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Beefheart to ultimatelyconceive
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, Alex Snouffer provided a sufficient playhouse for him to ply his talents. Snouffer had been a student at Antelope in the late 50s, as well, and was a classmate of both Zappa and Beefheart. He also used to share in the record listening sessions at Vliet’s house. Back when Zappa was wrestling gigs with the Blackouts, Snouffer was forming his own R&B band called the Omens. “[We] played early rhythm and blues during Little Richard’s heyday and after that era,” Snouffer explained. “Back then, it was Top 40 stuff.” By the time Beefheart was performing with the Soots, Snouffer had left the Omens to do a paying gig at a Lake Tahoe casino. When he returned in 1964, he was itching to do some blues. “Don was one of the first people I went to see ’cause he and I had been pal-ling around together before I left,” he recalled. Snouffer also sought out some other local musical pals: bassist Jerry Handley, who was a huge fan of John Lee Hooker and Jimmy Reed, plus guitarist Doug Moon, who had replaced Snouffer in the Omens when he’d set off to Tahoe. The idea was to form another blues band featuring Beefheart as their lead vocalist—even though he was hardly an experienced singer by that time. What sold Snouffer, though, was what he heard when Beefheart began to sing. “[H]e started to do this Howlin’ Wolf imitation and I thought, ‘Yo buddy!’ This isn’t bad at all,” he explained. Besides, Beefheart had learned to play a mean blues harp. So Snouffer brought Moon and Handley into the group, while Beefheart nabbed Vic Mortensen for the drums. Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band began as imaginative fodder for Frank Zappa’s failed film project, but now they were about to become a real live blues band.

Chapter Three
Jumping Out of School
    Know to recognize and pick up the signs of the power we are awaiting, which are everywhere; in the fundamental language of cryptograms, engraved on crystals, on shells, on rails, in clouds, or in glass; inside snow, or light, or coal; on the hand, in the beams grouped round the magnetic poles, on wings.
    Tristan Tzara, “Note on Poetry (1919),”
Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries
    For close to eighty minutes,
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unleashes a cascade of atonal sounds that never relent. If the record itself provides both contrast and texture within that dissonance, the force and originality of those arrangements can leave you breathless, guessing as to how, even why, Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band arrived there. Usually, at the core of pop music is a quest for a sound which touches anerve, something that strikes a pleasurable chord in the listener. The best pop tends to unify the incompatible world around it—even answer a subliminal calling. When Elvis cut loose in the 50s, he shook up a generation clearly ready to be shook—he uncorked a bottle filled with a frustrated generation’s desire to stand apart from the herd. Elvis not only transcended what came before him, he validated everything good to come later.
    In general, pop music is about the celebration and sharing of good times. For example, in the 60s, when the Ronettes sang “Be My Baby,” you shared the intense joy in their voices. It was overwhelming to immerse yourself in such pleasure and still not lose yourself. You could melt into their sound and still be set apart from the herd. The Ronettes offered a kinship, a spiritual bond so rich, so generous, that they quenched a longing, a craving for something impenetrably beautiful to experience. Be my baby, NOW! they demanded—with a desire that made you feel a fool to resist it. Of course, the Beatles scaled those peaks continuously, too, even building greater expectations on the songs they left behind. On “Eight Days a Week,” John Lennon easily convinced you that his love had the power to extend the calender beyond the expected seven days. He did it in a voice that asked—no,
demanded
—that those