Captain Beefheart : Dirty Blue Gene
"Commercial potential? Why not? Since I breathe air, I am commercial. Everybody's commercial. There just aren't that many good publicists and ad people and there aren't that many good record companies. I think kids are bored enough that if they got a chance to hear my music, they'd like it"
- Captain Beefheart in Trouser Press.
In September of 1980, Captain Beefheart and The Magic Band released Doc At The Radar Station, an equally good if not more forceful follow-up to the comeback album Shiny Beast ( Bat Chain Puller). Again Beefheart brought in a group of very talented musicians willing to work for a dictator under a tight deadline. They recorded the album in a week! The first song they tackled was "Dirty Blue Gene", originally recorded during the Clear Spot sessions in 1972.
Mike Bares describes the recording in his book Captain Beefheart :The Biography.
From the new convoluted guitar and drums introduction, the band blaze away in a tricky stop/start creation, fast and furious -bulbous,even - with guitar lines bursting out in bloom all over its surface and (John) French yelling the lyrics behind Captain Beefheart (Don) Van Vliet's ecstatic vocals. Charles Shaar Murray opined: "Something like the intro to 'Dirty Blue Gene' literally could not be the work of anybody else.
Beefheart did a lot of press for the album. At 39, he dismissed the current music scene, telling Lester Bangs
"I don't ever listen to 'em, you see, which is not very nice of me but ...then again why should I look through my own vomit? I guess they have to make a living though".
Guitarist Gary Lucas invited some of the top music journalists to his apartment to listen to the album and they lavished Doc At The Radar Station with praise. "Captain Beefheart's Most Medititative, Heroic Album" was the headline in Ken Tucker's Rolling Stone review. Downbeat gave the album four and a half stars. Doc finished #8 in the New York Times Ten Best list. "As brilliant as album as anyone has released this year," said Musician while Creem said "Prime Beefheart Like You Haven't Heard In Years".
Robert Christgau gave the album a grade of A-, writing :
Beefheart is an utter original if not some kind of genius, but that doesn't make him the greatest artist ever to rock down the pike--his unreconstructed ecoprimitive eccentricity impairs his aesthetic as well as his commercial reach. Only don't tell grizzled punks now discovering the boho past, or avantish rockcrits who waited patiently through the cleansing storm for musicianship to come round again. In synch with the historical moment for once, Beefheart offers up his most uncompromised album since Trout Mask Replica in 1969--never before have his nerve-wracking harmonies and sainted-spastic rhythms been captured in such brutal living color. Me, I've always enjoyed his compromises, which tend to be crazier than normal people's wildest dreams, and wish he'd saved some of his melodic secrets for the second side.
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