The Accepted Rock Critic Line on Strictly Personal is "the album was ruined by Bob Krasnow's over-the-top production. He added phasing without consulting Van Vliet, who was justifiably furious. It has some value as a historical curiosity."
Well, no. There's also the story that Beefheart approved the mix, but changed his mind later, laying the blame on Bob. This sounds wayyy like him, as far as we know, but we know Jack Shit about any of this because we weren't there. So it looks like we'll have to form our own opinions without the benefit of critical acuity and Backstory Bullshit. Gee whiz.
"Here's the thing" (as The Young People are saying) - absolutely nobody back then was throwing up their pale hands in horror at the production. Nobody knew what production was - we were too into the music to give much of a fuck. The whole album was totally mind-blowing, unlike anything we'd heard. Still is. Where Safe As Milk was based around recognisably structured songs, Strictly Personal owed nothing to song-writing craft, the music business as we knew it, or even the hippie demographic. If anything, it's anti-psychedelic, in a similar way to Frank Zappa, although abstract to his literal. Beatle Bones 'n' Smokin' Stones? He came to bury (and incinerate) the Brits, not to praise them.
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That gatefold sleeve in full. Run for the hills!
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The stumbling, howling intro to the first track, Ah Feel Like Ahcid, sets the tone - when that off-kilter railroad guitar comes in under the Captain's barnyard harp you know you're not in Kansas any more. This is authentically other - not self-consciously weird or "challenging", or even psychedelic. From Son House to the Trout House, this is ancestral music played sideways, skittering from the cracks, the rumble in the jungle, creaks in the attic, insect rattle and roll. A pre-Floydian heartbeat segués into the tarpit bass riff of Safe As Milk, time signatures tesselating, Van Vliet's vox schizo-stereo, and half way through the thing groans and rolls over, the Captain crooning I may be hungry but I sure ain't weird over squalls of slide guitar and John French battering his planetary drums, Thor-thundering and phased to stun. Trans-fucking-cendent.
The impact of Van Vliet's lyric writing isn't often credited. In the late 'sixties poetry - almost unbelievably - was still part of youth culture, in the tradition of the beats a decade earlier. The alternative press carried sprawling free-form odes, and paperbacks of contemporary poetry were popular items, often with beautiful psychedelic covers. I wasn't alone in carrying a notebook with copied-out poems and lyrics and koans and haiku. Incredible, right? Words were treasure. Words got you high. So anyway - someone showed me a Beefheart lyric in his notebook, saying that's poetry. The words, as they say, leapt off the page. Vivid, funny, and powerfully hallucinogenic. It was on Strictly Personal where Van Vliet freed his lyric muse, syllables sparking and popping:
Porcelain children see through white light so cracker bats, cheshire cats, named the dark the light the dark the day. Blue veins through gray felt tomorrows.
The whole album is unprecedented, in form and texture. A collapsing architecture of disarticulated chords and stub-your-toe beats tattoo your cerebral cortex. No compromise, no prisoners, no bullshit, and no sales. It is astonishing, in retrospect, that anyone thought it would fly off the racks with little or no radio play, but those were the times: risks might pay off, and nobody knew nuthin'.
Not only unprecedented, but impossible to Trout Mask replicate; this magic can never happen again. We live in tamed times, but listening to this, for those lucky enough not to have been born too late, sheds the intervening years like they never happened. Which, in a way, they haven't. Those coming fresh to it will have to bust out of the sterile salon of academic etiquette that is contemporary music culture, and lots of luck with that.
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"On you, this looks good. Really."
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As far as I know, Strictly Personal has avoided the remaster and reissue treatment - it remains an odd backwater even in the knotted swamps of Beefheart's music, where few think to go. The raw session tracks have seen many attempts at organisation and release (Mirror Man, I May Be Hungry, It Comes To You etc.) and are preferred by modern minds for their *cough* "purity". The recent soniclovesnoise edit is masterful, actually plays like an album, and is available free, gratis, and for nothing from his essential longplayingLPalbumswhatneverwas blog. But even he falls for the Backstory Bullshit that those "un-produced" tracks are in some way better than the Krasnow production. They ain't. They're different. Everything is different to Strictly Personal. It deserves better than to languish in the shadow of Trout Mask Replica (the one Rock Critics pretend to like, so we'll think they're groovy). It's one of the most wildly thrilling and genuinely avant-garde albums ever cut. What was far out, is far out.
I ain’t blue no more. Like heaven, like heaven ah said.
