Why Bob Dylan impressed Captain Beefheart as much as “a slug”
Captain Beefheart was a man with strong convictions. He liked what he liked, he hated what he hated, and he wasn’t shy about sharing his thoughts on either side. It wasn’t that he was a cynic like plenty of artists are. He was always more than willing and excited to lift up the people he liked and admired. But at the end of the day, it all came down to the music. If he didn’t like your songs, you were out, and Bob Dylan was out.
It wasn’t always like this, though. There were moments when Beefheart more than happily shared praise for the folk star when he thought the music warranted it. “I really like Dylan’s new album. I mean, I think that is the most representative Dylan album there is. You know that song ‘I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight’? Incredible. Really advanced music,” Beefheart said in 1974, with the album in question seemingly being Planet Waves but referencing a 1967 track. So it wasn’t that he was forever turned off to Dylan’s work, clearly he’d been paying attention.
That makes sense, though, as despite being very different kinds of artists, with Beefheart always being far more avant-garde and out there than anything Dylan has done, their foundational makeup is the same. They’re cut from the same cloth, even if that cloth was then dyed and frayed and utterly changed. At the start, they were both deeply inspired by the same cast of legends like the blues leader Howlin’ Wolf, the whole world of Delta blues music and the various artists and styles that spawned from that, from country elements to rock and roll.
They started from the same place, so it makes sense that at the start, Beefheart seemed to be a fan and seemed to stick around as one for a good while, through Dylan’s folk phase, into his early electric years, where that blues element that they both loved cropped up a fair amount.
But the thing with Beefheart, much like his old collaborator and complex friend Frank Zappa, was that it could all come down to one song. His opinion could change that quickly, as it was always the music leading the way, and he always wanted that to be moving forward, evolving and experimenting. It didn’t seem to matter if he’d liked Dylan in the past. The second there was a song, an album or a period he didn’t like, the favour was all gone.
For Dylan and Beefheart, that came in the 1980s. Not long after the earlier gushing compliment, the tone had changed totally. “Bob Dylan impresses me about as much as… well, I was gonna say a slug but I like slugs,” Beefheart said, ranking him below the slime creatures, “’You gotta serve somebody’ – s—, trash poetry. Too much LSD. You know, they usually do that – they go right up to Jesus. What about Buddha? He seems like a lot more fun,” he added as a reminder that artistic loyalty only lives as long as a good song.
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