Because the 80s rolled round, many iconic artists from the 60s would battle to search out their place within the decade. Captain Beefheart, nonetheless, although boasting a 60s discography that re-wrote what was attainable for a mere three-minute tune, got here again revitalized. The punk and new wave scenes of the late 70s and early 80s had embraced his inventive freedoms, whereas Beefheart himself, after seemingly turning his again on boundary-pushing music, unleashed a late-period Magic Band that asserted his credentials as one in every of rock’s true visionaries. They super-charged themselves for 1980’s Doc At The Radar Station, launched in August 1980 as his penultimate album. Portentously, it boasted an art work painted by Beefheart himself – the ultimate album to characteristic his personal work on the sleeve, as if signposting Beefheart’s eventual choice to retire from music and pursue portray in the midst of the last decade.
Take heed to Doc At The Radar Station now.
Doc At The Radar Station marked the primary Magic Band credit score for New York art-rock icon Gary Lucas – continued proof of Beefheart’s affect on NYC’s downtown artwork scene (it’s an affect that by no means left: the album’s opening observe, “Hot Head,” is a transparent ancestor to Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ early outings). Additional youthful chunk got here courtesy of Eric Drew Feldman, a multi-instrumentalist who had joined the fold for 1976’s Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller), and who would go on to carry out with Pixies and PJ Harvey – two artists who wore their Beefheart influences overtly.
A nod to Beefheart’s hallowed Trout Masks Duplicate-era band got here with John French’s return since his defection in 1972. French picked up marimba, slide guitar, bass, and drums throughout “Ashtray Heart” and “Sheriff Of Hong Kong,” and it’s maybe unsurprising that each boast the deceptively unhinged mania that marks a lot of Beefheart’s 60s output, however with an additional heft due to the brand new blood concerned.
This melding of outdated and new is arguably what makes Doc At The Radar Station so successful: a number of the materials dates again to the Trout Masks period, whereas different outings (“A Carrot Is As Close As A Rabbit Gets To A Diamond,” “Flavor Bud Living,” “Brickbats”) acquired preliminary try-outs throughout the shelved Bat Chain Puller periods of 1976. With such a forceful Magic Band attacking top-tier materials with gusto, there was no means Doc At The Radar Station might fail.
Certainly, of their overview Rolling Stone lauded “music of such heat, strength, and passion that many listeners will get trampled,” although additionally famous that the songs “rarely shatter into headlong chaos without first showing the comely, formal compositions they might have been.” It was an astute statement. Beefheart may need divided his fanbase along with his outwardly industrial 70s outings Unconditionally Assured and Bluejeans & Moonbeams, nevertheless it’s true that Doc At The Radar Station additionally makes clear the real songcraft that goes into even his most outlandish materials.
It had taken nearly twenty years, however maybe the world had lastly caught up with him. Rolling Stone fairly identified that, actually, the Captain was “bugged by the same things that plague us all: bad relationships, bad technology, bad government,” whereas The New York Occasions was sufficiently moved to hail album nearer “Making Love To A Vampire With A Monkey On My Knee” as “probably the most extravagantly original and perfectly realized creation of Beefheart’s career.”
Nearly three a long time on, as a penultimate salvo, Doc At The Radar Station nonetheless warrants such optimistic diagnoses.
Doc At The Radar Station may be purchased right here.
