‘Ice Cream For Crow’: the weirdest song Captain Beefheart ever recorded
When we look back on people who have changed music, many of those who are hailed as innovators are relatively obvious choices. People talk about The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and Iggy Pop as icons who represent a very real and tangible shift in music. However, there are a lot of other icons that slip under the radar, and while their impact is still felt, the name that caused such an impact is less known. Captain Beefheart is one of these big names.
We often talk about artists who dabble in various genres and, therefore, are difficult to categorise, but this couldn’t apply to anyone more than Captain Beefheart. His erratic combination of jazz, blues, and psychedelic rock truly defied any kind of expectation. Along with his Magic Band, he was able to create music that was truly spellbinding.
Many people thought that his music was unbearable. Because of its erratic nature and the fact that none of his albums seemed to make sense or have any kind of connection, many despised it. However, Beefheart was a big name in early punk, and many bands learnt from his music that randomness and chaos embodied within sound can work incredibly well.
John Lydon was a big fan of Beefheart and his chaotic album Trout Mask Replica. “There’s just so much on this: It’s a double album, and by the time you finish it – if you can finish it – you can’t remember what you heard at the beginning,” said the Sex Pistol. “I liked that. It was anti-music in the most interesting and insane way, like kids learning to play the violin – which I was going through at the time.”
Lydon continued, “So all the bum notes I was being told off for by the teachers were finally being released by well-known artists. That was my confirmation. From then on, there was room for everything.”
You could pick any track of Trout Mask Replica and call it one of Beefheart’s craziest, but there, in isolation, his strangest track comes from a later record. Ice Cream For Crow was Captain Beefheart’s second to last album, released in 1982. By this point, people knew what to expect from his music, and yet he still managed to surprise them with the disjointed nature of the track.
The title track, ‘Ice Cream For Crow’, is one of the most experimental and bizarre songs ever committed to a recording. To the extent that if you sat down for hours in a bid to try and make sense of it, you wouldn’t stand a chance. A lot of people tried to make sense of the haphazard song but could not and had to simply enjoy the song as a piece of art rather than a solid piece of linear music.
When Beefheart was asked about the song in a bid to shed some light on what everything might mean, he wasn’t able to help. Instead, he just confirmed what everybody already knew: “I’m just a silly ass,” he concluded. “I have no method to my madness.” While some people might hear these words and roll their eyes, a lot of the experimental music we love now wouldn’t have been made had it not been for the madness of what Captain Beefheart recorded.
