Us crack team of world weary scribes often have a little virtual chat around the introduction of each new theme. For this one, as the (currently*) token Brit, the newsroom wondered whether I would be taking on bloomers under this portmanteau. As someone who never discusses taking off bloomers, again a British "thing", I somehow have found myself delivering a post about voluminous panties. Well, someone has to!
And you know, I discovered how few songs there are on the subject. Indeed the only one that I could instantly think of, is one I can't stand. Perspective. When I were a lad, inky fingered from addiction to the musical press, I read more about music that had opportunity to listen. Thus, I liked a lot of artists long before I ever heard a note they played, purely on the basis of the enthusiastic coverage in New Musical Express and in Melody Maker. Frank Zappa and his Mothers of Invention were one such, as was his acolyte and erstwhile friend, Captain Beefheart. They looked such outrageous reprobates, not just dirty hippies, but filthy dirty hippies (or so my naive mind wandered). This admiration would take a logical step into afternoons misspent in the record shop, cans on, rifling through the records available. By good luck, it was Hot Rats that I first got my ears around, a record I love to this day, and can whistle still every nuanced guitar solo. It's true, I didn't much like the Beefheart vocals in Willie the Pimp, overly mannered and affected. (It's why my vinyl copy has a deep ridge in the grooves, as I tried, clumsily, always to skip them, as the guitar calisthenics that followed were and remain phenomenal. It sort of went downhill after that. OK, forgive me, I bought Live At The Fillmore, snickering at mud shark misdemeanours and other such low brow schoolboy humour; hell, I was a schoolboy. It has remained unlistenable for years since, bar the lift of Flo and Eddie reprising the Turtles' Happy Together, which I used to add to mixtapes. Showing how long, that too, was. (Of course I knew they were the Turtles before they were Flo and Eddie, should anyone be tempted to pass comment. You might anyway, as it has been so long that any of us had a comment that you could wonder if we write merely for ourselves.)
Fast forward, what, a couple of years, and I was sharing a study with someone with an even more over-attuned sense of hip than I. We shared our admiration of Zappa, and one fine day he unleashed his latest purchase, Overnite Sensation, playing it loud, on rotation, for several hours. I got to know the songs well, the lyrical drift imprinting on my brain like a bad smell. What was this dreck, this drivel? Even as I tried to concentrate on the instruments, all I could get was his insufferable baritone, smirking and smutting. In a crash of lightning it came to me, Zappa was shite, a charlatan. And, Hot Rats aside, there he has remained. I still think that a work of genius, so much so, in fact, as when his son, Dweezil, recently came over and played the album as the modus operandi of a tour and album, I had to go. And, when he had played the album, consummately, I should add, with his band, again I had to go, as he started the second half by cranking straight up into fecking Dina Moe..... Which meant I was home and tucked up in bed, probably before the encores. (Note, the review is not mine, but the first comment is.)
So, having written off both Zappa, largely, and Beefheart, totally, as pants, SWIDT, what more is there for me to do here? Well, how about the only Beefheart song I can abide.
