Captain Beefheart, Ty Segall, and the joys of a great rock 'n' roll record

No. 1344: Captain Beefheart - Safe As Milk

I remember where I was when I heard Captain Beefheart’s infamous and legendary Trout Mask Replica for the first time. I was 20 years old, in college but unemployed, wasting away the better part of the summer making a series of mix CDs with songs that all came out in a particular year, from 1963 to 2002 (‘63 being the starting point because that’s when the first Beatles records came out, thus making it a logical beginning). When it came time for 1969, I dug into some albums I’d never heard before (file sharing!) and lo and behold: Trout Mask Replica. I didn’t totally understand it, but the moments I liked, I LOVED (“Sugar and Spikes” is so badass). It was like free-jazz beat poetry. I think I’ve heard it described as being like a band throwing their instruments down the stairs, which is kinda fitting. It’s a strange record. There’s no doubt about that.

Safe As Milk only kinda sounds like Trout Mask Replica. Less stairs throwing, more sugar, more spikes. It’s a bluesy psych-rock record with melodies and short songs and a relatively straightforward approach. I can’t for the life of me remember who said this, but when I spoke to a friend about Trout Mask Replica, they recommended this one because it’s “a little more normal.” My memory fails me. Sorry friend.

It’s true, but only really in comparison to that record. Because this isn’t normal. It’s just more normal than Trout Mask. Which, well, most things are. But it’s less a standard rock record than something like Tom Waits’ oddball noise beat blues (Waits’ wife Kathleen Brennan showed him Beefheart’s music and that changed everything) with some old-school psychedelia thrown in. Songs like “Zig Zag Wanderer” are big on riffs and energy, while “Abba Zabba” is dadaist opium exotica. Just sublime stuff. By no means as weird and as challenging as the music to come, but pretty close to a perfect rock record. Not necessarily normal, but normal enough. Rating: 9.5

No. 1345: Ty Segall Band - Slaughterhouse

The first and only time I saw Ty Segall live was at SXSW 2011, before the Goodbye Bread album came out, and people went fucking nuts. I had only a passing familiarity with his music and what I’d heard of Melted was cool, but the crowd was absolutely losing their minds, jumping off of balconies, just utterly bonkers stuff. Segall, of course, rocked. But it was hard not to pay attention to the chaos around me.

Eventually he released so much music at such a rapid clip that I gave up on ever trying to keep up, but what I heard I liked. It’s just that it wasn’t until later that I realized I hadn’t heard the best of the best. To wit: Slaughterhouse utterly and absolutely kicks ass. This is the kind of record that makes doing backflips off a balcony seem like the only logical recourse. It’s so loud and fuzzed out and heavy and raw. A lot of his songs have a T. Rex influence with some glammy, garagey hooks and melodies. This is more like The Stooges’ Raw Power with some of the chaos of Funhouse bleeding in. I have this thing where I want every rock record to sound like Raw Power and they never do, and I’m always disappointed. Well, this one actually does so you can imagine what that does to a grizzled old music writer’s heart. (Disclaimer: May not actually be as old and grizzled as stated.)

For real though, this thing goes hard. Songs like “Oh Mary” and “Tell Me What’s Inside Your Heart” and “I Bought My Eyes” you could just line up back to back in a live set and it’d probably be the best thing you’d ever heard. Just absolutely nutso psych-punk madness. It’s also got some epics, and some weird covers, like “That’s the Bag I’m In,” by Fred Neil. But with the lyrics entirely mangled and with more noise and swearing. Gotta love it. (By comparison, Segall’s 2018 cover of Hot Chocolate’s “Every 1’s a Winner” is a lot more faithful to the original, so he can go either way.)

For a while the overwhelming pace of his releases kept me from digging too deep into Ty Segall’s records, and yeah, not all of them are essential. But I can honestly say it was a mistake not to keep going earlier on. As far as dude rock rock dudes go, this dude rocks. Rating: 9.3

No. 1346: Angel Olsen - Big Time

Angel Olsen goes country! That’s the headline on Big Time, one that was reinforced months after its release when she re-released the title track as a duet with Sturgill Simpson. But that’s maybe oversimplifying the matter. Big Time is actually a lot of things: a moment of grief for losing both parents, a kind of “coming out” after falling in love with a non-binary person, and yeah, a country-ish album too. You can hear the honky tonk piano and pedal steel and all the great sounds we typically associate with classic country. Not contemporary (radio) country, because that’s usually just AOR with a trucker hat, but you get the idea.

My friend and colleague L.D. Flowers would say that Angel Olsen has always been country, and if you listen to hear debut Half Way Home, that’s generally pretty true. This is more of a bigger budget Nashville sound, though, which is what makes the difference. The thing is, a lot of my favorite songs are those like the hazy “Dream Thing” or “Go Home,” which would have sounded at home on My Woman or All Mirrors, respectively, leaning into her climactic ballad sensibilities. Which she’s very good at.

I have maybe less of a personal connection to this one than I did with her run from Burn Your Fire For No Witness up to All Mirrors, but it’s a damn good record, and these songs sounded fantastic live. It’s a wonder I ever saw her in a venue as small as Soda Bar. It seems as if she were always destined for bigger things. Rating: 9.2

No. 1347: The Kinks - Something Else

I started diving into the catalog of The Kinks around the same time that I really dug through all the albums by The Beatles. Seems logical, right? Both emerged around the same time, part of the so-called “British invasion” that also included the Rolling Stones and The Who. But while The Kinks were relatively successful, they were obviously nowhere near the phenomenon of The Beatles. Nobody was, really.

But there’s another reason for that, other than simply being “not The Beatles.” The Kinks’ most critically acclaimed albums were also the ones that seemed to go against the trends of the time. On the surface of Something Else, you hear a record that maybe isn’t that out of step with their peers, but it’s steeped in nostalgia, bygone years, regrets, time passed and a romance for things that can’t be recaptured. And “music hall,” a style of music in the UK that can best be summarized as “old timey.” It’s still a rock record, and sometimes a pretty hard-driving one. There’s a reason why The Jam covered “David Watts.”

But Something Else, for all its concerns with forgotten years, is mostly a series of character studies, of smokers (“Harry Rag”), of a straightlaced conformist (“Tin Soldier Man”), of a melancholically domesticated woman (“Two Sisters”). The showpiece here is, of course, “Waterloo Sunset,” which was released as a single and is as strong a candidate as any for The Kinks’ best song. Told from the perspective of someone who isn’t living the life of the couple he spies from his window, it carries a sadness beneath the sweetness, a sense of loss amid the romance. And frankly everything here has both layers to them, a kind of tragedy beneath the quaint exterior. Maybe not everyone got it at the time, but Something Else is nonetheless a masterpiece of things you can’t get back. Rating: 10.0 

No. 1348: Radiohead - Hail to the Thief

I’m surprised I went this long without having all the (necessary) Radiohead albums. I don’t own Pablo Honey or The King of Limbs on vinyl, and if you’ve done the math you probably realized there’s still another one yet to appear in this series. But yeah, took a while. I picked up Hail to the Thief in 2022 and what’s funny about this is that for a long time on social media I was the annoying guy always saying stuff like “Hail to the Thief is underrated!” Part of that is the idea that Radiohead’s rock records are somehow inferior to their “art” records (they’re not) or that they need more songs like “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi,” or what have you. Great song! But also, why not more songs like “Go to Sleep?” Anyone? Just me? (I’m also still annoyed by the 2003 Pitchfork review that slagged “Where I End and You Begin” for sounding like U2, especially because at that stage, they weren’t yet fully entrenched in their 21st century doldrums.)

I remember buying this back in 2003 and being immediately floored by the fact that they were just kicking ass all over “2+2=5.” And there’s no shortage of highlights from there, like the eerie pulse of “Sit Down, Stand Up” or the electronic glow of “Backdrifts” or the Very Radiohead Sounding “There There,” which opened their 2004 Coachella set—to date the only time I’ve seen Radiohead or gone to Coachella.

This is also their most political record by some measure, steeped heavily in antiwar ideas, which accounts for some of the disappointment in Thom Yorke’s recent statement about Gaza. I’m not really gonna wade into that other than to say that we can probably find better messengers for issues like these than rich rock stars. (See also: Roger Waters’ subsequent “look at me!” statement.)

In any case, revisiting this now, it still holds up great to my ears, even if the algorithm seems to prefer In Rainbows deep cuts. Which is fine, that album’s great. I just sometimes need a little more rock. Rating: 9.4

No. 1349: Charles Mingus/Duke Ellington/Max Roach - Money Jungle

Jazz history is overflowing with legendary sessions featuring meetings of once-in-a-lifetime musicians capturing once-in-a-lifetime recordings: Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane, the incredible lineup of Eric Dolphy’s Out to Lunch!, pretty much anyone with Miles Davis (and his list of collaborators is long). You get two titans of music in the same room, and magic is inevitable.

But sometimes it’s not? Money Jungle is, by any measure, a jazz collaboration for the ages. Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus and Max Roach—that’s a lineup right there. Three absolute legends, and it’s not an elaborate big band record either, but a stripped-down trio record, just piano, bass and drums. Ellington and Mingus were doing much more elaborate records by that point, and Roach had done a Civil Rights Era masterpiece with We Insist!, featuring Abbey Lincoln’s powerful vocal performances. This should have been much simpler, and it is, but the story goes that it didn’t actually come so easy. Clashes happened between the three, particularly between Mingus and Roach, and though they were offered two albums from United Artists, they declined because of the friction between the three musicians was more than they were willing to tolerate.

Still, dope record! It works in spite of the friction. Maybe because of it? Or maybe if you’re just that good, even if you’re playing with dudes you don’t like, you can still pull off a great record. It’s essentially everything you’d want from a session from these three, playful, idiosyncratic but accessible. Originals, standards, it’s all good. This is another one of those public domain reissues, by the way, pretty good quality, and in the vinyl landscape we have now, these are more readily available than original copies, which are probably a lot more expensive anyway. (Though you never know, my copy of Giant Steps is an O.G. and that didn’t set me back that much.) Rating: 9.5

No. 1350: Loop - A Gilded Eternity

My background in ‘80s and ‘90s English psych is fairly limited. I can tell you that Spiritualized’s Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space is a masterpiece, and that those old Spacemen 3 records are pretty cool and … well if Jason Pierce was involved, count me in. But beyond that my knowledge is fairly limited. But I do know Loop, and Loop is cool. So basically they’re somewhere between Spacemen 3 and Hawkwind, droney but heavy, less about swirling paisley Rickenbacker riffs than big walls of distortion and swimmy effects. Which Robert Hampson and Scott Dowson sort of carried over to their next project, the abstract shoegaze outfit Main. Loop is blunter, beefier, almost heavy enough to be metal—they did a split with Godflesh once where they covered each other’s songs. And this record, their third, is maybe the best. Not exactly in step with the trends at the time but kickass anyway, and weirdly, released on a major label? Beggars Banquet and RCA had a distribution deal at the time (See also: Love and Rockets.) Kinda wild. You don’t see that anymore, and probably never will. Good way to spend $5 at Deep Groove in Richmond. Rating: 8.9

/