CAPTAIN BEEFHEART: UNCONDITIONALLY GUARANTEED (1974)
1) Upon The My-O-My; 2) Sugar
Bowl; 3) New Electric Ride; 4) Magic Be; 5) Happy Love Song; 6) Full Moon Hot
Sun; 7) I Got Love On My Mind; 8) This Is The Day; 9) Lazy Music; 10) Peaches.
1974 was unquestionably the strangest year in
the history of Captain Beefheart — the year in which he came out with a pair of
albums that turned out to be his most «normal» recordings ever, and that, in
itself, makes this the most bizarre and unpredictable turn of events for the
man. Other artists could be expected to go «commercial», perhaps, and genuinely
sacrifice the search for new sounds and experiences to boring, but financially
rewarding, conventionalism: Don Van Vliet, however, seemed like one of the few
select artists for whom «going commercial» was as easy to do as it would be for
a fish to walk on land. Not because he was so vehemently and ideologically
against it, but because he'd spent so many years not speaking that language at all.
His failure in 1974 was not in «selling out»,
but rather in the fact that he had no idea whatsoever how to sell out. Apparently, the slightly more accessible grooves
of The Spotlight Kid and Clear Spot failed to increase public
interest in his music: if the former did very briefly put him on the charts,
the latter only brought back the plunge, and something more drastic had to be
resorted to if the poverty-eliminating strategy remained in place. And so, with
a hint of self-irony on the album sleeve where the Captain is holding some
crumpled dollar bills with a semi-stupefied look of total incredulity, Unconditionally Guaranteed arrives as a
fully normal record of contemporary
pop-rock, blues-rock, and roots-rock songs — genre-wise, probably standing
closer to mid-Seventies «pub-rock» than anything else.
The results are nowhere near as bad as they are
usually advertised: had this album been recorded by anybody but Captain Beefheart, the typical
reaction would probably vary from mild pleasure to absent-minded indifference,
rather than disgust and horror. The worst thing, however, is that even if this
somehow happens to be the first
Captain Beefheart album in your life, it will still not take long to understand
that something is very wrong — that this is either a mediocre commercial artist
feigning artistic madness, or (as was actually the case) that this is a
formerly mad artist trying, but not knowing how to sound «normal». Where his
previous two records observed the balance between craziness and conservatism
quite loyally, here the craziness is largely restricted to some of the lyrics (occasionally)
and some of the vocals (many of which suffer from what seems like a bad case of
laryngitis, though perhaps it was merely an effect of suffering from supreme
depression at the idea of what he was doing). And that's a piss-poor balance —
if you ask me, the only choice to make this record good would be to go all the way, and take proper care of all
the arrangements, inflections, and modulations.
At least it begins nice enough: ʽUpon The
My-O-Myʼ is a mean-'n'-lean funky workout in the tradition of ʽBooglarize You
Babyʼ and ʽLow Yo-Yo Stuffʼ, though with less interesting and complex guitar
work — but a nice flute and sax interlude from guest musician Del Simmons to
compensate. The self-addressed question, "now tell me, good Captain, how
does it feel / To be driven away from your own steering wheel?" sort of
gives you a first hint at whatever is coming up, but the groove as such still
has plenty of snap, and Beefheart's vocal performance is probably his best on
the record. Skip ahead, though, and the next track is ʽSugar Bowlʼ, a
pedestrian country rocker with exactly one musical phrase to make sense of —
and not even a phrase that was invented by Beefheart or any of his musicians.
But if that song is simply «nothing special», then ʽNew Electric Rideʼ is a
monotonous, repetitive groove whose lyrics suggest an air of joyful exuberance
— "here we go again, baby, on the New Electric Ride... I could barely hold
my pride..." pride in what? the
fact that it is possible to sing in some sort of a dying croak and still manage
to stay on key? The problem is that the music, the lyrics, and the vocals on
this song just do not belong together — you might as well invite Pavarotti to
sing on a Clash track, or, more to the point, Stephen Hawking to sing ʽHey
Judeʼ, or maybe forget it, because the former would at least be novel, and the
latter disturbing. ʽNew Electric Rideʼ is just pathetic.
With song titles like ʽHappy Love Songʼ and ʽI
Got Love On My Mindʼ, it is as if the befuddled Captain were hopelessly lost
somewhere in between the art of parody and the desire to generate a bunch of
genuine generic love ballads — the results being equally unpalatable to his old
fans and to the general public. Weirdest of all, he is not totally incapable of
creating a good love ballad: ʽThis Is The Dayʼ, on which he sings with an
unusually clean and convincing voice, and graced with a very pretty lead guitar
melody, is a really good track whose lyrics do not try to make use of
commercial clichés, and ʽMagic Beʼ almost
comes close, although his voice is still too shaky on that one to normalize it
completely (and, like I said, only total and utter normalization would allow these songs to have a proper emotional
effect). But for every track like that, there's one or two silly
«happy-exuberant» numbers like ʽFull Moon Hot Sunʼ that simply feel sick.
I do not deny the catchiness of the melodies,
but it would be shameful to call Unconditionally
Guaranteed a good album just because the Captain took care to insert some
earworms — which were never his preferred specialty in the first place. The
closing ʽPeachesʼ, a musical variation on Wilbert Harrison's ʽLet's Stick
Togetherʼ, is kind of a guilty pleasure to me, but it would still work better with a different vocal
performance. Otherwise, the best I can do is not condemn the record: it is
essentially listenable, and there is something deeply intriguing in its
artistic failure that still makes it an unexpendable part of Beefheart's total
legacy, much as the Captain himself would want all of us to forget it.
It is said that upon hearing the final results,
the Magic Band was so shocked of its own wrongdoing that it simply stood up
and left the good Captain — and that the good Captain subsequently disowned the
record himself and, once his contract with the Mercury label ran out, urged
everybody who bought it to return it for a proper refund. Even so, there is no
getting away from the fact that Don Van Vliet wrote these songs, and the Magic
Band recorded them (and later on, the Captain even took a few of the better
ones on the road), and it wasn't merely
to placate the record industry bosses. There is also no getting away from the
fact that this record is not boring — if you want boring American music from
1974, try Kansas or, I dunno, Carly Simon. It is an artistic disaster, but when
the artist is of Don Van Vliet's caliber, disaster has its own special
fascination that can even be more memorable than success.
I've often felt like "Unconditionally Guaranteed" is let down by Don's vocal performance, with "This is the Day" being a great counterexample. Some of the material could certainly have been salvaged, and there's nothing inherently suspect about deciding to put out an album of softer stuff. But his voice on most of this is just...off. He sounds so miserable that it's tough to focus on the underlying songs.
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