CAPTAIN BEEFHEART & HIS MAGIC BAND - THE LOST BROADCASTS
Dancing with the Captain
By
the time the German TV show Beat Club was winding down in 1972, the beat in
question had been all but supplanted by altogether edgier rhythms. Among the
unlikeliest luminaries to grace the show’s soundstage were Captain Beefheart
& His Magic Band.
The
Lost Broadcasts presents everything the Captain and crew performed on that
epochal day, in pin-sharp focus and startling fidelity. Frustratingly, this
makes for a DVD that’s barely half an hour long: once you’ve had two takes of
Click Clack and three of I’m Gonna Booglarize You Baby, all that remains is
Golden Birdies, an instrumental reading of Steal Softly Thru Snow and Rockette
Morton’s unfeasibly violent introductory bass solo.
But
what there is of this music nears a strange perfection. The riveting spectacle
of this most magic of bands in constant, snakey, criss-cross motion – driven
lopsidedly by monocled drummer Ed Marimba, deploying a pair of paisley Y-fronts
as a bandana – is more than matched by the dirty locomotion they generate as an
ensemble. Top everything off with the rogueish Captain executing his finest
bull-moose field holler, and you remember just why they were in a different
league to every other band in the known universe.
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