| RAVE / PART ONE
My voracious appetite for music is almost exceeded
by my passion for books, so here’s a few spoonfuls of headfood
that has kept me ( & maybe you ?) warm through the big chill.
Ever since I’ve been doing shows on RRR
I’ve always featured tracks from Don Van Vliet AKA Captain
Beefheart, an abstract expressionist musician who like an action
painter splashed swathes of his multi octave post delta blues growl
while intoning his free ranging post Dada babble, across musical
canvases that incorporated free jazz, noiseblurt, naïve nursery
rhyme melodies & sophisticated blues stomp. It sounded like
nothing else before or since. A true original.
I’ve had a vague grasp of his back story
through the occasional article or commentary & finally picked
up a copy of MIKE BARNES‘ CAPTAIN BEEFHEART biography, really
the only decent book on the man out there, to finally find out what
is the story of this eccentric genius that created these otherworldly
musical meanders, before abruptly retiring from music to pursue
painting.The book is meticulously researched, extensive interviews
with everyone involved except the enigma at it’s core &
a genuine affection & enthusiasm in it’s style & a
wealth of anecdotes & Beefheartian bonbons of abtuse wisdom
& fractured wit. The detail, in particular around the creation
of his Trout Mask Replica double album opus, when the band lived,
played & starved together in an ordinary house like a cult or
Sun Ra like collective, while The Captain taught them to play the
music that he heard in his head that no one else had even thought
of before, is intriguing. An incredibly audacious unique creative
leap. Sadly the book also shows the resistance of record companies
& difficulties with “the business “ that no doubt
led to his sudden departure from music, they put an entire album
of his through a phaser effect without his knowledge. It’s
an exuberant read, but Don himself remains a cryptic question mark
at the centre of his own entertaining universe.
Frank Zappa a childhood friend & on again
off again collaborator & adult friend is a leading character
in the narrative & is also the subject a biography FRANK ZAPPA
by BARRY MILES, who has also authored biographies of Allen Ginsberg
& Paul McCartney amongst others. Frank appears as not so much
a question mark but a blank page at the book’s centre, incredibly
prolific, he comes across as a manic music maker who really had
very little life in the so called real world. Even his daughter
who lived in the same house slipped letters under his door to communicate
with a recluse living in own suburban family home. His creativity
seemed to have come from an almost mathematical mind rather than
from the heart or soul, a cold distance that appears to have permeated
his relationships & fractious worldly dealings as well as his
own internal life. For those that want to know exactly what Frank
did in his creative musical life in every detail step by step, this
is the book for you, but for the rest of us unfortunately it’s
a boring book of lists about a really boring heartless creative
music machine. No more no less.
Barry Miles is a bit of a hipster, he’s
hung with the cool & at one stage was appointed by Paul McCartney
as head of Zapple Records, a planned spoken word label that led
to him to working with American author Charles Bukowski as the planned
first release. It collapsed, along with the rest of Beatles’
noble but failed attempt at hip capitalism Apple Corp & the
project was lost but it did provide the material for part of Barry’s
recent biography of Bukowski, but he will be hard pressed to better
LOCKED IN THE ARMS OF A CRAZY LIFE by HOWARD SOUNES, a book as rambunctious
a read as it’s subject. Packed with anecdote, intimate photos
& interviews with virtually everyone that Bukowski had a relationship
with, it’s a warts ‘n’ all portrait that neither
eulogises nor condemns it’s subject. An often lazy & limited
writer Bukowski has been latched onto my recent generations as some
sort of hipster cool icon, when all that he offered most in his
writing & in his life was his essential humaness as a flawed
& sensitive human trying to be as honest as he could to himself
& to the world. A noble rogue.
The perfect companion to the book is the CHARLES
BUKOWSKI BORN INTO THIS DVD, an assemblage of interviews, homemovies
& candid confrontations that give an incredibly intimate portrait
of the man & his haphazard life that in spite of his own wrecklessness
clung to the ordinary & mundane. A contemporary of The Beats,
he thought that they were too optimistic & when he drops the
schtick as he does several times here, his gentle soul shines through,
as it does in the best of his writing.
The recent reissue of the previously difficult
to get 1939 novel ASK THE DUST by JOHN FANTE, a literary hero of
Bukowski’s, who pays tribute in the preface, brings an American
classic of lean & mean writing back into the public gaze. Amusing,
heartbreaking, hard boiled & soft centred, it’s beautifully
nuanced tale of the everyman contrarian stumbling through life on
the margins of society & himself. A classic.
Quite by accident I seem to have read a lot of
biography lately & currently I’m several hundred pages
into THE ULTIMATE PICASSO edited by BRIGITTE LEAL, the appropriately
titled tome that is an impeccable hybrid of biography & art
lesson & gallery tour of Pablo Picasso’s remarkable creative
life. He was a 20th century giant & as you move through the
book, your awe, appreciation & admiration for the man becomes
almost overwhelming & exhausting, he was a Shiva spark that
burnt so brightly in his primal core. Constant creation & transformation.
Impeccably designed, printed on heavy paper stock, over 500 pages,
featuring Picasso’s complete works in over 1200 reproductions
& biographic & art notes from 3 of his most important bioographers,
it’s a feat for the mind & eyes.
COMING NEXT IN PART 2, Miles Davis, Truman Capote,
Brett Easton Ellis, Gerard Malanga, League Of Gentlemen, Curb Your
Enthusiasm & Lone Wolf & Cub amongst other good stuff.
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