Diana Marcovitz & Captain Beefheart: When the View is Askew

Pushing the musical envelope

Hello music lovers!

For this edition of Listening Sessions, I take a look at two albums that are deliriously quirky: one well-known (Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band’s debut, Safe as Milk) and one that surely isn't (Diana Marcovitz’s Horse of a Different Feather). Music where the view is askew is something that I have been writing about quite frequently these days. I guess it might be a reaction to the strange days that we find ourselves living in or just my general lack of concern for conformity. Whatever reason, I hope you enjoy the below essay and that you'll share your thoughts as well.

Coming next will be another round-up of new and upcoming music that I think you’ll love. Until then, may good listening be with you all!

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Diana Marcovitz & Captain Beefheart: When the View is Askew
By: Robert C. Gilbert

“I come to wish you well
and you shake your head
and tell me to go to hell
so you can go back to bed.
That’s the sensitive artist
the intelligent man
who views the world from a garbage can.”
- from ‘Herschel,’ written by Diana Marcovitz

What is it about music where the view is askew? That place where things are just a little off-kilter. I’m not talking here about avant-garde music or music that seems designed to clear the room as quickly as possible. I’m instead talking about music that has the appearance of being tuneful and lyrical but is not confined by the strictures of good taste or being audience pleasing or content with being middlebrow. The notes sometimes zig when they should zag, testing the listener’s capacity to venture onto the fringes.

It’s something I’ve written about quite a lot recently, whether it be Porter Wagoner or Eugene McDaniels or Judy Collins and Chi Coltrane. The lyrics I quoted at the beginning of this essay are sung over a broad martial beat that dissipates for the lines that begin with, “that’s the sensitive artist.” The beat picks up again for this observation, “he calls it art, I call it fart.” Whoa! That’s some’s rhyme there.

At another point, the music veers into an extravagant form of klezmer. The song, ‘Herschel,’ is a broad satire on the tropes of the starving artist, bohemia at its filthiest and the martyrdom of motherhood, especially that of the Jewish variety. It’s uproariously funny and impressive in its complete disregard for putting its humour in a nice and neat musical bow. Instead, the listener is made to feel as starved, as dirty and as testy as the song’s namesake.

Some may hear it and never make it to end (which is a shame because it means missing the punchline that induces the final gut-busting laugh). Others will ride it out to the end and never again wish to hear it. And then there are those whose hearts and heads are catnip to such delirious musical derring-do.

That happens a lot when listening to the album on which ‘Herschel’ appears: Horse of a Different Feather. It was recorded by a singer-songwriter by the name of Diana Marcovitz and released on Columbia in 1974. Both artist and album are almost beyond obscure.

Here’s a personal anecdote: I stumbled upon the album while crate digging at the start of 2019. Intrigued by the cover, I nabbed it. On the front, Marcovitz looks like a disheveled Elaine Benes surrounded by a lot of geese. On the back, she is pictured thumbing for a ride on a country road with an upright piano loaded with antique junk as well as an equally laden wagon, and there’s geese there too.

I raved about the album on Twitter multiple times and discovered I was the only person who ever done so. Six years later, I remain the only person to have done so.

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At some point last year, the album was released on streaming platforms. Its 11 songs have been viewed all of 670 times on YouTube (as of May 3). On Spotify, it averages three listeners a month. Fittingly, there is precious little about Marcovitz online except for some basic facts. She was born in Montreal. She went to Concordia University. She started performing when she was 12, first playing the guitar and then moving to the piano. At some point, she moved to New York. She got noticed by John Hammond which led to Horse of a Different Feather.

Nineteen seventy-four was a sunsetting of an era in record making that balanced capitalizing on trends with risk-taking. Among these trends were the female singer-songwriter who specialized in cross-pollination and the female singer whose interpretative powers were equally broad. Indeed, Marcovitz was part of the same lineage as Judy Collins, Laura Nyro, Janis Ian, Susan Carter, Carole King, Linda Ronstadt, Bette Midler and Melissa Manchester.

In another sense, she was on a plane all her own, making music on Horse of a Different Feather that sounded little like anything made before it and little that came after it. Her voice could be described as Streisand-like filtered through a quaver that invokes Katherine Hepburn and a tendency to swoop upward like Tiny Tim. Her compositions here have a fluidity of tempo, texture and time that often underline the outrageousness of her lyrics.

‘Hershel’ may be the most extreme example in its tale of a mother and the son who has chucked away security for the grime of being an artist. Marcovitz doesn’t hold back anything as the mother both scorns her offspring (“Hershel, you’re on your own”) and yearns for him to visit even as it is unclear whether he has done what his mom rather flippantly tells him to do after he heads to the bowels of Manhattan, and has actually died for his art. She is equally aggressive in her short paean to women who have just about had enough, ‘So Pissed Off,’ although the rage she conjures as she just about shouts out the lyrics gives it some level of universality.

Fortifying much of the album is a celebration of the outsider, those who don’t fit in and those who want to be on the inside but wind up on the outside peering in with equal parts yearning and scorn, perhaps ultimately realizing that they are exactly where they should be.

On ‘The Good Old Days,’ Marcovitz sings of friends—one a boy, the other a girl—who have known each other since childhood. In elementary school, they sit at the back of the classroom using their thumbnails to carve something into the wood of their desks. When they graduate high school, they don’t score invites to the debutante’s ball but watch as the venue where it is held burns to the ground. The boy is now a grown man. He gets jilted at the altar and Marcovitz, as the girl, now a young lady, offers her shoulder, hoping that like between them could turn into love. There’s poignancy here within the humour: the longing of the clown who wishes to be taken seriously.

There’s a distance between what we want and what we get. ‘Groupie’s Lament’ tells of a girl who tries to capture the eye of a rock star but is instead looked upon as “a dog with mange.” The possibility of love is equated on the album with being a ‘Three Toed Sloth’ and then a piglet as if there weree be the only ways someone like Marcovitz: quirky and proudly weird, could ever broach such a thing with another.

In this way, I wish I had known this album when I was younger. It would have provided solace in its caustic gaze but I remember what was like to be out of step and happily remain very much so. The sole cover on the album: Randy Newman’s ‘Love Story (You and Me),’ is aptly wild. If Marcovitz doesn’t exactly land the verses like Newman did in his version, she broadly sings the chorus without his ambiguity. Here, the call of “you and me / you and me, baby” sounds like a threat as well as an invitation to the groom to make like the bride in ‘The Good Old Days’ and get out of Dodge while the getting remains good. It’s not surprising that Marcovitz adds a final repeat of the chorus to her interpretation or that the bridge once again offers a manic exploration of the klezmer rhythm. Not even Newman could be this cynical.

There are two tracks on the album without bite. One of them, ‘Prime Ballerina,’ with a harpsichord part by Dick Hyman, is an affecting portrait of an aging dancer, a kind of requiem in which the protagonist is part-Norma Desmond and part-Elaine Stritch. A respite like this in necessary—I haven’t even mentioned how Marcovitz skewers cowboy singers, Gilbert & Sullivan and Canada—tilting Horse of a Different Feather into something resembling controlled madness ready for its long-deserved close up.

“Zig zag wanderer had a zig zag child
Zig zag traveler fathered mercy mild
Found his queen in nature’s scene
Quenched his thirst where he’d never been”
- from ‘Zig Zag Wanderer,’ by Don Van Vliet and Herb Bermann

Safe as Milk, the first eruption on LP by Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, needs no such discovery. I see the album completing an unofficial trifecta that incinerated conventional and mannerly rock while also demonstrating a facility with making it. First there was Freak Out! by the Mothers of Invention and then The Velvet Underground & Nico and finally, Safe as Milk. All were also preludes to subsequent explorations that took rock’s ashes and burned them again. You can never be too careful.

In the case of Captain Beefheart (born Don Glen Vliet) and His Magic Band, that would be Trout Mask Replica, an album so intimidating in its sprawl and uncompromising in its radical rejection of anything resembling normalcy that I’ve only ever dared play it twice. Occasionally, I look at the back cover of the album with Beefheart, wielding a lamp like a laser gun and band, all looking glazed over, in a field, and I’m initially mesmerized and then disturbed and then completely freaked out. Contrast with Safe As Milk’s back cover. Beefheart and band, including a 20-year old Ry Cooder, are also pictured in a field. They are all in suits. They look like an accounting firm albeit one that likely would offer any client the most incredible cup of tea he or she will ever have. It’s a hint to the album’s electric push and pull.

The first thing heard is Cooder’s slide guitar. Beefheart quietly sings a blues chorus. It sounds like a field recording—two blue-collar workers shaking off the dust of the working day. As Cooder plays a turnaround to the next chorus, the rest of the band: Alex St. Clair Souffler on guitar, Jerry Handley on bass and John French on drums, jump in and the blues turns into a boogie. The energy on ‘Sure ’Nuff ’n Yes I Do,’ based on the blues standard ‘Rollin’ and Tumblin’,’ is frenetic yet disciplined, proclaiming something new in the air, a feeling that becomes even more apparent when Beefheart begins to sing in a kind of metallic growl, an auditory rebellion in a song that sticks to blues form.

‘Zig Zag Wanderer,’ which follows, is a pop song with a bridge, hooks and an earworm refrain but it doesn’t sound like one. The beat throbs like a cut by the Kinks but it bounces on a razor’s edge. The bridge pops with a funky bass line by Handley that resolves into a call and response by competing Beefhearts. The lyrics are impenetrable but themes of defiance and derision are definitely there.

Parts of Safe as Milk don’t mess as much with propriety. ‘Yellow Brick Road,’ save for a brief, staccato eruption, skips along at a merry gait. ‘I’m Glad’ is a genuinely melancholic love song and ‘Call on Me’ is folk rock ending with a Bo Diddley beat against a repeat on guitar of the opening riff of the Crystals’ ‘Then He Kissed Me.’

These breaks are necessary, not only making the moments when Safe as Milk is pitched into the future that much more startling but also establishing that they are the result of decisions made based on a mastery, rather than a deficiency, of the fundamentals of pop songwriting.

Take, for example, how Beefheart snarls against the break beat of ‘Dropout Boogie’ or the harmonica-drenched blues of ‘Plastic Factory’ or the serpentine unfurling of ‘Abba Zabba.’ For ‘Where There’s Woman,’ a moody mid-tempo snake charmer, the rhythm is slightly out of synch on the catchy refrain. It’s another way the balance on Safe as Milk is uneasy—the centre will not hold for long. The two side closers make that clear.

’Autumn’s Child,’ which closes the album, ventures onto the outer regions. The chorus has a thudding, outsized cadence while the verses are rubato with a part for the theremin, played by Samuel Hoffman, that whirs with abandon, boldly interrupting the placid quietude. ‘Electricity’ is loud and crotchety. Beefheart is in full yelp against the electronic disturbances of the band. There is still a sense of a steady pulse yet what ultimately matters is how the performance imagines a new way to make music.

It’s always seemed to me that the most exciting pieces of culture are those that are created during the moments when the old rules are being cast aside and new ones are in the process of being written. It’s here where there are no clichés because none are even close to being codified let alone discovered. Safe as Milk is one such artefact that is fueled on pure imagination and reckless creativity, laying glorious waste to conformity.

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