Friday, February 5, 2021

Captain Beefheart, "Zig-Zag Wanderer"

It's been a bear of a week. It seems like a lot of people are hitting some kind of invisible COVID wall where their reserves of resilience have suddenly run dry, myself included. It's normal in even the best of times to be dragged down by the doldrums of February, by far the most miserable time of the year. Throw in a pandemic and then having to dig out from a blizzard and it's all suddenly unbearable.

Tonight we ordered take out and then passed out on the couch twenty minutes into the movie we were watching. I woke up restless and have been blasting what I call weird freakout music to process my emotions. Nothing works in this regard better than early Captain Beefheart.

Coming from his first album, "Zig-Zag Wanderer" is the blues reflected in the haze of a hippie hash pipe. The rhythm is a wicked, off-kilter groove made for jumping around the room like a maniac. The low fuzzy bass meshes perfectly with Beefheart's Mississippi Delta on Mars yowl. It's the best bad trip you'll ever take. 

Back in 1967 plenty of bands in San Francisco were singing about peace and brotherhood. Beefheart knew the real score. Their music wasn't the "be in" but the napalm strike and clouds of tear gas. That side of the sixties seems more relevant than ever these days. 

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