RE: [Harp-L] RE: Zappa Harp now Captain Beefhart

[Ken Deifik <kenneth.d@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Richard Hunter Wrote re Captain Beefheart:
>I'm not as crazy about his album "Trout Mask Replica" as a lot of people

I loved it back in the day.

I got to see the exact band that played on the record at a seriously 
mobbed-up nightclub in NYC called Ungano's.  Ry Cooder was the opening 
act.  The guy who spun tunes between sets played the most dreadful bubble 
gum music - wrong choice for that hipster crowd in 1970.  The audience 
started howling and the DJ got on his mic and - sounding like a very angry 
Paulie Walnuts told the audience to shut the F up, and kept playing 
whatever he felt like.

The Magic Band played most of Trout Mask Replica note for note, sound for 
sound, on the very instruments it had been recorded with.  And it was about 
a billion times more powerful than on the record.  Very surprising.  We 
thought we were going to see a band of okay musicians noodling some loose 
music while Captain B screamed poetry.  What we got was a stage full of 
virtuosos playing this astonishingly intricate music with precision and 
incredible fire, as though their lives depended on it.  (The drummer in 
fact had been in the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy, and had 
worked with Zappa.)  To this day one of my favorite nights of music.

The audience shouted for more at the end and Beefheart came out by himself, 
pulled out a harmonica and played "More", the theme from the movie Mondo 
Cane, which had been a hit a few years earlier.  I don't think he got very 
far into it before he quit and walked off.

Great show.  Also the last show of its kind.  The instruments were all very 
strange, old guitars and such with very unique qualities.  The day after 
this show the band - most of whom were from the Mojave Desert - went 
downtown to visit with Ornette Coleman, leaving their axes in the 
taxi.  Beginner's mistake.  They never saw those instruments again, and the 
band never sounded as good with the replacements.