since you feel so good
about
your current band, why have you decided not to tour?
to be perfectly truthful, i don't
care if
the public hears this music or not. i do it for mé! i have to.
i
mean, if i don't get it out - good god!
so how do you feel about your
audience?
do you feel any sense of kinship or respect?
no sense of kinship, really. i think
if they
want to come hear it they should, but if they don't want to,
they shouldn't.
i respect anybody who wants to hear something they have to go
through so
much hell to hear. i mean, i'm gonna holler at them! i'm
hollering at myself,
at the monster in me. it's not meant towards any humans.
in a very elegant way....
the artist is he who kids himself
most gracefully.
can an adventurous ear for music
be learned?
yeah, i think it can probably be
refined,
although i liked mozart the minute i heard him. i just wish
i'd heard him
perform his music. i don't want to hear somebody else's
interpretation
of it. the interpreters get so laid back. they always take the
bite and
power out of it. i heard stravinsky conduct himself once and
god, what
a difference!
do you have hopes that your music
will
be performed by other players in the future, or are you
central to the
music to the point that that would be impossible?
i expect it's impossible but i don't
know
if anybody's going to ant to tear themselves up as much as
this music demands.
my band plays hard. i hate to flex and all that macho
silliness but my
music does take a lot of muscle.
have you ever heard your music
performed
by any other group?
yeah, once. what's their name? the
tubes,
yeah, the tubes went down on one of my songs. [read the
sputnik and the blimp for what happened next - t.t.]
and this british
group, magazine, did 'i love you, you big
dummy', and they did a disgusting job. totally missed the
point! sounded
like attentive masturbation.
do you attempt to stay abreast of
musical
trends or listen to the radio?
no! yyyeee no! the very thought
gives me
an involuntary shake. you can get ear flu from pop music.
why do you think the general
audience
tends to find your music difficult and abrasive?
probably because they won't work
hard enough
to hear it.
*
exactly how does a musician go
about mastering
beefheart's unique repertoire? ask the man himself and he'll
no doubt leave
you with a poetic understanding of how he approaches his
work, but the
actual techniques he employs remain a mystery. in an attempt
to shed some
light on his working methods, and the dynamics of his
relationship with
the people who play his music, i spoke with the four members
of the magic
band.
GARY
LUCAS guitarist
don teaches us our parts in a number
of ways.
he tends to mold and shape the music right there during our
rehearsals
and he often sings or whistles our parts to us. sometimes
he'll draw a
diagram or give us a tape of him playing the piece on the
piano. he's able
to compose at the piano very beautifully - 'trout mask
replica' was in
fact composed at the piano, by and large.
i learned one cut on the new album,
a thing
called 'evening bell', from a tape he gave me of himself at
the piano.
for six weeks i worked four hours a day trying to translate
what he was
playing onto the guitar, and i was lucky if i could learn ten
seconds of
the piece a day. don's music can be incredibly difficult to
learn but for
me it's worth the effort because it's great music and it's an
honor to
play it.
picture by
kate
simon
he also uses great
analogies to communicate
what he's after. for instance, in teaching a drum part to
cliff, he told
him to play as if he were juggling a pan of pencils - funny
stuff. in a
way, the songs are like frozen events. it's as if a deck of
cards were
thrown in the air, a snapshot was taken of it, and we learn
to reproduce
that snapshot. if we play it incorrectly, he keeps making
adjustments until
it's right, shaping it as if it's a sculpture rather than
written music.
for us in the band it's sort of like
seeing
a photograph develop. he knows exactly where it's going but
frequently
the band won't have the overall picture until the end. don's
music appears
improvisatory to most people but, in fact, everything is
meticulously worked
out in advance.
everything is in perfect balance and
it doesn't
really lend itself to improvisation. it's like a mobile with
all its elements
spinning in space. the only spontaneous element is don. we
provide a canvas
on which he paints his stuff.
RICHARD
SNYDER bassist
it doesn't bother me that we're not
invited
to offer ideas and opinions about the music because i really
love don's
music and feel a strong commitment to it. one of the hard
things about
playing with don is that being a musician, i tend to think in
a musicianly
way, but he's not dealing with any of that at all.
occasionally the musician
part of my mind gets in the way and i won't be able to play
exactly what
don's after, and when that happens i just have to drop my
musician's armor
and play it the way he asks.
and it's almost liberating to let
that go
- to let the teaching go. many musicians who have worked with
him in the
past have said: 'i was already a proficient musician before i
joined the
magic band', and although that might be true, that's not what
beefheart's
band is about. it's not that you are asked to play badly
because obviously
that's not happening at all. gary lucas does some really
incredible things
with the guitar on the new album. but to play don's music, you
have to
drop your preconceived ideas about playing. you don't drop
your ábilities
but you do drop your concepts.
JEFF
TEPPER guitarist
in the seven years i've been playing
with
don, i've seen his music get less melodic and less musical.
his ideas and
the compositions he writes now are even more abstract and
broken up. his
singing is less melodic - there's more talking or yelling -
and the music
has become more rhythmically fragmented. a song on the new
album called
'cardboard cutout sundown' is a good example of all this. i
think the music
feels less oriented.
CLIFF
MARTINEZ drummer
don always tells us to 'hit it to
hell in
a bread-basket', to play every note like it's going to be your
last note.
and that's one thing i've always liked about his records -
they've always
been sincere and had a lot of energy. don has devised a
completely unique
approach to the drum kit and although not too many drummers
are aware of
beefheart or drumbo (former magic band drummer, aka john
french - k.m.),
i'd put him up there with tony williams or elvin jones.
the drum kit as we now know is a
pretty new
instrument and the way it has always been used in the recent
past, in big
band music, jazz, bebop and rock 'n' roll, is pretty much that
the right
hand plays some kind of ostinato pattern while the left hand
and feet play
accompanying patterns against it. what don does that's
different, is he
incorporates the entire drum kit - tom-toms, everything - into
that time-keeping
ostinato, so that the entire drum kit is playing this giant
melodic pattern.
don's gone through various phases
over the
years and done a few albums - the two on mercury specifically
- that were
commercial attempts. but his unique approach to the drum kit
has remained
fairly consistent throughout all his music.
