MY MOST LOVED ALBUMS - Clear Spot by Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band - 1972

  

I picked up Clear Spot in a cassette sale. Back in the seventies when a local independent record store was a common thing. I'd heard Captain Beefheart on John Peel, in the Trout Mask Replica era, and that was definitely a taste challenging to acquire. Clear Spot doesn't particularly turn down the wackiness, more redirects it, by changing the musical sources it draws upon. For this is one hell of a strident amalgam of a Rhythm & Blues - Bluegrass mash up with Captain Beefheart's uniquely surreal imagination. On the albums title track Clear Spot it works hard at straddling the border between experimental and mainstream. This album probably marks the high point of Beefheart's most accessible period of music making.

Captain Beefheart shares a similar musical ethos to Frank Zappa, with whom he once worked. Part Dadaist absurdity, counter cultural drug influenced fantasy and in Beefheart's case one hell of a howling wolf of a raucous blues voice. Rough edged, wailing and plunging the depths, it grabs your attention through its over committed delivery. And on Clear Spot he develops a tenderness and soulful intonation, on tracks like Too Much Time, with its Stax horn section, or on Her Eyes Are A Blue Million Miles and My Head Is My Only House Unless It Rains where both have this fondness for and an unabashed sense of love.  

But by and large Clear Spot is most remarkable for the power of its blues inflected shuffling stompers. Such as Circumstances and Long Necked Bottles, or the immortally title of Nowadays A Woman's Gotta Hit A Man, which concludes with 'to make him know she's there.' A lot of the time there is a pumped up male braggadocio going on here too. 'Some of my woman have tears in their eyes when you ask them about me I swear.' which, because it will often be accompanied by some absurdist wit, it makes  questionable if this is meant to be taken completely at bare faced value.

Beefheart is at his characteristically most unhinged and preacherly on Sun Zoom Spark, and is a wack job out of his head on smack on  Low Yo Yo Stuff - Golden Birdies - Big Eyed Beans From Venus. But these are so full of brilliantly evocative imaginative associations and word puzzles they are enjoyable bits of linguistic playfulness. There are the moments here where childish glee is injected into the rich mix of this album. Its what makes this so utterly loveable.