Captain Beefheart & Jeff Simmons

Captain Beefheart

          I met Captain Beefheart, aka Don Van Vliet, when I was helping out with the 1968 Xmas show, but we didn’t really get to know each other until I started working for Bizarre full-time in mid-1969. There was a matter of some tympani, I believe it was, that Beefheart had rented for the making of Trout Mask Replica but had apparently not yet returned. I think the rental was in the name of Straight Records, but there were several issues in dispute I made it my business not to learn. I was told that Beefheart had imperiously ordered away several crews sent to retrieve them. Herb Cohen thought that Beefheart might treat me more kindly.

          I drove out in search of the wayward tympani to a remote, almost wild, area of Woodland Hills, on the Valley side of the Santa Monica mountains, dead North of Malibu, far from Hollywood. Parts of Los Angeles provide an amazing illusion of being rural. It seemed that the whole Magic Band lived in the big house. Out back were some fantasy gardens that were the most artistic I’d seen since Paul Osborne’s stone houses in Montclair. Inside was a jumble of furniture and some odd paintings. Beefheart, under his birth name of Don Vliet (he’d added the Van later), had been something of a child prodigy as an artist.

          Beefheart was in one of his periods of feuding with Zappa, with whom he’d been involved since they’d been teenagers. Nonetheless, he greeted me warmly, told me he appreciated my position in this thing, got me stoned, and gave me a tour of the house and grounds. He had an amazing voice, even when talking: a full baritone, both rough and melodious. We laughed and did impromptu poetry back and forth. I sang him a song I’d half-plagiarised, half improvised, which he made a big display of finding amusing. I was able to load one of the kettledrums into the back of my VW bus that trip.

          Over the next few months I went out to Beefheart’s place a few more times, having been appointed the person in the organisation to deal with him. I drove him into Woodland Hills’ commercial area on errands. He told me in detail about how he’d written Trout Mask Replica in one huge outburst of creation over about nine hours one night on mescaline. He gave me his own copy of Safe As Milk from the stack of LPs under his stereo. I still have it.

          Later, during a time when I was unemployed and Beefheart was being managed by Grant Gibbs, a friend of mine from the Bizarre Inc. organisation, Grant hired me to do a couple of jobs shlepping the Captain’s band’s equipment. I remember in particular one of the recording sessions for Lick My Decals Off, Baby. Beefheart composed most of his music note for note, but in a sort of free-verse form, with only occasional reference to key or time signatures. Very free-flowing; not easily accessible to the everyday music consumer.

          “The music’s just out there,” Don told me once. “All I do is bring it in. I feel bad about taking money for it, because where I get it, it’s free.”

          (Once when I was working for Bizarre-Straight, a San Francisco radio station mailed the [double] album cover of their promotional copy of Trout Mask Replica back to our office with a note that said something like, ‘Enclosed please find the album cover of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band’s latest release. We have no further use for it. The records, however, make dandy ashtrays.’)

          Anyway, for a person not ready for it, some of Beefheart’s arrangements could sound like a bunch of random noise. What was remarkable about that recording session was that, after the band had played two or three minutes of this seemingly random noise, Beefheart would call a cut, correct one of the musicians for missing a phrase or something, and then they’d start all over and repeat that two or three minutes again just about exactly, as far as I could tell.

          The audiences at Beefheart’s performances were populated by many odd-looking people, but not of the ordinary Hollywood oddness — they tended toward being various manifestations of the spaced-out-nerd variety. And a large percentage of them seemed to know all these difficult songs by heart.

          I lost contact with Beefheart when I left LA. I’ve read that in the 80s he gave up music and moved back out to the desert to concentrate on his painting, then moved to coastal Northern California. He became seriously ill with multiple sclerosis in the 1990s, and died in 2010.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6roEf9RpWBM&feature=youtu.be 

Jeff Simmons

          Early on in the process of helping out with the Mothers of Invention’s 1968 Xmas show at the Shrine Auditorium, Joe Gannon sent me out to LA Airport to meet a band from Seattle that Zappa had signed called Ethiopia. I was told to look for a tall guy with a red ’fro hairdo. No problem. There, standing about looking like a band, were four or five guys, one of whom was tall and had a big bush of kinky red hair sticking out from his head. So I walked up and said, “Ethiopia?”

          The guy with the hair’s name was Jeff Simmons. He later told me he’d thought I was freaky, just walking up looking the way I did and saying that one word. Me? Freaky? Anyway, I did end up chauffeuring them about a bit, including an excursion out to the stone houses in Montclair.

          When I came back from the East Coast to work for Bizarre in mid-1969, Ethiopia was gone, but Jeff was under some kind of contract with Zappa or Herbie or both. He’d been the bass player from Ethiopia that Herbie had decided to keep, sending the others in the band packing to Seattle. He had a new band, most of whom were also from Seattle, and was working on a solo album.

          He had also, almost as a sideline, done the sound track for a B-movie biker opus called Naked Angels with another musician named Randy Sterling. Jeff’s soundtrack really rocks, and the obviously improvised-on-the-spot lyrics to “Vegas Boogie” are pure Jeff and subtlely funny as hell. I especially liked the bit with the lug nuts.

          I schlepped Jeff’s band’s stuff, of course. At one memorable gig at some dive in El Segundo, a particularly dreary beach town. I took the flack as the middle man between the irate saloonkeeper, who wanted the amps turned down because the neighbours had called the police, and the guitar player, a tough little nut named Craig Tarwater, who went ballistic at the thought of his amps being turned down. I don’t know how I made it through that one, but I did. And the police didn’t bust us, although I imagine that would have given the band some needed publicity.

          Jeff was then staying in one of the apartments at a charming, funky old court on Fountain Avenue west of La Brea. It must have been built in the 1920s in a modified California-Arts-And-Crafts style. Now, for people unfamiliar with the California court as a form of residential architecture, it consists of smallish duplexes or quadruplexes or rows of flats set facing each other across a central walkway, which is usually landscaped with trees (unless the place is decidedly downmarket), at a right angle to the street, similar to what the Brits call a mews. The one where Jeff was staying had quadruplexes: one-bedroom places upstairs-and-down and side-by-side, I think three or four quads on each side, with long carports at the far end of the walkway away from the street, and driveways around the whole thing. It had good-sized shade trees along the central walkway. It seemed to be inhabited entirely by show-biz types and other assorted weirdos, many of them, like Jeff, from Seattle. There was a community atmosphere about, and I wound up being pretty close with a bunch of them.

          Hanging out with Jeff was to be involved in his intense creativity. With some people it was a matter of wine and weed and listening to music; with others it was a matter of wine and weed and playing music. With Jeff it was getting ripped and writing music. Or comedy. Jeff was a devotee of the punch line and the zinging adjective. It was great keeping up with him — or trying to.

          He and the other guys in his band — Tarwater and a Seattle drummer named Ron Woods — had what I assumed were the usual assortment of in-jokes with which band members indulged themselves. I got the feeling most of these in-jokes originated with Jeff.

          One in particular that I remember was an emphasis on the word ‘rank’. Their invariable assessment of anything assessable, whether a joke or a song or a meal or something that somebody did, was either, “How Rank!” or “Too Rank”. They’d invented an imaginary person named ‘Hal Rank’, based on the first of the above-mentioned expressions. This of course led to the time-honoured pastime of playing with names with other meanings. Dick Hertz. Mel and Collie Baybee. And so forth. The only aspect of life and culture that escaped being classified as Too Rank, apparently, was Pink’s 24-Hour Chili Dog stand on La Brea, which they deemed to be Just Rank Enough.

          Despite all this camaraderie the band couldn’t survive the lack of commercial response to the album, which was released in February 1970, and broke up. Then Zappa hired Jeff to play bass and do some singing with the Mothers in the Spring of 1970. He played in the Mothers’ Pauley Pavilion concert with the L.A. Philharmonic. He told me he was disgusted by being misquoted (under the name of Swoovette Simmons) in a story about the concert in Newsweek. Otherwise, I didn’t see much of him while he was with the Mothers.

          I was surprised when he quit the Mothers early in 1971, just as they were starting to film the movie 200 Motels. He never did give me a clearly understandable reason why he gave all that away, but my impression was that he’d just felt that what he was doing there wasn’t what he wanted to be doing. He seemed to be particularly bitter about the lack of understanding and support he got from some of his friends in the band at the time.       

          He then started paying with various LA musos of the spaced-out variety — with Albert Lee at one point, for example. At about this time his creativity seemed to go through the ceiling. He began changing his name to match whatever style of music he was writing. I remember him becoming Little Junior Turlock and also Kent Dubçek. Sitting with him in his place, getting wrecked, and listening to his newest Little Junior Turlock compositions (I remember in particular one that began “It was back in the alley and nobody saw ...” and another that began “Used car in the morning light ...”) was a profound artistic experience.

          His wife and daughter, about whom I’d never heard him speak, came down from Seattle and he moved into a duplex in the flat part of Hollywood next door to Danny O’Keefe, another Seattle player who later became a one-hit wonder with ‘Good-Time Charlie’s Got The Blues’. He kept his high rate of creativity and energy, but was going nowhere in the LA music business.

          I don’t which of us left LA first, but when we did we lost touch until I found him on the internet and we re-connected in March 2001. In the intervening 29 years he had, as best as I could find out through the net, been playing music and cutting up on stage in the Seattle area, acquiring a heavy reputation, but never staying with any one act for very long. He’d taken such names as Darvon Willis, Jetsims, and Little Bobby Sumpner (aka Robert Sumpner Jr., the Janitor of the Blues). Some of the bands he played with included the Reputations, the Backtrackers, the Shimmering Guitars, and Cocktails for Ladies.

          When I got back in touch with him he was trying to get a new Jeff Simmons CD out. He updated me about it:

          “the scene: Jerry's Famous Deli, Coldwater and Ventura, Studio City California ... Enter one Robert Sumpner Jr. self-proclaimed ‘janitor of the Blues’ for a sit- down kosher power lunch with Herb Cohen. the date: April 9th 2000 ... thirty-two years after you picked Phil and I up at LAX with little Naomi [my dog] in tow.... anyhow between huge glorping bites of piled-high tuna and various ethnic relishes Herb offers: ‘for you to come back to Hollywood ....at your age ? ... would be delusional ... besides your record didn't exactly sell a million copies did it?’ needless to say this has been a challenge to my rancid present day demo ‘Adventures in the White Blues Era’ ... please send 17.95 today and I won't release my second albumen.” I’d given him the line, “Adventures in the White Blues Era”, in an earlier email.

          By December 2001 the album was still imminent:

          “‘How green was my valet?’, these and other classic proposed titles are battling with ‘adventures in the white blues era’ for the nome de plume of my CD ... ready for my luck to change ... concierge to the blues ... the right reverend, Robert Sumpner”

          By October 2003 he was still busy with getting that second solo album out. In late 2004 there it was on the internet: Blue Universe, released by Blue Fox Records. I sent him an email asking about it and received a reply saying, in part, “your weirdship, please visit www.bluefoxrecords.com, a luxurious portal of self-aggrandizing bulljive, pedantic overstatements and questionable intent. ... due to unforeseen calamity ‘blue universe’ was released this June 2005 ... pardon my radio silence ... send digits and will gift you w/disc.”

          It eventually arrived via parcel service. I haven’t heard from him since. His page on facebook is ‘automatically generated based on what Facebook users are interested in and not affiliated with or endorsed by anyone associated with the topic’ – a line I imagine he’d enjoy satirising, and so many people named ‘Jeff Simmons’ have facebook accounts that I said fuck-it at the idea of going through them. My guess is that joining facebook isn’t something he’d do, anyway. I’d be surprised if he weren’t still gigging around Seattle, playing bass and being weird. The grand old man of the local music scene.

          Of course, I could be wrong.