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EXPLAINED: Captain beefheart - The Real Truth

"A mix of surreal, supercilious satire and puerile lewdness." Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and The Mothers' Bongo Fury, revisited and expanded

A six-disc, 57-track edition of the legendary 1975 collaboration, featuring live recordings and outtakes

Louder

“If anything makes me regret not pursuing more of an artistic career, it’s looking at Brian Eno”: Still, BJ Cole didn’t do too badly with David Gilmour, The Orb, Bill Nelson, Scott Walker and others

He set out to confound expectations of pedal steel with post-country band Cochise. Thanks to Captain Beefheart, Love and Hank Marvin, the session hero is pleased to reflect that he got away with it

Louder

“I refused to believe the negative things he said because I couldn’t lose hope. But everything he said came to pass”: Terry Bozzio asked a question when he joined Frank Zappa. He asked the same question when he left

Drummer, composer and painter recalls his experiences with Captain Beefheart, UK and others, names the best band he’s ever been in and reveals how long it takes to set up his Big Kit

Louder

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“Mikael Åkerfeldt and I were close for a while. We wound up with the same management and drifted apart”: Devin Townsend discusses his prog world (while he’s hiding from his dogs)

Stick-collecting Canadian who preferred Motorhead to Marillion says Captain Beefheart didn’t know he was nuts, the Interstellar soundtrack floored him, and the Wildhearts are prog

Metal Hammer

Street battles, invented languages and gigs in psychiatric hospitals: France’s lost rock revolution of 1968

Bands such as Magma and Art Zoyd provided a soundtrack for the student protests that shook the country. Little remembered now, a new book reveals their decisive influence on later successes such as Air and Daft Punk

The Guardian - UK

Mud, mayhem and four-hour Grateful Dead sets: The chaotic story of Weeley and Bickershaw, the early 70s festivals that time forgot

Not every festival could be Woodstock or the Isle Of Wight

Louder

“They told me to start playing along, but I didn’t even know what key the song was in. And by the end they said, ‘You’re the only one who made it to the end of the song — you’re hired!’”: The madness of Captain Beefheart’s masterpiece Trout Mask Replica

“Man, it was weird!” recalls bassist Rockette Morton

MusicRadar

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Have they no shame? 3 of the worst celebrity artists (and 3 of my favourite)

I know art is subjective, but this is ridiculous.

Creative Bloq

Previously unseen pro-shot footage of Captain Beefheart performing live in Paris in 1972 has surfaced online

The newly discovered footage has lain unseen in the vaults for more than 50 years

Louder

“My totalitarian rule might not be cool, but at least we’ve made interesting records. At least we polarise people”: It took The Mars Volta three years and several arguments to make Noctourniquet

Omar Rodriguez-Lopez challenged himself to stop aiming for perfection, and challenged old friend Cedric Bixler-Zavala to write direct lyrics. It wasn’t easy for either of them

Louder

“He would beat the crap out of the guitar. The result can best be described as Jackson Pollock trying to play like John Lee Hooker”: Aggressively bizarre, Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica remains one of the craziest guitar-driven albums ever made

Dense as a rainforest and often hard to grasp, Captain Beefheart's best-known album is the poster boy of late-Sixties avant-garde rock

Guitar World

“I’m sitting on the couch with a guitar, and Jeff is standing over me. He pulled out a notebook with lyrics and doodles, started singing, and that was Grace”: How Gary Lucas made guitar magic with Jeff Buckley, Captain Beefheart and Chris Cornell

The guitar journeyman has suffered his share of torture during a career of spreading the word about underdogs – and while he remains one himself, he’s not giving up on his mission

Guitar World

“He was wearing a red satin suit and he’d closed his eyes to do existential-style doodles. Then he got ink on his suit and was pissed off”: Why Captain Beefheart is The Primevals frontman Michael Rooney’s prog hero

Scottish singer met Don Van Vliet a number of times, and the eccentric American’s influence extended through his own career

Louder

“We’d been paying Rick Wakeman £25 a week and Yes offered him £100… We had his son Oliver with us for a while, and he left for Yes too!” Dave Cousins and the life and times of Strawbs

Prog veteran recalls connecting with Sandy Denny, his band’s attempt to fire him, being loved by Led Zeppelin, why they’ve never had a Steven Wilson remix, the “albatross” of Part Of The Union and the unreleased, more political version

Louder

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Louder

“I had just taken my first acid trip, and I had an African spear and a Chinese Warlord outfit”: Arthur Brown’s wild tales of Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, David Bowie and more

Jamming with Hendrix, partying with The Who, getting hit on by David Bowie’s wife – The God Of Hellfire has done it all and more

Louder

“They didn’t do the posing rock thing – that attitude has stuck with me ever since”: Ruts DC drummer David Ruffy explains why Edgar Broughton Band are his prog heroes

He hails their punk ethic, their experiments with electronica, and their way of writing songs about real people

Louder

"Lemmy was a creature of habit; he'd have a huge line of speed and then a big fry-up for breakfast": Topper Headon's wild tales of Johnny Thunders, Keith Moon, Keith Richards and more

Living with Lemmy, Sharing a tour bus with Bo Diddley, refusing to get out of bed for Martin Scorsese – these are the stories of Topper Headon, legendary drummer with The Clash

Louder

"The show was vilified by the record companies because artists were insulted on a regular basis": In 1974 Captain Beefheart appeared on Dutch TV show Van Oekel's Discohoek: Even by his standards, it was weird

In which Captain Beefheart interrupts another singer, lip-syncs badly, is awarded a trophy, and pays tribute to The Beatles

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Louder

“We were both big ELP fans, and I’m sure if you look at our record collections back then you’d have seen Yes, Greenslade, King Crimson…” How electronic music duo Underworld grew up with a world of prog

No one would call dance outfit Underworld a prog band. But they grew up influenced by the whole genre, it appears

Metal Hammer

"Prog music, or heavy music in general, is a very conservative scene. When you are willing to expose yourself emotionally, it’s a vulnerable place to be." Devin Townsend tackles The Prog Interview

From his early days with Steve Vai to battling through mental health problems and explaining to Prog just why he prefers Beefheart over Zappa, there’s much to cover in this therapeutic discussion…

Louder

“He was incapable of saying anything fond about anyone or anything. Affection didn’t exist in his life, only weird sex”: how Frank Zappa survived the 70s

Throughout the 1970s, he hated the hippies, loved jazz as much as rock and played dumb with incredible technical prowess, making his music thrillingly unique

The Guardian - UK

‘He was treated like a holy figure’: why Captain Beefheart quit music for the easel

He was a musical maverick whose Trout Mask Replica still sticks out on best-of lists, but when he gave up rock to paint, his art was dismissed as doodles. Now his remarkable work is getting its due

Louder

“Whenever I got accosted on the street by a crazy maniac, the best thing to do was walk away. I always felt threatened. We had to leave by the back door at a lot of places”: Devo’s battle for survival

They’re the coneheaded “alien” stars whose controversial anthems and madcap behaviour wound up the masses – but how prog were Devo?

Louder

“People thought the Beatles were God. That's not correct”: the genius of Frank Zappa, the rock’n’roll icon who had no time for rock’n’roll

Musical genius, rock’n’roll outsider, sexual obsessive, the ‘original shock rocker’ – this is the epic story of how Frank Zappa became Frank Zappa

Louder

Amazing Grace: how Jeff Buckley got started on the album that defined his genius

Jeff Buckley’s move to New York in the early 90s was the flashpoint for Grace, the classic album that would outlive him. Collaborator Gary Lucas remembers a star who burned bright and fast

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