Ian Anderson said Captain Beefheart had no musical talent: “He was pretty cruel”
When Ian Anderson first started Jethro Tull, rock and roll was something that relied on being one of the most proficient musicians in the world.
Part of the appeal was the fact that any novice blues guitarist could pick up on a Chuck Berry lick if they worked hard enough, but when the prog rock world started opening up, bands were coming out with the kind of songs that felt like classical music played on rock instruments. This was a different breed of rock and roll altogether, but even if it was strange for the time, Anderson could definitely find something 15 times stranger.
Because when you look at the genesis of prog rock, it goes back much further than what you saw in the 1970s with everyone from Yes to Gentle Giant. By the broadest definition of the word, The Beatles should really get the credit for being the first official progressive rock band thanks to their work in the studio, and even Pink Floyd managed to do the same when working on their psychedelic experiments on Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
Anderson would have also considered them both prog giants, but there were also bands like King Crimson paving their own way in rock and roll. Robert Fripp didn’t seem to have anywhere near the same rock and roll influences that everyone else did, so when the public heard a track like ‘21st Century Schizoid Man’, they were dumbfounded that any band could play like that on record.
But if the prog-rock giants took their influence from genres beyond rock and roll, there was bound to be a bit of avant-garde in the mix as well. There’s no doubting that Frank Zappa could be considered a progressive musician in many respects, but there are many moments throughout his run of albums that venture between works of musical art and the sound of someone taking the piss every single time they step up to the microphone on albums like Joe’s Garage.
Zappa seemed like the peak of what weird music could sound like, but anyone running scared from an album like Hot Rats wouldn’t dare try to take on Captain Beefheart’s music. There was an unhinged nature to virtually everything he made, and while Anderson did have a certain degree of respect for what he could do, there were moments where he felt like the avant-garde master through all sense of musical theory out the window.
Although Anderson heard stories about Beefheart’s wild antics when rehearsing with his bandmates, he considered him to be far from the kind of musicians that could actually play rock and roll, saying, “He was pretty cruel to his musicians, which was pretty hard for them to take because they didn’t have a great opinion of him as a human being, nor as a musician. Don had no musical talent whatsoever, he simply employed other people to translate his maniacal ravings, musically speaking, into something that had a bit of order and discipline.”
If he couldn’t play an instrument, he made up for that by making some of the most disturbing lyrical pictures that anyone had ever painted. The end result might not have been all that pleasant to listen to, and there’s probably more than a few Captain Beefheart fans that will wonder whether or not an album like Trout Mask Replica is genius or absolute garbage, but you can’t deny that it was one man’s vision from back to front.
It was a very harsh vision for anyone to understand, but it wasn’t about trying to make the fans comfortable whenever Beefheart made a record. He was trying to get all of the musical fury that was in his head down onto the tape, and that made for songs that, for better or worse, helped progress rock and roll forward.
