Cap'n

Ahoy, there! If you were linked here from John's blog and are looking for sweet, sweet Captain Beefheart stories, know that I searched my previous posts very hard but couldn't find anything. I'm pretty sure I did write something about the Cap'n, though.

Like John said, he often worked with Frank Zappa, as they were lifelong friends, and have (had?) similar weirdness. Zappa was somewhat successful commercially, however, while Captain Beefheart was not really ever. On the other hand, CB's infamous album Trout Mask Replica is generally heralded as the best experimental music album ever or something. Here's a picture of the album cover I stole from Wikipedia (that means it is free):


You can tell just from that that is amazing, and also that it will be right up John's alley. Beefheart is also credited with being a huge influence on later dudes such as Les Claypool and Tom Waits. What's he sound like? You probably won't like him. I don't know which album that is from; it's not from Trout Mask Replica, and that's the only one I know, but it does sound similar to some of TMR. Yeah, he pretty much always sounds like that, growling over guitar timed precisely to sound wrong about things that really don't make any sense. Here he is live, in all his glory. I can't find any video links for TMR, but it is even better (weirder) than those.