff-edge of the perimeter of it all. I’d especially dream about not going to school, living out in the high Mojave with a giant telescope, a whole stack of spiral-bounds and some paint at my disposal, no questions answered, no answers asked.

All these things somehow found their way onto Frank Black’s 1994 album Teenager of the Year. It’s a continuous onslaught of joy, unsurpassed in its thorough geek capacity and ecstatic pop-pummeling. This is the sound of pure astronomical abandon, punctuated with songs about the Three Stooges, terraforming Mars, headaches, the disappearance of Pong, freedom rock, and many other things. You could classify this as Sci-Fi Rock if you wanted to. But it’s the kind of Sci-Fi that I dug before teenage shadows sunk their claws into my midriff, the non-differentiating kind that didn’t really see the boundaries between terraforming Mars and, say, girls. I wanted to be the first pop-rocker in space, obliterating all the rules, winning the hearts of babes and astro-geologists alike! This is the sound and message of Teenager of the Year, and I hold it dear.

Tags: frank black, mars, preteen, science fiction, space, spiral-bound notebooks, teenager of the year, telescopes, terraforming

I’m not calling to any of them, though they keep coming to me. Is there an unknowing self, or would that be the one who knows? Knows what? That love persists forever, and death has no power except to serve it, by causing it to flourish more. There is no pain but love-caused, and so what else is there? …

— from “Entering the Jewel” by Alice Notley (In the Pines, 2007).

Documented evidence, balloon-lifted, proves the claim of birth by burst of laughter.

Hello. Blunt force beatitudes! I’m trying to make this work, make it mobile, give it legs and shoes.