Ashtray Heart. Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band. 1980. Virgin.

 On the late evening of November 22, 1980, I was occupying the place of my routine Saturday night roost, in front of the Curtis Mathes color console TV set in the den of my parents’ house. My favorite show, Saturday Night Live, was about to air and I was probably braced for disappointment because the show had a new cast, which had altered a very smart program that parodied American stupidity into a dumb, loud program. I kept watching, though, because the musical guests were, as is well known, consistently outstanding, especially for an American teenager learning that there was more to contemporary pop music than what was programmed on the Dallas-Fort Worth FM radio market I listened to. That night the host introduced Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band. A four man group had taken the stage, and performed with a rhythmic intensity whose galvanizing effects still retain their power to directly challenge spoon fed concepts of American originality and homogeneity. Ashtray Heart, the second track from Doc At the Radar Station, just released in August that year, is a paranoiac’s—sometimes Freudian—nightmare about which Don Van Vliet sings obliquely rejecting musical genealogy, and refusing kinship with his new wave contemporaries, even referring to them as “invalids [made] out of supermen.” It’s a convincing argument. Van Vliet’s iconic vocal roar has always functioned as an organic outgrowth of the Magic Band’s peerless innovations, and he uses it here to rage against a growing sense of diminishment, a nagging loss of vitality. “I feel like a glass shrimp in a pink panty with a saccharine chaperone.” A Wikipedia quote attributed to Van Vliet from a KABC-TV Channel 7 Eyewitness News interview from around this time reads, “I’m doing a non-hypnotic music to break up the catatonic state…and I think there is one right now.” The final Magic Band record with Van Vliet would be released only two years later, and the great twentieth century American glossolalia—that is, the mass of spoken, sung, and written voices that was the cultural wellspring of rock and roll—that had shaped the sensibilities of Magic Band members was now giving way to a more corporate, refined, and less independent sound and vision. “Open up another case of the punks…new hearts to the dining rooms…dissolve in new cards, boards, throats, underwear.” The Magic Band climaxed Ashtray Heart that night with a soprano saxophone solo that Van Vliet blew with all the charmless passion of an oracle going about his business of prophecy and crisis management. But to what impending cataclysm was the Magic Band attempting to draw our attention? The twilight of rock and roll? The future consequences of isolating ourselves behind Reagan’s mythic curtain of American exceptionalism? We can’t know because we were never meant to know. The beauty is in the sublime composition of the alarm itself.

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