Jeg har været heldig at låne Captain Beefhearts album Lick my Decals off, Baby – som grammofonplade. Men et lille rødt FONA-mærket oppe i det ene hjørne. Jeg lader Frøkenen lytte lidt til pladen i ørebøfferne. Man skal jo tænke på hendes dannelse. “Det lyder forfærdeligt”, siger hun og giver mig høretelefonerne tilbage. Og pladen er da også noget af det mest eksperimenterende Beefheart, man kan lytte til. Trout Mask Replica lyder nærmest som mainstreampop i sammenligning…
Pudsigt nok var albummet det mest succesrige i England, hvor det kom ind på top 50-listen og lå der i samtlige elleve uger. Hvilket nok især skyldes John Peel insisterende promovering af pladen i radioen. Men pladen er – stadigvæk – for viderekommende. Jeg faldt over rock-skribent-legenden Lester Bangs anmeldelse af pladen fra 1971 (i magasinet Creem). Bangs sammenligner – ja sidestiller – Beefheart med den samtidige avancerede jazz og forsøger at forstå musikken som fremtidens musik:
“Beefheart may be verbally obtuse and look like a trasher of everything “beautiful” (or euphonious) in centuries of Western musical tradition, but what he’s really doing, along with people like Cecil Taylor and Albert Ayler and the early Velvet Underground and the Tony Williams Lifetime, is creating a whole new musical vocabulary out of the ashes and dead air left by a crumbling empire of exhausted styles. Instead of destroying, Cap is taking forms with no seeming mileage left and reworking them into prophesies of tomorrow which will be as far-reaching for rock and the new free post-idiomatic music as Ornette Coleman’s radical divergence was for jazz a decade ago.

The comparison with Coleman is apt
on more than one level: both ushered in new decades with conceptions
of ensemble improvisation so unheard of as to raise wide controversy;
both have concerned their music with the rising spirit of man, the
unforced compassion and insight that led Coleman to write songs
like “Lonely Woman” and “Beauty is a Rare Thing,” Beefheart to “Frownland”
and “I Love You, You Big Dummy”; and most significantly, no matter
how far out both have gotten, the primitive American blues heritage
has always been implicit in everything they’ve done. The essential
cry of joy/anguish that courses through Coleman’s plaintive birdlike
squawks is merely genius echoing the earliest changing moans in
an age of atonality and distortion. And the more you listen to it,
the more you realize that for all the rambunctious waywardness of
Beefheart’s woolly excursions, the seeming cacophony always swings
as surely as the finest in the jazz and rock traditions it draws
on. The rhythms may be shifting a lot, and the players all jutting
off at squiggly angles, but that heartbeat always rocks on as surely
as an old up-and-down boogie.”

Beefhearts tekster er et kapitel for sig selv. En egensindig, poetisk omgang med sprogets gloser og sætninger. Nedbrydning og opbygning. Helt parallelt til det, der foregår i musikken. Grænser brydes op, og nye grænser skabes…

Rather than I want to hold your hand,
I wanna swallow you whole
‘n I wanna lick you everywhere it’s pink
‘n everywhere you think
Whole kit ‘n kaboodle ‘n the kitchen sink
Heaven’s sexy as hell
Life is integrated,
Goes together so well
‘n so on
Well, I’m gonna go on ‘n do my washing
Well, now you may think I’m crazy but I want you to
Lick my decals off baby
‘n I don’t want you to be lazy
’cause it’s drivin’ me crazy
‘n this song ain’t no sing-song
It’s all about the birds ‘n the bees
‘n where it went all wrong
‘n where it all belongs
‘n the earth all go down on their knees
lookin’ for ah little ease
She stuck out her toungue ‘n the fun begun
She stuck out her toungue ‘n the fun begun
She stuck it out at me, ‘n I just thumbed my nose
‘n went on washing my clothes