Brian Eno names his favourite Captain Beefheart song
Standard rock and roll never really suited Brian Eno. Throughout his time working with Roxy Music or working behind the boards before the greatest acts in the world, he was always looking to push music one step further, even if that meant that something sounded a little bit weird. By that definition, Captain Beefheart should have been a prime example of how strange music could get, but Eno’s favourite song he ever made might be as close to normal as he could muster.
Looking at any one of Captain Beefheart’s albums, though, the word “normal” shouldn’t really be in his vocabulary. There are certain pieces of his works that sound fairly simple, but anyone listening to Trout Mask Replica for the first time is usually going to have to check themselves for scars afterwards.
From day one, Beefheart wanted to make something off-the-wall, and on almost every record, he tended to toe the line between being a traditional rock and roll singer and what sounded like a homeless man shouting some stoned rhetoric to anyone within walking distance of him on the street.
He did still have soul, though, and ‘Too Much Time’ could pass for a decent R&B song if it had almost anyone else’s name on it. Compared to where he was a few years before, Beefheart seemed to grow into the sensible rock and roller if only for this song, singing about how lonely he feels to be without love. Just bring up the backup singers a little bit and maybe add a horn section behind him, and you’d have a pretty good Teddy Pendergrass B-side.
Then again, Eno was never a stranger to making soulful music, either. Yes, most of his greatest productions as a solo artist involved him creating ambient pieces that would sound great coming out of airport overheads, but his work in Roxy Music still had pieces of soul as well, with Bryan Ferry almost trying on his best R&B chops on ‘Do the Strand’.
Looking through Eno’s production credits, there are also moments where he infuses some soul and blues into what he’s doing. He may have been endlessly frustrated trying to get U2 to make the best songs that they could for The Joshua Tree, but when listening to a track like ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’, its roots feel more in line with genres like gospel than anything remotely rock and roll.
Although any die-hard Beefheart fans may have thought that he was selling out, it didn’t long until they returned to their regularly scheduled weirdness, with Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) being one of the single zaniest projects ever released in the 1970s, this side of Frank Zappa. When you’ve lived inside the warped world of Captain Beefheart for too long, though, ‘Too Much Time’ feels more like a strange outing for him by comparison.
Eno may have been more comfortable behind the board than he was onstage, but there’s a good chance that he saw himself in the kind of strange exercises Beefheart was doing. Nothing was going to be able to match him, but if Eno could incorporate some of his avant-garde techniques into a pop context, it was usually worth it.
