from the LP Bongo Fury, Discreet Records, 1975Lost in the maelstrom of grading that becomes every teacher’s world for the last couple weeks at the end of each semester, I somehow managed to miss the unfortunate news that Captain Beefheart had died last Friday, after a hard-fought battle with MS. Given that tomorrow would have been Zappa’s 70th birthday, I figured this song was an appropriate selection (Zappa’s mind-melting solo here is one of his best ever, and that’s Beefheart’s inimitable voice singing backup vocals at the end, “girl, you thought he was a man, but he was a muffin…”), taped live on the tour where their relationship, both personal & professional, basically fell apart; fortunately, the two men buried the hatchet previous to Zappa’s passing away. Plenty is being/will be written about the legacy of an artist as eccentric and anarchic as Beefheart was, so I will leave all the mushy eulogies about everything the world of modern music & art has inherited from him to the experts---suffice to say, the dude was far out man, and so was Zappa. Rest in peace fellas!
