Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Grown So Ugly

Tonight is the last night of The First Night of The Living Van Vliet Festival. A strange white kid who grew up in the Mojave Desert and somehow developed mutated dna vocal abilities giving him the super powers to somehow cross breed Otis Redding and Alien Amphibian mating calls from another planet in another galaxy. An esthetic that mixed Delta Blues with Hugo Ball Dada poetry. An ability to compose music that deconstructed and reconstructed itself as you listened to it. A totally original American phenomena who happened to be able to profoundly change the way we play, listen to and the way we think about music even if you never heard of him. This is another piece off of his first commercial 1967 recording, Safe As Milk...The song is an authentic Delta Blues by Robert Pete Williams who recorded it in 1959. Here's Robert Pete Williams Version:
I want to thank mikeb302000 for instigating and curating this event. It's given me a chance to reconnect with Captain Beefheart and the strange thread I've been unraveling from the sweater of my life. We barely scratched the surface and it seems that more and more archival material surfaces all the time...so I'm getting out my pick axe cause I got to dig a little deeper and get ready for the next
NIGHT OF THE LIVING VAN VLIET!

2 comments:

Ol'Buzzard said...

I spent ten years in the Delta of Mississippi back during the 1950's: the delta blues is the only good thing that ever came out of that time and place.
the Ol'Buzzard

Unknown said...

Thanks for all your input. You are a treasure trove of musical bits and pieces.