Eclectic Trains

Great music often evokes specific memories hardwired to precise locations and so with the death of great musicians. Friday 17th December 2010 saw the passing away of Don van Vliet, a beguiling musician, who you may know by the name of his musical alter ego: Captain Beefheart. Snow was falling fast in London and I happened to be playing some of my favourite Beefheart tracks on Spotify whilst attempting to clear my desk at work before Xmas - a persistently futile exercise. The snow was threatening to clogg everything up and so I headed for the tube. Someone twittered "Beefheart has died" which I picked up when the District Line surfaced to a snow-drenched Bromley-by-Bow underground station. I always lose data connection there but when I got home the radio confirmed Don van Vliet's depARTure.

Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band disbanded in 1982 after their 12th, and final, studio album Ice Cream for Crow and van Vliet committed himself to expressionist painting for the rest of his life. So his shuffle off this mortal coil was not an immediate loss to music as he had already retired: no comebacks, no reunions, no final tours or charity singles. If you have never been gripped by pop/rock music post 1955 then he will be, and is likely to remain, an utter mystery to you. If however, you like popular music (and one can never assume that everyone does) and you have never come across Captain Beefheart, then you have many treats ahead of you. My brief tribute is not an obituary, please go to Rolling Stone, MOJO, Wikipedia, The Guardian and cult fans sites for the narrative details. No, this is simply a short personal reflection on Captain Beefheart's impact on my musical senses.

I went to Nottingham Trent Polytechnic in 1983 as an indie kid and left in 1986 a jazz-fiend, a world music lover with a taste for the avant-garde - or so I like to think. Some of my new friends were listening to Frank Zappa - who immediately excited me as an artist - and along with Zappa came Captain Beefheart. Zappa went to school with Beefheart (I prefer to use his alter ego's name) and encouraged him to pursue his music, produced the most experimental of all his albums: Trout Mask Replica (1969) and also worked with him on the 1975 album, Bongo Fury. If you like one then you'll probably like the other although they are clearly very different artists. Nevertheless, what they share is a jazz sensibility.

Beefheart had an incredible voice. He could get really low and he also developed a characteristic high-pitched squawk, or squeak, that would punctuate his singing. His voice was often compared to Howlin' Wolf and it's a reasonable assumption that Wolf was a significant influence on Beefheart because of the initial similarity of the vocal sound, the skillful harmonica playing and Beefheart's clear love of the blues. So if you mix up Howlin' Wolf's voice with the free jazz experiments of some of John Coltrane's and Ornette Coleman's recordings and mix in a desert-swamp-rock blues thing with a poetry vibe, then you get some way to describing the explosive Beefheart sound.

I love the first album, Safe As Milk (1967). Electricity, a song from this album, is so brilliantly captured in this live footage from 1968 on the beach at Cannes. Beefheart looks out of kilter with the time. The audience certainly don't know what to make of him. The music has a frenetic energy and a very thick full sound. Ironically for me, I also like the mid-period, 'softer' recordings -  Unconditionally Guaranteed (1974) and Moonbeams and Bluejeans (1974) - that Beefheart later disowned (not so avant-garde now are we?). If you get an opportunity to listen to Upon the My-O-My and Observatory Crest then hopefully you will be enraptured by the atmospheres they conjure up. Trout Mask Replica they certainly aren't.

Smoke-filled student digs, going on mad trips to Wales, turning up the dial to 11 on my (recordiing) Sony Walkman through the streets of Nottingham and free jamming sessions all get tied up into my Beefheart memory bank. Enjoy these links if you want to get booglarized:

13 Reasons Why We Love Captain Beefheart
Ten Essential Captain Beefheart Songs

Hope Augustus live at PJ's, Covent Garden from eclectictrains on Vimeo.

In June this year I had the opportunity to film jazz singer Hope Augustus at PJ's in Covent Garden.  It was great to get out with a video camera and capture a flavour of the atmosphere at Hope's gig.  The performing space at PJ's is intimate, for those of you that don't know it, and therefore a challenge to film in.  So I plonked myself at the back of an eating area and didn't take the camera off the tripod until the punters had had a few drinks.

It was a fun night.  There were certain moments when the audience were completely captivated which is hard to achieve when everyone is eating and imbibing.  Look out for the audience reaction to Hope singing "The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face".  Before the show I filmed a short interview with Hope.  This was a family show, so to speak, as Hope is my sister-in-law.  I hope (every pun intended) you enjoy this short film of the night.

[For those of you interested in the technical stuff: the film was shot on a Sony Z1 (HDV mode);  I recorded extra sound from the PA feed into a Zoom H4n (utterly crucial); I edited on Final Cut Pro and my colleagues at Xube graded my footage using Magic Bullets].

You know when you find a website that just takes your breath away... well Last.fm has done that for me. It's a music social networking web 2.0 site thingamyjig. It's basically a music website that allows you to listen to vast amounts of music for free*. The clever "scrobbling" software behind the scenes tracks your tastes and suggests to you other music you might like. As Last.fm exlains itself:

"Millions of songs are scrobbled every day. This data helps Last.fm to organise and recommend music to people; we use it to create personalised radio stations, and a lot more besides."

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. I have managed to discover music that I just hadn't heard before. "Unlimited free, legal music!" you say in complete surprise. Can this be true? No, not exactly. In the process of playing certain tracks to death, I discovered that Last.fm will try and restrict the frequency of access to tracks by only letting you hear 30 second excerpts. Why? *Because they want you to subscribe to the service (£1.50 per month) or buy the track. Okay, so there is an business model beneath the surface but what the heck it's still brilliant! Personally, I think it blows iTunes out of the water.

I went to a gig in 1992 at the Jazz Cafe. Abdullah Ibrahim was playing with a 4-piece band. I thought he was amazing and one particlar track just mesmerized me. After the gig I tried to find the track, but to no avail. I bought a few albums but he is very prolific and the internet didn't exist then. I even resorted to singing the flute melody to staff on the jazz floor of London's Virgin Megastore. They were sympathetic, and highly bemused, but couldn't help. Last.fm helped me discover this track in a matter of minutes. My quest has ended but really it has only just begun. In case you would like to hear this tune here is a link below. It's called "The Mountain" and I believe it is the title track of an eponymous album and with it's oriental themes, should have been the BBC's ident music for the Olympics (or perhaps not, some gem stones are best left undisturbed).

www.last.fm/music/Abdullah+Ibrahim/_/The+Mountain

I have eclectic music tastes as my moniker suggests. I have a penchant for classic rock and was lucky to go and see Led Zeppelin in December 2007 at the O2. Please read my blog entry on the Zep gig if you fancy: eclectictrains.blogspot.com/2008/01/zep-at-o2-belated-tribute.html

But that ain't half the story. I love jazz, blues, Beethoven, Bach, Stravinsky, Mozart, Mahler and am still listening to "London Calling" by The Clash.

I've been meaning to sign up to Last.fm for a while. The company is based near my work - www.xube.co.uk - in the East End of London, I believe, so I feel a kind of parochial pride in it's success. What a great idea!

electictrains @ Last.fm

A very pixellated photo of Led Zeppelin taken on my mobile at the O2 on 10/12/07.

I've been meaning to scribble down a few musings about Led Zeppelin at the O2 and a recent tribute to the venue in the free rag, The London Paper, has jolted me into action. I picked up the paper yesterday on the tube and read guest contributor, Louise Claridge's article "Why the O2 arena rocks my world". I enjoyed her celebration of a great venue in East London so much I felt compelled to add my experience of returning from December 10th's Led Zeppelin reunion concert. Hopefully you will find her article here: http://www.thelondonpaper.com/cs/Satellite/london/talk/article/1157150430729?packedargs=suffix%3DArticleController

Oh how sad, it says I wrote my contribution at 1:18 this morning but I know for a fact that I hit my pillow at 12:30!

Guest_Eclectic Trains says: Great article. I saw Led Zeppelin before Xmas and got home in a jiffy. Couldn't contain the smug smile on my face as the majority of fans headed West whilst I was a mere 4 stops from Upton Park (home). Bring on the rise of the mighty East London! It's been a long time... Tuesday 29 January 2008 01:18 Mark as offensive (what's that about?)

I wasn't a Led Zeppelin fan the first time round. "Stairway to Heaven" was enough to put me off. In 1976, aged 12, I had just graduated to Pink Floyd and Punk came along. The albums "Dark Side of the Moon" and "Animals" had to be hidden as The Clash, Pistols etc... went to the front of my LP box. Punk was pithy, angry, urban and cool and rock was what local biker gangs listened too. They were tough but they weren't cool. But like a lot of people whose music tastes were shaped in the 1970s you signed up to the revolution but also, over time, began to appreciate the evolution. What I mean is the raw energy to be fun in "Pretty Vacant" by The Sex Pistols could also be found in "Rock and Roll" by Led Zeppelin. In fact the first drummer we had in our teenage punk band, was a orange-dyed haired, proto-Rotten look-a-like called "John the Punk" who used to entertain us with the opening drum break from "Rock and Roll" just to get an ironic laugh out of us. Once we managed to shut him up, Downstream, our band, went on to pen little Oxfordshire punk classics called "Punk Rock Superstar (what a hypocrite you are)", "Harlequin Man", "Apocalyptics" and "(Living in these) Financial Times". Oh those were the days...

Anyway my simple point is that Led Zeppelin have attracted wave after wave of new fans since their real demise in the late 1970s because they have a distinct and awesome sound. I think a housemate in Nottingham lent me the tape of "Houses of the Holy" in 1986. I didn't listen to it straight away, but a few years later I found it again, played it and started to get hooked (thanks Grant - I've still got your tape!). I'm no mystic. The mystic lyrics of "Kashmir" make me smile but they don't transport me. The relentless power of the music blew me away on the night and their performance of that song will stay with me for a long time. I enjoy the groove, from hard rock to funky riffs to spacey experimentation. Very rarely do lyrics catch my imagination. But on the night of the gig, whilst I was waiting to meet my brother, who had luckily, and legitimately, been sold 2 guest list tickets, I was moved to text him with some trivial and banal Led Zep (LZ) lyrics that were blasting through my iPod headphones as I emerged with fellow LZ fans up the North Greenwich escalators to the O2 Mecca. Here is my text:

------ SMS ------

To: +44**********
Sent: 10 Dec 2007 18:58
Subject: "Night Flight" by LZ
"Night Flight" by LZ

"I received a message from my brother
'Cross the water,
He sat laughing as he wrote 'The End's in sight'.
So I said goodbye to all my friends
And packed my hopes inside a matchbox
Cos I know it's time to fly...
Ohhh yeah come on meet me in the morning,
Meet me in the middle of the night..."

Nuff said. I'm here!
------------------

Pop Music is about capturing a musical moment. When it works special songs can coincide with moments in your life. I think I probably reverted to an over-excited teenager just for one night and Led Zeppelin at the O2 are to blame for that.