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.

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