Wednesday 31 December 2014

Captain Beefheart: Live from Paris US Review

CAPTIAN BEEFHEART & HIS MAGIC BAND – LIVE FROM LE NOUVEL HIPPODROME PARIS

October 26, 2014by Tommy HashNo Comments
Band : 
Genre : 
Label : Gonzo Multimedia
Link : http://www.beefheart.com/

Paris 1977 - cover
There is no shortage of insanity at a Captain Beefheart show, from Bongo Fury to numerous bootlegs and visual footage that has been dug up, the Zappa protégé knew how to work the audience and raise hell too the point where you didn’t know if he was preaching a death sermon or simply throwing a fit. Now as more material is surfacing from Don Van Vliet and Company, this concert, having taken place in late 1977, two years after …Fury and over a year before Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller), shows that the Captain just can’t disappoint. But as the story goes, The Magic Band at this point was beyond being The Tragic Band, but they still went beyond kicking ass with their punkish and post-avant garde stage act.
The material preached includes early goodies from the Buddah years (“Abba Zabba” & “Electricity”) to a lot of Warner/Replica-era ditties (“The Dust Blows Forward…” & “Big Eyed Beans from Venus”) to even giving us a taste of what was to come on future releases (“Owed t’Alex/Carson City” & “Bat Chain Puller”), so those fans who bought the later records could sing, or in this case howl along while dropping the needle on the wax. This two-disc collective of mutant blues is a bootleg quality, on a scale of 1-10, mainly a five, stick right down the middle, not really being able to decipher if it was either a soundboard recording or something that was captured through a decent mic/tape recorder in the midst of a good sound system; lots of tape hiss and slightly muddy. Yet that’s the only way to capture the man whom no one sounded like before and no one sounded like after; through the slide guitars, wailing sax, and vocal antics of this performance, what other way is there than to enjoy the raw lunacy.

CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM GONZO:
Commodore Ballroom, Vancouver 1973
CD - £9.99

Le Nouvel Hippodrome, Paris 1977
2CD - £11.99

No comments:

Post a Comment

...BECAUSE SOME OF US THINK THAT THIS STUFF IS IMPORTANT
What happens when you mix what is - arguably - the world's most interesting record company, with an anarchist manic-depressive rock music historian polymath, and a method of dissemination which means that a daily rock-music magazine can be almost instantaneous?

Most of this blog is related in some way to the music, books and films produced by Gonzo Multimedia, but the editor has a grasshopper mind and so also writes about all sorts of cultural issues which interest him, and which he hopes will interest you as well.