“Strange matrix”: Tom Waits’ favourite Captain Beefheart song
Most musicians are preoccupied simply trying to pull off the alchemy and stringing pleasent chords and sentences together. Very few decide to attempt to play the washing machine with a 2×4 or place their drummer in a barrel and whack it with a stick in the hopes it will improve their performance. These are traits reserved for the creative oddballs like Tom Waits and the captain of Captain Beefheart, Don Van Vliet.
But in a strange way, they are both as natural as music gets—borne from the rugged world of creativity in crisis that raised them. “LA’s a city that kind of hates itself,“ Beck explains, “So the past is never really maintained for posterity. Tom [Waits] represents a part of LA that died a long time ago, and he keeps it alive for us.“
As such, he believes there is a strong kinship between Don Van Vliet and Waits that defines the city. “Beefheart also totally makes sense to me as someone coming from LA,“ Beck continued. “He’s like that collective of people a few years ago called The Cacophony Society, who did things like douse themselves in mud and parade up and down Rodeo Drive. In some senses, this town can be like a wasteland, but at least it forces you to use your imagination.“
And nobody has used their imagination with quite as much fervour as Waits and the Captain. Manic and magical, to describe them as avant-garde is reductive of the fact that the many multitudes of cultures are contained within their respective works. True to the city that spawned them, they are merely looking for gold by whatever means necessary.
As Waits said of his admiration of his peer, he’s “the roughest diamond in the mine, his musical inventions are made of bone and mud. Enter the strange matrix of his mind and lose yours.” In that alternate reality, the most glimmering offering in his view is the track ‘China Pig’, selecting it among his all-time favourite tracks.
The song, taken from the madness of Trout Mask Replica, is simply a blues riff, distantly recorded as though you’re hearing it from another room while rambling chatter forms the most wayward topline. It is a rough diamond, indeed, but it’s true to Waits’ own tenet of atmosphere and energy being as important as anything else.
As Waits once said, “My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket.”
Somewhere in the rambling dissonance of ‘China Pig’, there is ample space for the listener to flood the scene with their own thoughts. Captain Beefheart plays with space and ruggedness like whichever divine hand was behind the Eurasian Steppe.
There were times in the 1970s when Waits would open for Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band, and it’s not hard to see how that might’ve been more like the Travelling Circus descending on a provincial town rather than a typical music show.
