Captain Beefheart, also known as Don Van Vliet (born Don Glen Vliet; January 15, 1941 – December 17, 2010) was an American singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and visual artist. He conducted a rotating ensemble called the Magic Band, with whom he recorded 13 studio albums between 1964 and 1982. Their 1969 album Trout Mask Replica would later rank 58th in Rolling Stone magazine’s 2003 list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. Although he achieved little commercial or mainstream critical success, he sustained a cult following as a “highly significant” and “incalculable” influence on an array of new wave, punk, and experimental rock artists. After his retirement from music in 1982, he pursued a career in art. His expressionist paintings and drawings command high prices, and have been exhibited in art galleries and museums across the world. (More from Wikipedia)
“LSD-25” by the Gamblers is one of several surf instrumentals toward the end of the Pebbles, Volume 4 CD. This track dates from 1961; the allstar line-up includes Bruce Johnston, Larry Taylor (later in Canned Heat), Elliot Ingber (Fraternity of Man, Captain Beefheart, Little Feat, etc.), and famed drummer Sandy Nelson. According to the CD’s liner notes (by Nigel Strange): “Actually, surfers were the first subculture to embrace LSD, at a time when it was almost exclusively the plaything of the academics. With their footloose existence, and a sometimes mystical rapport with the ocean, the early surfers (we’re talking years before the craze, of course) were in many ways the true inheritors of the beatniks’ existential tradition, standing outside normal society and contemplating the void. In any event, this must surely be the first acid reference to appear on a record by several years.”
(December 2014)
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