The Spotlight Kid (1972)
10 tracks, 36 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes
We’ve skipped ahead a bit since the last time we met Captain Beefheart. Then, we listened to Strictly Personal from 1968; although Spotlight Kid came out less than four years later, much had happened. Specifically, three more albums including the eternal masterpiece of Trout Mask Replica, an album that was so ahead of its time that we’re still trying to catch up to it*, and Lick My Decals Off, Baby, a more refined album but with a darker edge. So when The Spotlight Kid came around, I’m not surprised that it was met with confusion. Even those that performed on the album are quoted as being disgusted by its ‘boring’ and ‘simple’ content.
It makes sense. This isn’t the manic but tightly-reined chaos of Trout Mask Replica, and I’d even say it’s less starkly intelligent than Lick My Decals Off, Baby. But this is no bad album by any stretch: for me, this one is all about the feel. And that feel is boogie. Right from the beginning, too, with the track ‘I’m Gonna Booglarize You Baby’ – no mistaking the intent there, as a lexical or musical statement. It starts with choppy, funky and effected guitar riffs layered on top of each other before the deep, rumbling growl of the Captain comes gurgling from some primordial depths with his barely logical lyrics, only occasionally reaching up into the octave to offer a pained blues moan, while the evermoving boogie carries on underneath it all.
It carries on like that. It is much more simple than the previous few years’ material, it’s a little straighter on the rhythms here, a little more predictable in the melody there, but nothing about it can leave you in any doubt that this is the one and only Captain. It’s stamped in every sound and every word; it just shows that accessible Beefheart is still as innovative and still as…well, Beefheart.
Near the end of the album there is a basically perfect run of three tracks that keep the boogie rolling all the way through. It starts with the train song ‘Click Clack’, where the introduction doesn’t give you a clue as to where the beat is actually going to go when it finally comes in; then ‘Grow Fins’, another intensely blues-riddled tale, one of exploring the depths to get away from the banalities of solid ground, shored up by some fantastic slide guitar and blues harp interplay; and finishing up with – who’da thunk it? – a Captain Beefheart Christmas song, ‘There Ain’t No Santa Claus on the Evenin’ Stage’, replete with jingle bells and with a typically perverse spin on things, sung right at the bottom of Beefheart’s vocal register. Listen to those three and you’ll know you’ve been booglarized.
In some ways, ‘Grow Fins’ sums up Beefheart for me. Not that it is his most representative track or anything, but that the blues harp that he blows on that one is just so, so good. The Captain’s skills at the harmonica are such that if he wasn’t known for his thoroughly considered batshit compositions and poetry, if his career had taken the slightest kink along the way, I have no doubt that he would still have been known as one of the greatest blues harpists ever. And when you consider that even disregarding his music, he’s known as a legitimate fine artist and that, by all accounts, if he’d have gotten his way as a teenager, probably would have gone on to be a great sculptor instead, it becomes obvious that Captain Beefheart was an artist to the core, and would shine from the pack no matter what media he chose, be it paint or marble or words or blues harp. All that mattered was that it was him. And whatever you think about his work, you can’t deny that, if nothing else, it was him.
* To shamelessly steal words from How to Speak Hip, Captain Beefheart was such an out genius that the thing he was a genius at hadn’t been invented yet.
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