Waxed Oop

by Fast n' Bulbous
2009, Cuneiform Rune 277, 2009
CD, $15
Distributor's website:   http://www.cuneiformrecords.com.

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University

mosher@svsu.edu

Waxed Oop is a sprightly CD dedicated to the music of Don Van Vliet, who recorded albums from the 1960s into the '80s as Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band.   This is the second Fast n' Bulbous album, a project organized by guitarist Gary Lucas, who played in a late version of the Magic Band.

One assumes that the cost to lease rights to one of Van Vleit's own paintings (he gave up music for easel painting about 25 years ago) was prohibitive, yet Jonathan Rosen's cover imagery and artwork may be a bit sensationalistic, the "medical model" Alexis Trice in bandages, menaced or restricted by tubing, mechanical diagrams, a male researcher, and her fetishistic high-heeled shoes (like a young woman in the comics of Beefheart's contemporary, Robert Crumb).   Rosen's drawings don't evoke the Magic Band's swaggering exuberant musical boys' club (though Antenna Jimmy Semens did occasionally wear a frock), and are perhaps intended to evoke Leonardo Da Vinci's notebooks.   A fat brass bee, perhaps a West African gold weight, seems the most appropriate image here for the brassy Fast n' Bulbous music.

Back to the music, Don Van Vliet was a teenage friend of Frank Zappa, who later returned the favor by helping him secure record deals and producing his major albums.   While "Dropout Boogie" sound like garage rock the two might churn out as southern California teenagers. "Ice Rose" and "Trust Us" are classically Zappaesque, switching into different riffs and time changes in the course of each. While the Magic Band of the 1969 double album Trout Mask Replica and its successor Lick My Decals Off, Baby sounded audially transgressive and like nothing else out there, "You Know You're a Man" sounds like much 1970s Rock or Soul music.

Waxed Oop is bluesier than the groups' first album Pork Chop Blue Around the Rind (reviewed on this site), and features less of the Captain's intricate melodies with their early-twentieth-century discordant edginess.   Several of Captain Beefheart's songs, like "Well", seem to contain only two notes, often the minor third distance, as from an E to a G.   In Fast n' Bulbous' novel interpretation of "Well", the musicians let the rhythm loosen its threads, each instrument drifting into a crepuscular seascape of cirrus clouds, distant saxophone foghorns.   A two-note riff propels much of "Blabber and Smoke", while another part of it sounds like it should be the Band singing about the American Civil War.   Here's found a cheery "Woe is a Me-Bop", and medley of "Click Clack/Ice Cream for Crow".   The simplicity of riffs in "The Past is Sure Tense" unleash these skilled players to have improvisational fun upon the song's simple disciplined base, showcasing Lucas' electric guitar and the baritone sax of David Swelson.

I'm still not sure I subscribe to Lucas and Johnston's thesis that Beefheart should be numbered among the top twentieth century composers, yet, like Zappa, Beefheart is someone who memorably expanded the horizon of rock music.   Imagine the lonesome moaning blues of Howlin' Wolf, interspersed with complicated bridges by Stravinsky, performed by a college marching band; from this, Fast n' Bulbous' CDs make good, energetic university art studio work music.

Gary Lucas' solo National Steel guitar, played with a bottleneck slide, opens the disk with "Sure Nuff Yes I Do", from the Magic Band's first album long ago, when its first guitarist was Ry Cooder; one wonders what would have resulted had Cooder later brought Captain Beefheart to Cuba.    The National is also pressed into service on the closing live cut "China Pig", sung by Robyn Hitchcock, who switches between a Delta Blues holler and Syd Barrett sotto voce as only Englishmen gone out in the noonday Rock do.

"The Blimp" is one of only two pieces on the CD with vocal accompaniment, a good example of Beefheart's poetic lyrical, over an insistent drum paradiddle.   The recitation, originally on Trout Mask Replica, also appeared forty years ago on the Warner Brothers Records promotional album "Zapped", all musical acts that had been produced by Frank Zappa or were considered similarly avant-garde.    Available by mail for a dollar, the LP was obtained by my hip neighborhood friend when we were nearly 14, and made deep impressions on us both (including purchase of Beefheart albums).   Don Van Vliet's witty word confetti might be credited with launching that lad on his career trajectory teaching English at a major American university.   What a bit of it on Fast n' Bulbous' Waxed Oop CD does now is to remind me to invite the poets in my own university over for a listening of my vinyl copy of Trout Mask Replica on the old stereo phonograph.