Safe As Milk 5
Is it Pop?
When Howlin’ Wolf and his bands made the music gathered on the ‘Rocking Chair’ album, the music they made was passing pop. If we look at it in terms of the popular factors I use, the Wolf’s music has a steady dance beat. Yes, the vocals growl and yes, the guitar is free, but this music was created for playing in a noisy city. However, the Van Vliet/Magic Band constructions jerk that beat through sections, and that’s only the most evident of the disruptions. Even in conventional form like the song ‘Call On Me’ the playing is stretched off a dance beat. To be Pop, the music needed to be resourced in a beat, melody supported (probably extended to payoffs also), the vocal leads exchanged more easily with instruments, and The Captain’s lyrics needed to flow sometimes.
Van Vliet tried simplifying his moves on a later album, Clear Spot but missed the depth of reconstruction needed. The integration of music arrangement makes Don Vliet compositions hard to cover. I’m not well travelled here but, despite the possibility someone may put in the work on the more catchy tunes, I don’t know much of note—Mike Barnes puts in quarter a chapter which covers more than me, but fails with a similarity catalogue. The best Van Vliet cover I’ve heard is by Blacktop, which soaks ‘Here I Am, I Always Am’ into a new arrangement in Blacktop‐world (though credit to Everything But The Girl for hearing possibilities in ‘’My Head Is My Only House Unless It Rains’). Captain Beefheart output is Pop‐Art in that it abuses a pop form, but is dislocated from Pop source. My opinion—the crowd denies—it was never gonna be a hit, not even in the wild times.
And nothing by any of the Magic Bands, in a Joe Carducci sense, was Rock. Any trace of that dried off early. Which, given the several bands, is a musicality from Van Vliet. Specifically, the bands barely roll, they don’t explore a melody, and the arrangements are sometimes against what would work to make that happen. They shape round some figure, however short, often varied and even at odds with sung melody. In this, the compositions work like the pop electric blues heard on Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Rocking Chair’ album. You can hear this in other work of Magic Band members for example, by the drummer John French. Joe Carducci called the Magic Band one of the two great ‘folk abusers’ (along with the Velvet Underground). They were never on for that audience, either.
Critic talk
But talk of composition applies to most of Van Vliet’s musical work. Let’s back up to ‘Safe As Milk’. There’s a important things to say. See, there’s only a small body of talk about the Magic Bands online. Much of it is wrapped in entertainment‐spawned criticism, Which, when not riding hobby‐horses into sunsets of social theory or politics, pulls ranking systems of what’s worth your money or not. Blame Christgau. Let’s summarise the crit‐industry take on the albums attached to ‘auteur’ Captain Beefheart,
‘Safe as Milk’ was weird. Captain Beefheart was given artistic freedom on ‘Trout Mask Replica’, came close on ‘Lick My Decals Off, Baby’, then in a bid for mainstream success sank into lame pop music before a comeback with ‘Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller)’, finishing with the album ‘Ice Cream for Crow’. Then quit music forever.
Course there are variations on this. The original Rolling Stone Album Guide rated ‘Trout Mask Replica’ as an album essential to understanding the music, or perhaps as a supreme output of the possibilities, Robert Cristgau says ‘Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller)’ is his pick of a kind of music he has time for, and Allmusic calls ‘Safe as Milk’ alongside ‘Trout Mask Replica’ as a five‐star album.
As usual, the problem is there may be personal interests in the mix, which is before we talk critical thought‐space. As auteur development, ‘Safe As Milk’ will always be walked past. And Beefheart’s later career held true, with variations, so ‘Safe As Milk’ is not open to the usual “I preferred them when they were young and raw” jive.
This critical line hides the differences between the albums, not only in how a ‘musical vision’ developed, but in how the albums were created. Yes, The Captain may have retained distinctive ‘auteur’ marks through his career. But Van Vliet was part of bands, and his relationship to how those bands were formed and the way the music was composed changed.