STRANDED -- The Countdown (14)

Stranded, that is, for a whole day with Captain Beefheart.

CAPTAIN BEEFHEART AND HIS MAGIC BAND, Mirror Man (Buddah). My heart doesn’t exactly belong to the Beefy one, but I give him all credit for being a visionary, an honest-to-John, irony-free wackadoo who howls at a moon only he can see but who also knows enough about music to love doo wop. Marcus picks the plum off this album: “Tarotplane,” track one. Blues and R&B in a sexfrugmindmash, the most convincing white soul snarl ever heard shouldering against enthrallingly monotonous outre elements: a voice turns into a saxophone turns into a harmonica turns into a bagpipe. Or does it . . . ? "Tarotplane" does boogie, it sure does roll right out for an epic 20 minutes. But the rest -- save a sweet stretch of psychedelic guitar magic over the last half of “Kandy Korn” -- is more of the same, only less novel each time: primitive rhythm without elaboration, furious dry rub without needed climax.

(It wouldn’t be a bad idea to have some campfire music on the island, something to hear while beating animal skins and circle-dancing, praying for mercy from the gods of storm and madness. But over the Captain for that purpose, I'd nominate those lovable East Village slobs the Godz. “Hmm, so that’s the Godz,” Greil Marcus is supposed to have said once. We might need separate campfires.)

To take Mirror Man to any island, even the self-service island at your local filling station, you’d have to really love the blues. You’d have to find it a bottomless repository of human wisdom and aspiration, success and failure, sin and grace, the highest and lowest we might reach in these transient skins. Which it may be. Which it may very well be. Recorded 1965 / released 1973.

Note: With the release of The Mirror Man Sessions in 1990 it became known that this material was recorded, not in 1965 as was first believed, but in late ‘67 or early ‘68. It was intended for a half-live, half-studio LP called It Comes to You in a Plain Brown Wrapper, which never came.

----. “Diddy Wah Diddy” (A&M). This is always grouped with the great mid-'60s garage singles (and is found in that capacity on the first Nuggets box, expanded from the 2-LP set). But this makes even the best of its smoggy, froggy, droogy competition -- Shadows of Knight, Count Five, Music Machine -- sound like poseurs impersonating the true grandfather of flunk rock. That doesn’t make this a better record than say “Psychotic Reaction” or “Talk Talk,” but it does make it more of a monstrosity, less of a novelty. 1966.

----. Trout Mask Replica (Straight). Ever have a dream about a naked little reptile-man, a flesh-covered Black Lagoon Creature with solid pink eyes and a quivering pink webbed head, crawling out of your toilet dripping and snarling, hungry and smacking, belching and squealing, on the prowl, and you see it coming but don’t know how to kill it, and it gets between you and the escape door and traps you in the bedroom, and the dream ends with you screaming and gurgling in the corner as the thing crawls up your uncovered torso and snakes its ghastly tongue all the way down your throat so it can pull out your spine and chomp it like corn on the cob?

Well, this album is nothing like that. It’s more like sitting at the door of a junkyard outhouse near a Los Angeles off-ramp with two o’clock sun tanning the hide of your face, slapping a clammy fish on the down-side of a white plastic drum that once held caustic rock salt, while a toothless messianic mental patient stomps his twine-tied boot, drools philosophy, pukes poetry, and growls at your earhole thinkin’ he’s a bluesman. Except that in his awful phlegm-hacking, syphilis-minded way he really is a bluesman, and you slap that fish harder because you’re scared what he’ll do if you quit. And an enraged, mangy dog is straining its chain a few feet away, and you’re parched and sick from the stench with nothing to drink. And the crazy man's even crazier friends are coming over with their "toys."

You don’t know if you’ll last through to nightfall. 1969.