01	I'm Gonna Booglarize You Baby						04:35
	02	White Jam						02:55
	03	Blabber 'n Smoke						02:46
	04	When It Blows Its Stacks						03:40
	05	Alice In Blunderland						03:54
	06	The Spotlight Kid						03:21
	07	Click Clack						03:30
	08	Grow Fins						03:30
	09	There Ain't No Santa Claus On The Evenin' Stage						03:11
	10	Glider						04:34
	11	Low Yo Yo Stuff						03:41
	12	Nowadays A Woman's Gotta Hit A Man						03:46
	13	Too Much Time						02:50
	14	Circumstances						03:14
	15	My Head Is My Only House Unless It Rains						02:55
	16	Sun Zoom Spark						02:13
	17	Clear Spot						03:39
	18	Crazy Little Thing						02:39
	19	Long Neck Bottles						03:18
	20	Her Eyes Are A Blue Million Miles						02:57
	21	Big Eyed Beans From Venus						04:23
	22	Golden Birdies						01:55

The Spotlight Kid



Song list:

I'm Gonna Booglarize You Baby
White Jam
Blabber 'N Smoke
When It Blows Its Stacks
Alice in Blunderland (instrumental)
The Spotlight Kid
Click Clack
Grow Fins
There Ain't No Santa Claus on the Evenin' Stage
Glider


Shopping guide from Justin Sherill:

This album is much in the same vein as Clear Spot, but lacks the same tight feeling. Still very accessible, and a good purchase if you like Clear Spot. (Almost a moot point, since they both come on one CD now.)

Radar Station's shopping guide:

Spotlight Kid contains some very heavy, slow and spacious blues. Although seen as a disappointment by many on its release, due to its very restrained nature, it really shines through today as being another Beefheart classic, containing some of his most beautiful songs, such as Glider and Grow Fins, and a few live favourites, such as Alice In Bluderland and Click Clack. The killer opening tune, I'm Gonna Booglarize Ya Baby, never fails in its mission, no matter how many times you've been booglarized before.

You can view the paintings and poems contained on the sleeve here.

Reviews:

Spotlight Kid by Colman Andrews, from March 1972 Phonograph Record Magazine.
Spotlight Kid by Lester Bangs, from 30th March 1972 Rolling Stone.
Spotlight Kid from June 1972 Stereo Review.
Spotlight Kid / Clear Spot by Jim Washburn, from 12th January 1995 Los Angeles Times.
Releases:



The Spotlight Kid Review


Written by Colman Andrews, taken from March 1972 edition of Phonograph Record Magazine.

Who's the greatest white blues singer in America today? Shame on you if you said John Hammond or Dave Van Ronk or maybe Kate Taylor. If you said Van Morrison, you get half credit 'cause he used to be (or maybe quarter credit since he's only an honorary American). Half credit for Ry Cooder too, cause he's working on it. If you said David Clayton-Thomas, bite your tongue. Hard. If you got really weird and came up with somebody like Bernie Pearl, kindly stop reading this publication at once. And no, it's not Sammy Davis, Jr., and if somebody out there is clinging to the hope that it might be Mark Farner, please mail us your name and address so we can send out The Archies to stomp your ass.

The correct answer, of course, is Don Van Vliet, who, despite his name, is not the forgotten man of the Flemish Renaissance, but who is in fact stout-hearted, trout-hearted old Captain Beefheart himself, the Madman of Musical Melancholy, the Sultan of Street Sorrow, the Robber Baron of the Blues. I mean, I love Mose Allison and Dr. John and all those other fine people, but only Captain B. has really been able to take all the essential elements of the black blues idiom and synthesise them into a musical style that has absolutely nothing to do with its sources (except in the most obvious, simplistic way) and that, now that I stop to think about it, has absolutely nothing to do, with anything else at all. A Dialectic of the Dirty Boogie. Or of the Dirty Booglarize, since, of course, "Vital Willy tol' Weepin' Milly / I'm gonna booglarize you baby". And since the Captain, My Captain, has one of the dirtiest voices in the entire history of verbalisation. I mean, he could get arrested for reciting The Lord's Prayer in public. And when, far from that, he goes around singing "I'm gonna grow fins / 'N go back in the water again..: I'm gonna take up with ah mermaid / 'N leave you land-lubbin' women alone"; when he soulfully informs us that: "Down in hominy's grotto there's ah soul diein' 'n leavin' / Every second on the evenin' stage"; you know that he's not just whistling Dixie.

Which brings up the matter of the fact that, in addition to the lovely, smutty surrealism, the street-corner pseudo-reference that studs his lyric style like pecans in a Georgia praline, in addition to all that, there's the music. His own harmonica (which sounds like Clifton Chenier's accordion on "White Jam"), Zoot Horn Rollo's "glass finger and steel appendage guitar"; which is more wry than Ry, Ed Marimba's marimba, piano, and harpsichord, Rockette Morton's "bassus ophelius", Winged Eel Fingerling's guitar, and drums by Drumbo, Ted Cactus, Ed Marimba, and Rhys Clark (how did that weird name get in there?). A nice, nasty band which is certainly a tasty adjunct to the greatest white blues singing in America that is going on simultaneously. The orchestration, the veritable chorus of percussion at the start of "When It Blows Its Stacks", then the Ornette-goes-to-carnival-type break in the middle of the song. The neo-bop riff under the raunchy blues riff on "The Spotlight Kid". The whiz-bang choo-choo sounds on "Click Clack" (certainly a classic blues theme if ever there was one - it even has two trains on two railroad tracks and a woman who's "always threatenin' t' go down t' N' Orleans"). And the grand fragmentations of line on "Blabber 'n Smoke", which is thoroughly extraordinary throughout. Zowie. And Captain Beefheart singing like he looks and looking like the kind of guy who ":takes um out / Out on an iceberg / Hand 'em ah Ronson 'n says I'll see you around."


The Spotlight Kid

This review of The Spotlight Kid (Reprise) was written by Lester Bangs and was originally published in the 30th March, 1972 edition of Rolling Stone. Kindly sent to me by Jim Flannery.

"Said the Mama to the baby in the corn/'You are my first-born/That shall hereon in be known/As the Spotlight Kid.'" That's how the title song of this album begins, and one glance at the picture on the cover - Cap natty in Las Vegas jacket, with a knowing almost-smile on his face - reveals a man with the self-understanding and self-confidence to bill himself as a new-generational hero with no false pride.

And make no mistake, it is definitely to the new audience, the ones that teethed on feedback and boogie, that Captain Beefheart belongs. He has been called everything in the past from a man wasting the clear ability to be the world's greatest white blues singer, to an impossibly complex musician who may or may not be the real avant-garde, but is certainly an elitist taste. While I have always held to the opinion that there's been nothing playing on the face of the earth as far out as Beefheart for about 3 or 4 years now, I also recognize that his former style was a bit beyond the attention span or interest of the average listener. Which is certainly not to slight mass tastes, either; after all, why should things have to be as far out as possible all the time?

This album is Captain Beefheart's answer to that question. It is the most accessible thing he's recorded since Safe as Milk (remember the single of "Diddy Wah Diddy"? Captain Beefheart makes hits!), and goes back to his most primal roots for much of its inspiration, proving once and for all that not only is Captain Beefheart almost certainly the supreme white blues singer of our era, but he knows how to take that gift and combine it with his supra-blues musical vision sliced down to bone basics, and come up with vital, immediate, funky rock 'n' roll.

Its originality is almost complete, although the Captain is treading waters these days adjacent to those where some of his mightiest contemporaries strut. For instance, for verbal and vocal mysterioso effects, he sounds in some parts of this album even more like Doctor John than Sly Stone does on There's a Riot Goin' On. Throughout, however, the Beefheart wit and genius manifest themselves. "I'm Gonna Booglarize Ya, Baby" is a song riding in on a tense, edgy riff, telling a story about Vital Willy and Weepin' Milly driving around and around in Will's car in the night (the first line is "The moon was a drip on a dark hood"), looking for a secluded place to park. Finally, in desperation, Milly tells Willy that they can go to her house, and Beefheart comments: "Tush! Tush! You lose your push/When you beat around the bush!"

While hints of eclecticism creep in at odd moments, it is blues and the raunchier forms of R&B which lie at the heart of this album. "White Jam" opens with a Chinese-sounding marimba riff, like porcelain raindrops breaking on a sill, then drifts with perfect organic logic into a sawing boogie with great understated harp and high Beefheart falsetto. "When It Blows Its Stacks" is an ominous song built on a basic guitar riff worthy of Mark Farner. With each chorus, the guitar builds from its initial simple advance to wirier, more complex backups for Beefheart's stark, threatening vocal that seems to be about some angry god: "When it blows its stacks/He don't pussyfoot around/Hide all the women..."

On side two Beefheart gets more deeply into something akin to traditional blues, especially with the last three songs; the Captain has never sounded more like Howlin' Wolf than he does here, and he's always had Wolf's growls and howls down to a point of virtual transcendence. The best thing on the album, wisely chosen for a single b/w "Booglarize You," is "Click Clack." This is real train music, with trestles in the drums and whistles in the guitar and harp: "One [train] goin'/And the other one comin' back," as Cap sings. The rhythm is insistent and propulsive, in the great tradition of such songs as "Train Kept a-Rollin'" and Lou Reed's "Train Round the Bend." The mutated Chicago South Side harp heard throughout much of the album enters, the guitars begin pushing at the riffs' edges, and "Train was goin' up the track/You was leavin'/I could see you wavin' yer handkerchief" is described in a hypnotically redundant guitar riff like the obsessive replay of an old memory.

There comes a time in the career of every pop musician who also happens to be a serious artist when he realizes the need for a balance between the most intensely personal type of statement and music of mass appeal. If he can strike that balance without compromising his integrity, he is probably a greater artist than even his staunchest fans previously suspected, and with any exposure at all the public would pick up immediately on the truth and beauty of what he is doing. With this album, Captain Beefheart has struck that balance with total success, and I wouldn't be surprised if he were a major star a year from now. Though you may have been a great shadow hovering over our music for half a decade now, Don, it can be said that in 1972 you've really arrived.





The Spotlight Kid review


Writer unknown, taken from June 1972 Stereo Review.

Captain Beefheart is about six years ahead of his time; his early material was cut in 1965 and still sounds advanced today. The main influences on him are Delta country blues and John Coltrane's mystical jazz. His voice has a four-octave range, which means he can peak at skyscraper high notes and comfortably descend to guttural monotones. Combined with his personality, his music and his voice will either fascinate you or send you screaming into the woods. He plays word games, sometimes getting triple meanings through puns, and his material is basically good-natured and wildly imaginative.

In conversation the Captain is distant and intimate at the same time but his personality is wonderfully refreshing. I don t understand all of his music but I've had the pleasure of meeting him several times. He told me via pay-phone from a northern California fishing village that he intended to "go commercial" for "The Spotlight Kid" but the Captain's conception of commercial is still sweetly weird. The music on this disc is close to his early blues boogie days, and the performances are much more orthodox than on the "Trout Mask Replica" or "Lick My Decals Off, Baby" albums. It's the Captain's most palatable album in years. If you dig him already, 'nuff said. If you haven't heard him or have been put off by him, "The Spotlight Kid" will make it easier to dig him.













Clear Spot



Song list:

Low Yo Yo Stuff
Nowadays a Woman's Gotta Hit a Man
Too Much Time
Circumstances
My Head Is My Only House Unless It Rains
Sun Zoom Spark
Clear Spot
Crazy Little Thing
Long Neck Bottles
Her Eyes Are A Blue Million Miles
Big Eyed Beans from Venus
Golden Birdies

Shopping guide from Justin Sherill:

This is probably the most accessible Beefheart album, and the only album I've been able to get my girlfriend to enjoy. A few of the songs have been covered by other people (Joan Osborne, for instance) and is a good starting point. Unless the music you listen to must be inaccessible, buy this. The double version, noted below, is probably the only version in stores at this point.

Radar Station's shopping guide:

While his guitar work on his other Beefheart albums may well be more complicated, for me this album is Zoot Horn Rollo's finest hour. Just listen to him zip up and down his guitar! It also contains his now infamous long lunar note in the song Big Eyed Beans From Venus - a tune guaranteed to bring a smile to the most sullen of faces.

All these songs are very tight, catchy and punchy, and there isn't anything especially odd about them, though having said that, there isn't anything particularly normal about them either. If you want a gentle but utterly captivating introduction to the Magic Band then this is it.

Reviews:

Spotlight Kid / Clear Spot by Jim Washburn, from 12th January 1995 Los Angeles Times.
Clear Spot by Bob Palmer, from 31st December 1972 Rolling Stone.
Getting Closer To The Captain - Clear Spot. This excellent piece was written by Lester Bangs and first appeared in January 1973's Creem.
Clear Spot by Robert Sandell, from 9th February 1997 Sunday Times.



The Spotlight Kid / Clear Spot Review


Written by Jim Washburn, taken from the Los Angeles Times, 12th January 1995.

More undiluted examples of Captain Beefheart's singular genius can be heard on his "Trout Mask Replica" and "Lick My Decals Off" albums, but this pair of 1972 albums-packaged together here-are his most innately pleasurable.

Had Howlin' Wolf been raised beside the canals of Mars, he might have sounded like Beefheart (a.k.a. Don Van Vliet), who mutated the blues with Dadaist lyrics, jagged guitar lines and spasmodic rhythms that showed his disdain for what he called the "mama heartbeat" of rock music. Striking many as chaotic hippie noise, his music, for the diligent listener, mirrored nature in its complex patterns and disquieting beauty. With "The Spotlight Kid" and particularly "Clear Spot" (helmed by future Van Halen producer Ted Templeman), Beefheart seemed to be attempting to meet listeners halfway. But while you can dance to some of the songs here-given an extra limb or two-it is still demanding, powerful stuff.

Along with his abstract lyrics, Beefheart offers more palatable tracts ranging from runaway trains to feminism, on which he opined, "Nowadays a woman has to haul off and hit a man to make him know she's there." Both his voice and harp blow at house-leveling force, and his Magic Band was aptly named.

Art Tripp (a Zappa alumnus who also had done symphonic work) is one of the scariest drummers of all time, taking impossibly disjointed, angular rhythms and making them swing as solidly as if they were straightforward beats played by the MGs' Al Jackson Jr. Under Beefheart's influence, guitarists Zoot Horn Rollo and Rockette Morton created a whole new vocabulary for the instrument, taking off from Delta slide guitar with slashing, lurching lines that interlock like roots on a forest floor.

Nothing here rocks as you might expect it to, but it all rocks like mad.

-JimWashburn




Clear Spot Review


Written by Bob Palmer, taken from the 31st December 1972 Rolling Stone.

The continuing evolution of Beefheart's music has been one of the most fascinating developments of contemporary rock. The Captain has seemed an introverted, almost schizophrenic figure, mirroring in his work the apparent dichotomy between the rigorous ensemble playing of the Chicago-out-of-Mississippi bluesmen and the anarchic-sounding sprung rhythms of modernists like Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman. But the unique facet of Beefheart's blues playing has always been his understanding of the essentially irregular metric structures of much Mississippi blues, and he has thus been able to translate the abrupt, quirky stridency of the early blues guitarists into abrupt, quirky arrangements for his Magic Band. In this way he has synthesised several diverse strains of American music. Beginning with scrupulous attention to basic rhythmic building blocks, and an equally scrupulous perfectionist's approach to achieving unanimity of musical intent within his band, he has now arrived at a sound of his own, a lean, mean sound for a lean, mean four more years.

Clear Spot is sizzling 1972 heavy metal flash. It is without a doubt Beefheart's most commercial album, and if it doesn't equal the incandescent brilliance of Safe as Milk or Lick My Decals Off it is nonetheless a considerable improvement over The Spotlight Kid. While the latter album stayed close to the blues idiom Clear Spot ventures into areas that are new for Beefheart. Its unqualified successes "Low Yo Yo Stuff", "Nowadays a Woman's Got to Hit a Man", "Crazy Little Thing", "Long Neck Bottles" are tough, tight bursts of energy. None of them are blues, but they are valid extensions of the blues tradition, with high, whining slide guitar leads; harmonica breaks and gravelly, shouting vocals. The Captain and Zoot Horn Rollo are in front most of the way, but the meat of these tunes is their extraordinarily succinct, kinetic underpinnings. Rockette Morton's slashing second guitar, Orejon's bass (which often functions as a booming bass drum) and Ed Marimba's light but precise drumming merge into a push-pull of contrasting rhythms that is similar in effect to the percussion orchestras of Africa and Latin-Amenca. Each player has a definite rhythmic part and the way these parts fit together is the secret of Beefheart's art.

Some of the other tunes don't measure up to the glow of these masterpieces. "Too Much Time" attempts, perhaps too literally, to recreate the Stax/Volt sound of the mid Sixties. It would have sounded fine on anyone else's album but here it is a let-down. Beefheart long ago absorbed the Delta sound into his approach, but "Time" doesn't absorb the Memphis sound, it merely copies it. Two love ballads offer a lyrical contrast that is new in the Captain's cosmology. "Big Eyed Beans from Venus" is an only slightly flawed tour de force. The arrangement is stunning. It begins with a Bo Diddley-inspired beat which soon develops into snarling slide guitar interchanges over thundering, pummeling rhythms. The words are some of the most superficial Beefheart has written, but the music, which sounds as if it might be a reaction to things like Ornette's "Science Fiction" and perhaps Sun Ra, is brilliantly realised.

Throughout the album, the lyrics introduce a Beefheart persona that is essentially new. The dada-dabbling surrealist has become the teasing, tantalising back door man who entices crazy little things with almost drooling gusto. But the good Captain's women aren't the meek domestic mates of contemporary pastoral rock. One of them "got to drinking one night and shot up the town / I'll be damned if she didn't bring an airplane down." And how did "Crazy Little Thing" get so doggone crazy? And how did she get a name like Crazy Little Thing? "Must be the name that drove you crazy all along."

The Captain's live shows are dynamic, sizzling, tightly controlled explosions. Clear Spot has its ups and downs. But again and again the weaker songs hit home with unexpected twists in the arrangements and committed, powerful playing from the band. And the stronger songs are clean out of sight.




Getting Closer To The Captain


Clear Spot Review


Written by Lester Bangs, taken from the January 1973 edition of Creem.

"And that pantalooned duck / white goose neck / quacked, 'Webcor, Webcor.'" Those are the last lines on Clear Spot, from a song called "Golden Birdies." Not exactly "I Can See Clearly Now," I know, but if you find it hard to make sense out of lyrics like that, or feel that you must, rest easy. Captain Beefheart has come out of the haze.

Even though his music has always been solidly rooted in the blues, Beefheart has remained a sort of cult figure: to his followers, a supreme genius; to many others, inaccessible both musically and verbally. Starting from Delta blues, which was never too rhythmically stable to begin with, Beefheart worked his way through rock and free jazz to build a totally original form of music. He handpicked and slowly trained the members of the Magic Band in the disciplines of a style which seemed to move from every angle at once, ricocheting back at you from the ceiling, feeling rhythmically askew yet never out of control. It took awhile, but once you got behind it, it could be breathtakingly powerful music, never sacrificing emotion for its avant-garde stance.

The words to his songs fell all around the music in a similarly coherent clatter. Beefheart's mind works in a unique way: you can't always get to what he's talking about, but it's almost always been effective as impressionistic imagery. Besides, you know what a line like "Yella jackets and red devils / Buzz around 'er hair hive hole" means. Many of the songs set Beefheart up as a sort of off the wall oracle relating oblique fairy tales and parables that were diffuse enough to mean whatever you wanted them to but seldom pretentious. And anybody who sings about "Mama flattenin' lard with her red enamel rollin' pin" can't be too strange.

The only trouble with all this was that most people didn't have the time, or the musical exposure, or the attention span, or whatever was required to get into this music fully. And Captain Beefheart, just like every other stout hearted American, has always wanted to be a star. A rock'n'roll star. No matter how brilliant you and your limited circle of fans know you are, it's never going to matter as much as it should if it's not universal enough to be relatable to people who don't want to be bothered with something that doesn't hit them over the head and get their gonads right away.

Beefheart made a strong step in this direction with his last album, The Spotlight Kid. It was the easiest listening since his early pre-Trout Mask Replica work, but somehow it missed. There was a certain tentative quality to it that disappointed some of his old fans and didn't really win that many new ones. With Clear Spot, though, he's gained his ground and looks to hold it for awhile. Which is just another way of saying that the Captain may have a hit on this deck, folks.

It's ironic in a way, because one thing this album proves is that the ascendance of Boogie has merely brought the masses that much closer to Beefheart and Beefheart's roots. Meanwhile the man himself has tightened and directed his music for a new kind of concise fury. The words are as rangy as ever (except for some love ballads and specific sex grope chants) but their splintered refractions hit home more often than not. They're the perfect crest for the dominant mode of Clear Spot, which is a surging tide of sound: rusty, demonic guitar flailing, raspy voice choking, punching, roaring and pounding drums underneath it all. Everything is pouring in and it's all instantly relatable. You can still hear meshes of Bo Diddley, square dance, bebop, African drum and maybe European folk dance in Beefheart's chunky loping rhythms, but somehow you never lose the heartbeat of rock'n'roll.

"Nowadays A Woman's Gotta Hit A Man" is a perfect example of how Beefheart mates musical culture: old blues, Stax horns doing a New Orleans boogie, slashing amped-up bottleneck guitar. Beefheart's incredible growls gouging and rambling all over the place. "Low Yo Yo Stuff" is hypnotically compelling, with deep booming rhythms and upfront guitar. His old stuff showed a thorough absorption of free jazz masters like Ornette Coleman; here it's used as seasoning, because the basic impetus is funk all the way, gravel 'n' greasy, with a bit of juju out of (though not derivative of) Dr. John. And the words are a total gas - in an effete era Beefheart slides on with the universal joy of good old fashioned non-ambivalent lust.

"Too Much Time" and the ballads "My Head Is My Only House Unless It Rains" and "Her Eyes Are A Blue Million Miles" are all ventures into more or less new ground for Beefheart. "Too Much Time" seems rather strained - Otis he ain't (which is no denigration; he can do things Otis couldn't), and the horns seem rather perfunctory, lacking the edge and fullness that Stax gives the same cliches. The female vocal backup, as elsewhere on the album, is pleasant but seems almost like an afterthought or an attempt to give this album a marketable trendiness it doesn't really need.

"Head" and "Eyes" are both delivered with enormous tenderness, yet somehow Beefheart's gruff voice sounds out of character with material like this, as if it's just about to rant through the walls of the cut and start thrashing in the brambles once again. Still, both songs wear well, and "Eyes" is especially fine for some low, lovely mandolin work.

The main thing to he said about this album is that, even at its most violent, it's comfortable. Its scope becomes endless by limiting itself (how's that for rock critic bullshit?) and you can throw it on anytime. It feels good to listen to Clear Spot. and it feels good to know that Beefheart has finally become a bit less of a phantasmal, somewhat arcane father figure and come into his own as a flat-out, full-throttle rock 'n' roller. If this LP jives your buns the way it should, though, you should waste no time in securing a copy of the earlier, two record Trout Mask Replica. That's one of the most overwhelming pieces of music ever recorded.




Clear Spot Review


Written by Robert Sandall, taken from 9th February 1997 Sunday Times

WHILE nobody questions his status as one of rock's great originals, Captain Beefheart's madcap variations on the blues are an acquired taste. Armed with a voice like Howlin ' Wolf, a band he claimed to have taught himself and an imagination that just went thataway, Beefheart did not set out to be easy listening. The unhinged adventurousness of his 1969 masterwork, Trout Mask Replica, appeals mainly to critics and students of musical weirdness.

More approachable and ultimately more satisfying is the album he recorded three years later with a new producer. Ted Templeman, whose clients included Van Morrison and the Doobie Brothers, was drafted in to address Beefheart's chronic lack of commercial success. He failed miserably in that, but he coaxed some electrifying performances out of a band who had boasted that they were into "anti-music sound sculptures". Now, they were into guitar arrangements of orchestral complexity, as evidenced by the majestically noisy Big Eyed Beans from Venus; and where Beefheart had once seemed hellbent on avoiding the beat, on this album everybody, guitarist Zoot Horn Rollo included, was part of a topsy-turvy, funk rhythm section.

The horns and backing singers did not get them played on American radio, but neither did they get in the way - in fact, My Head Is My Only House Unless It Rains turned out to be one of the most affecting songs Beefheart recorded. Placing that alongside the surreal horseplay of Golden Birdies was madness and, thanks to his hilariously gruff charisma, it worked.

-Robert Sandall

(c) Times Newspapers Ltd, 1997.