Laurie Anderson’s favourite Captain Beefheart song
Laurie Anderson and Captain Beefheart remain two stalwart names of experimental art, each refusing to allow their sound to be neatly categorised. When exploring their discographies, you’ll find clear-cut genre definitions give way to instantly recognisable motifs. These sounded like dissonant growls in Beefheart’s case and the atmospheric thrum of electronica in Anderson’s. Both shared a love of sculpture and visual arts that enriched their respective musical output and found a comfortable home under the colourful avant-garde umbrella.
In 2023, after the strange resurgence of her 1981 track ‘O Superman’, Anderson reflected on what the all-encompassing tag meant. As she saw it, the term avant-grade was “constantly updating itself”, and music followed. But it’s often buoyed by an expectation of originality and newness, which Anderson told Literary Hub didn’t make sense to her. “I don’t care whether it’s new or not,” she said. “An old Captain Beefheart album sounds newer to me than something I heard in a club last night.”
Specifically, Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller). The 1978 album, which arose out of one of Beefheart’s many spats with fellow avant-artist Frank Zappa, who withheld the master tapes for the original Bat Chain Puller, had one of Anderson’s favourite Beefheart numbers, ‘Tropical Hot Dog Night’.
“You know, there’s certain words that just get drilled into your mind: the second you hear ’em, you got a vision,” Anderson told Line of Best Fit. “And ‘Tropical hot dog night / like two flamingos in a fruit fight’, I mean, I hear that, and I can just see it.” In a literal sense, Anderson was also a big fan of his expressive paintings, and the real brilliance of Beefheart was his ability to imbue tracks and canvases with the same almost kinetic energy.
“He’s somebody who I hope gets a revival soon because he wrote amazing hallucinatory songs with the greatest lyrics,” she added. Anderson worked with him a handful of times in the studio, but their collaboration never amounted to any material, a casualty of timing and his general “jittery” vibe. He’d walk to her studio but get caught, quite literally, in the weeds before they could do much.
“At the time, it was next to these cracked sidewalks with weeds growing out of them,” she explained. “And he would come back really spooked because he said, ‘I just saw some things in the weeds!’. And then he’d look behind the console of the studio we were working at and shout, ‘Woah! I just saw Brer Rabbit pop up on the screen.'”
Although it’s a great shame the two titans of musical oddity never put the studio to material use, it was a fun project for Anderson, who reflected: “I think we probably just laughed too much.”
