Sunday Big Note – Listening Session #17

Of all the live concerts in my music collection, today’s particular show had proved to be one of the most difficult to find because of it’s uniqueness and it’s rarity among live show collectors. It had been on my most wanted search list for a very, very long time. Of course, I’m talking about the group known as Mallard, formed in 1974 by Bill Harkleroad (Zoot Horn Rollo), Mark Boston (Rockette Morton) and Art Tripp III (Ed Marimba) after leaving Captain Beefheart‘s Magic Band. It was during Mallard’s European tour in 1976 that they performed the German TV Show ‘Rockpalast’ on September 7th, 1976.
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Captain Beefheart Symposium

Captain Beefheart guitarist Gary Lucas will conduct a Beefheart Symposium at The Magic Room, Brighton, MA, on Friday Sept. 10th:

Gary Lucas, who has been called “a modern guitar miracle” (Rolling Stone), “The Thinking Man’s Guitar Hero” (The New Yorker) and “One of the 100 Greatest Living Guitarists” will give a lecture and musical demonstration devoted to his mentor and childhood hero Don Van Vliet aka Captain Beefheart.

Gary will show rare video footage of the man and the band, delve into his complex artistic oeuvre as both a composer — by performing some of his fiendishly difficult solo guitar compositions live — and as a painter by showing slides of his formidable paintings and drawings.

Funny little note at the end: “No one under 18 years old will be admitted.”

Beefheart Cover from Hamamatsu, Japan

Just when I thought I couldn’t be pleasantly surprised by anything posted on YouTube lately, I came across the following two Japanese Indie Bands, Blood Pees with their cover of Don Van Vliet’s “I’m Glad” and New Roman Chitose‘s “PV Volume One” (performed with pole dancers):
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An Interview With Lorraine Belcher

Andrew just published an interview he did with Lorraine Belcher, full of wonderful little nuggets such as this one:

He told me that his wife never made a sound during sex. This made him feel bad. One day, after he’d been on the road to a meeting in LA for awhile, he realised he’d forgotten something and turned around. When he got home he found his wife passed out on the bed with a potato carved like a dildo. He was originally very upset, since she’d apparently been so satisfied she had to take a nap! Then he asked her to tell him about the potato. She had apparently tried all the other vegetables and found the potato to be the most harmonious with the vaginal canal….pH balance, etc. It didn’t produce any kind of infection or discharge, and held up well. That’s why he wrote Call any Vegetable.

Check out the full interview here.

The Muffin Men @ Fairport & Elsewhere

In 2008, The Muffin Men – a British band, based in Liverpool, England which primarily plays the music of Frank Zappa – performed at Fairport’s Cropredy Convention, performing such Zappa classics as “Zoot Allures”, “Don’t Eat The Yellow Snow” and “Black Napkins” (above) as well as “Road Ladies“, “San Ber’dino“, and “My Guitar Wants To Kill Your Mama“.
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The Magic Band – Peel Sessions, July 2004

Besides being an avid collector of Frank Zappa and Mothers of Invention bootlegs and field recordings – as well as a collector of Captain Beefheart‘s various and sundry recordings (and a collector of all the related recordings of the various alumni who, at times, played in both groups) – I’m also an avid collector of live radio broadcasts. I’ve always found something intrinsically interesting about an artist’s and group’s live radio performances (as though they put on that little extra show for the benefit of the radio listener).
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The Jack and Jim Show

Eugene Chadbourne and Jimmy Carl Black – the principle members of the Jack and Jim Show – perform a cover of Captain Beefheart‘s “Dropout Boogie” (first clip, below) at The Pit Inn, Shinjuku on June 6th, 2008 (available on their CD, Pachuco Cadaver), and a cover of the song, “One More Road To Cross” (second clip, below) from their 2007 DVD, The Jack & Jim Show: Live at the Stone, NYC.
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