A MAGIC BAND UPDATE

In addition to The Grandmothers and The Banned From Utopia, concert promoter  GYGX (http://gygx.ch/) also represents The Magic Band in Europe.

CAPTAIN BEEFHEART'S MAGIC BAND

• John French (Drumbo) - vocals, harmonica, sax, drums (on instrumental songs)
• Mark Boston  (Rockette Morton) - bass
• Denny Walley (Feelers Reebo) - (mostly slide-) guitar
• Eric Klerks - guitar
• Craig Bunch - drums (on vocal songs)

Drumbo co-founded the Magic Band in 1966, and he was much more than just it's drummer. Since the Captain didn't play any instruments, John French had a crucial part in composing the music: Up until the second to last Beefheart album "Doc At Radar Station" in 1980 he's always been the one who turned the master's wild ideas into actual songs and did the music-transcribtions for the other members of the band.

Rockette Morton made his debut in 1969 on the epochal "Trout Mask Replica". And on the four following albums Mark Boston was the Magic Man on bass and second guitar also.

Feelers Reebo was on board the Captain's ship with his guitars from 1975 until '78. On the Zappa/Beefheart double header "Bongo Fury" Denny Walley was even serving on vocals.

How to put this music into words, though? For sure it's rooted in the Delta Blues, but rampantly overgrown by a - psychedelic, experimental, avant-garde - Dadaism of sound which only allow rudimentary circumscription. It's certainly much easier to pick a few names from the endless list of Captain Beefheart's  great admirers. Be it Jack White, PJ Harvey, Nick Cave or Tom Waits (who, when called a Beefheart copy time and again, would gladly confess: "Once you've heard Beefheart, it's hard to wash him out of your clothes").

For more than twenty years this music was lying completely fallow. Don Van Vliet retired in 1982, dropped his Beefheart moniker and painted himself to a gloriuos second career in art. And with his illness progressing, it became obvious before too long that his life would remain in total seclusion until he sadly died.

Thus it wasn't until 2003, when new opportunities came about to re-witness these unique musical creations live - thanks to the resurrection of the Magic Band. For almost another decade however, this scpectacle was reserved to Britain's stages. There the reunited Beefheart originals caused thrills at Glastonbury or London's Royal Festival Hall, there they're selling out the houses to this very day. But last year the five Americans made it to continental Europe at last. And even though they had rarely played here in Beefheart's days, their first tour this side of the channel has been met by audience receptions of the kind that drove away any scepticism within the band. Just as it had happened to the professing Beefheart fan John Peel who originally wasn't fond of any comeback plans. Until he heard just how astonishingly Drumbo has mastered Don Van Vliet's way of singing - which prompted Peel to immediately invite the new Magic Band to his studio for a live recording.

"You don't need to have Beethoven on stage to play his ninth symphony". These were the words that John Peel found, praising the return of the Magic Band to his listeners in that show which turned out to become one of the radio legend's last. And us continental Europeans, we will get to enjoy the second visit of this truly magic band for it's ten year anniversary!