Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band: Grow Fins: Rarities (1965-82) (Revenant, 1999)

Here's a contemporary review I wrote for MTV.com of the Grow Fins consumer fraud (aka box set). I had the opportunity to take a potshot at it in an Elizabeth Nelson Ringer article about box sets for which I was interviewed. But here's the full takedown. In terms of a letter grade, I'd give it a C-minus, docked a notch for the usurious price ($199 on Amazon but a copy can be had for $35 on Discogs as of this writing) and for the continued practice of ripping off even the most discerning music fans with pointless, infuriating reshuffles. If you want to know why Joan Crawford invented Napster, then read on.

 

Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band: Grow Fins – Rarities (1965-1982) (Revenant) 

Rating: ** 

Songs To Record: “Bellerin Plain” (CD 5, Track /4), “Electricity” (CD 2, Track 1), “Untitled 28” (CD 3, Track 28) and “Frownland” (CD 3, Track 17). 

Grow Fins suffers from the same problem as last year’s X anthology, Beyond and Back. Both are larded with inconsequential demos, outtakes and live cuts that do little to serve their legacies. No doubt this is a self-conscious strategy. If X went beyond and right back in their quest for a popularity they foolishly thought they deserved, then Captain Beefheart had to grow fins to prevent himself from drowning in the corporate chicanery that plagued his recorded output since the very beginning. These collections, then, come across as a sour grapes “Fuck you!” to the status quo that wouldn’t have them. In short, they’re astonishingly unlistenable for two artists whose recorded legacies are as endlessly listenable as any in pop music history.

Listenability is not a quality often associated with Beefheart. Ever since the talismanic double album Trout Mask Replica in 1969, he took the rock combo about as far out as it could go exploding his song structures with free jazz chaos. Not helping the medicine go down was the Captain’s own smokestack lightnin’ blues roar (pay no heed to gush about his “five-octave range” – he has about as much color as Joe Strummer). Yet the few adventurous listeners willing to scout through the music’s overwhelming density discovered a totally unique and, at times, absolutely frightening retreat not just from convention but from the very order of things. 

But even at his most uncompromised, Beefheart still provoked some sort of reaction (if only “ugh, turn that racket off!”). The saddest thing about the Beefheart Advanced Placement study guides on Grow Fins is that they’ll barely make an impression on unsuspecting neophytes at all. That’s fine by Revenant - trading attitude for étude, Grow Fins wasn’t compiled with neophytes in mind. But it doesn’t even seem to be for big fans like myself (scholars and obsessives aiming to refine their sensibility to the point of nauseum are more the target). From bland garage R&B demos to the first scrapings towards atonality (CD2’s live 1968 Cannes “Electricity” is fine but it’s only marginally better than the live 1968 UK version two cuts later), the first four CDs will teach you what you already know over and over again. 

CD3 is particularly obnoxious in this regard. It’s a complete run-through of a little more than half the songs on Trout Mask Replica with almost exactly the same arrangements but without Beefheart’s vocals. Don’t be fooled by the twenty-nine “Untitled” numbers – they’re mostly in-between song shuffling, doodling and silence. The four-second “Untitled 28,” for instance, is just a single guitar note. The purpose of this instrumental nightmare is to demonstrate how rehearsed and exacting the tumult actually was. Now that you know that, you don’t have to listen.

The last CD starts out strong towards the beginning with three excellent live songs from 1971. Here the Howlin’ Wolf/Ornette Coleman fusion is perfectly realized – the silence immediately after Beefheart’s sax-led finale to “Bellerin Plain” is literally breath-taking. But the disc soon devolves into drum solos, piano solos, guitar solos, voice solos, mellotron solos, etc. 

Worst of all, Grow Fins, which lists for around $90, could easily be winnowed down to four discs if not three. CDs 1 and 2 total 79:44 and while CD 4 has the enhanced live footage on it, the 12:33 of chit chat with the Capt.’s neighbor on the audio part is a total rip-off. So artist-run excavating indie labels are only in it for the art, huh?