Vlietymology: Captain Beefheart 80

Bat chain

Puller

Bat chain puller

Puller, puller

A chain with yellow lights

That glistens like oil beads

On its slick smooth trunk

That trails behind on tracks, and thumps

A wing hangs limp and retrieves

Bat chain puller

Puller puller

Bulbs shoot from its snoot

And vanish into darkness

It whistles like a root snatched from dry earth

Sodbustin’ rakes with grey dust claws

Announces its coming into morning

This train with grey tubes

That houses people’s very thoughts and belongings.

Bat chain puller

Puller puller

This train with grey tubes that houses people’s thoughts,

Their very remains and belongings.

A grey cloth patch

Caught with four threads

In the hollow wind of its stacks

Ripples felt fades and grey sparks clacks,

Lunge into cushioned thickets.

Pumpkins span the hills

With orange Crayola patches.

Green inflated trees

Balloon up into marshmallow soot

That walks away in faulty circles

Caught in grey blisters

With twinkling lights and green sashes

Pulled by rubber dolphins with gold yawning mouths

That blister and break in agony

In zones of rust

They guild gold sawdust into dust.

Bat chain puller,

Puller puller.

Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band

Wolf & Rissmiller's Country Club

Reseda, California USA

1.29.1981

01 Hair Pie

02 Nowadays a Woman's Gotta Hit a Man

03 I Wanna Find a Woman That'll Hold My Big Toe 'Til I Have to Go

04 Hot Head

05 Ashtray Heart

06 Dirty Blue Gene

07 The Smithsonian Institute Blues (or The Big Dig)

08 Best Batch Yet

09 Safe As Milk

10 One Red Rose That I Mean

11 China Pig

12 Sue Egypt

13 Doctor Dark

14 Bat Chain Puller

15 My Human Gets Me Blues

16 Sugar N' Spikes

17 Sheriff of Hong Kong

18 Kandy Korn

19 Veteran's Day Poppy

20 Big Eyed Beans from Venus

Total time: 1:19:54

Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet) - vocals, gongs, harmonica & soprano saxophone 

Jeff Moris Tepper - guitar & vocals

Richard Midnight Hatsize Snyder - guitar, bass & vocals

Eric Drew Feldman - bass, mandolin & keyboards 

Robert Arthur Williams - drums & percussion 

Denny Walley - guitar on "China Pig"

master soundboard cassette

1st second of "Doctor Dark" patched from the JWB "Best Batch Yet" 30th Anniversary remaster of this set;

edited for dead air throughout, start of Track 01 repaired, tape flip between Tracks 12 & 13 smoothed, 

and boosted +1.25 dB throughout by EN, January 2021
490 MB FLAC/January 2021 archive link

There are different versions of this this ultra-definitive bootleg, and a contradictory history as to where each version was sourced. But I won't trouble you with all that. 

OK, maybe I will. This is the original soundboard dub, that goes all the way to 20 kHz. There's others that claim to descend from reels made from this master soundboard cassette, but those only go to 15 kHz, as an off-air FM tape would. 

All I did was cut out the dead air and tuning -- it fits on a single CDR now, not that the 20th Century matters much anymore -- and performed a couple of subtle repairs utilizing the existing materials already there. I also turnt it up a smidge.

So in case you haven't figured it out yet, Don Van Vliet -- the madman musician and painter better known as Captain Beefheart -- would have been 80 today. There's nothing to say except that if he showed up at the record company offices today, they'd probably go right past calling security and just summarily execute him, right there at the reception desk.

You better not miss out on this (holy shit it's brutal in its precision) tape or he will take you for a ride in his Tarotplane.--J.

1.15.1941 - 12.17.2010