LICK MY DECALS OFF - CAPTAIN BEEFHEART - STRAIGHT

Gazing across pop music’s stale horizons, past all the cynical ineptitude, pseudo-intellectual solemnity, neurotic regression and dismal deadends for great bands, there is one figure who stands above the murk forging an art at once adventurous and human: Don Van Vliet, known to a culture he’s making anachronistic as Captain Beefheart.

Though there are still lots of people around who just don’t read the Cap at all, who think his music is some kind of private joke or failed experiment (or as a local teen band told me, “Most of that’s the kind of stuff musicians always do when they’re just fucking around”) or merely a porridge of noise, the appearance of T-out Mask Replica, last year was a real musical event, a signal that there was finally so ething new in the air. And even people averse to contemporary “avant-garde” mu. ight find in Beefheart a continuation of traoicions they loved and a sensibility refreshingly healthy in these days, when so many experimental artists feel compelled to shroud their innovations in manifestations of madness and destruction.