Lowell George is pretty well respected, I'll put some on as I should have sooner

I do know the Zappa catalogue though & that is something special

The Knicks need a scout like this

WaltLongmire wrote:

Splat wrote:

Hector wrote:

Splat wrote:My first favorite Zappa album was one of his first. It is called Hot Rats. It is still fantastic.

Any Beefheart fans here?

I love that album, Beefhart sings a great vocal on 'Willie the Pimp'.

Bongo Fury - the Advance Romance of that is the best.

I don't really follow his solo stuff but I'm sure it is really good.

The most famous one is Troutmask Replica and you can't go wrong with that, but you can pretty much land anywhere in his output and it is all pretty interesting. A lot of the musical ideas you hear on the Tom Waits trilogy from SwordfishTrombone to Frank's Wild Years were done first by Beefheart. Waits just cleaned it up a bit to get his perfect carnival jukebox sound.

As an aside, I can pretty much guarantee that anyone who has listened to this kind of music and liked it understands my anarchism on this board. It is to be expected others find stuff that is not even intended to offend offensive.

Love the earlier Tom Waits- one of the better lyricists, IMO. Named my first cat, Waits, after him.

Never looked into his musical influences, but expect that it would be interesting to see who inspired him.

I was in an acting class and some girl saw a Waits CD in my bag and said he was no good, just some white guy who wants to be black. I think I said something close to STFU and GTFOH it was such stupid thing to say. I wanted to shove an REO Speedwagon up her tucus.

Waits has many obvious influences including like Kerouac and beat poets and he picked up a lot from Brecht & Weil's agitprop style of theatrical address and recycling of American influences into the European stage and music hall. (The Doors did their Weill thing on The Whiskey Song). I made the Beefheart connection because Captain's style of skronking, broken down, carny surrealism preceded Waits fruition of that sound by more than a decade.

It is very expressionistic and that is particularly so because Beefheart's other primary pursuit was expressionistic paintings. He spent many years in trailers in the desert making canvases.

Expressionism is all about impulse and the way it shows up in song is that abrupt starts and stops happen in the middle of songs which is closer to the way the mind actually works. It allows for dream logic to take over and that is something Waits seems to have picked up from Beefheart.

The primary difference is Waits is more cohesive, loses most of the abruptness and he does more actual storytelling than Beefheart. He uses those approaches more texturally than as a raison d'etre for the song itself (as in making a full composition rather than a painting being just about paint).