There was some interesting discussion of Cpt. Beefheart back in the Fall, because I was playing him in the rock seminar. At the time I think I neglected to mention that I had programmed him largely because I think Robert Christgau’s and Lester Bangs’s approaches to writing about him so nicely encapsulate the differences between their whole ways of going about doing rock criticism (probably possible to find other musicians for whom this is true, but Beefheart works so well and does give an opportunity to talk about old man Van Vliet as well…). The posts are here and here.
In any case, I got a smile from this online comic piece on Beefheart from Scary Go Round. I particularly like the question, “Have you been buying records from the rag and bone man again?” The celebration/deflation of the record collector/Beefheart fan is pretty spot on.
[Thanks to my brother, Jeremy, who writes read-in, for pointing me to this.]
My favorite line, from the third strip: “The most popular number of times people listen to Trout Mask Replica is ‘once’, followed by ‘a quarter’.”