Captain Beefheart had complete artistic control over his 1969 album, Trout Mask Replica, which brought rock to an edgy place long before “edgy” became a marketing cliché. The album was met with widespread incomprehension (but avid cult fascination) and reached the outer limits of Beefheart’s oeuvre.
Collected in the Sun Zoom Spark box set, the music recorded immediately after Trout Mask can be heard as pulling back from a dizzying brink, yet Beefheart at his tamest was far in advance of most rock acts. Sun Zoom Spark contains all three Beefheart albums from 1970-1972, cleanly remastered, plus an interesting disc of outtakes. His first post-Trout release, Lick My Decals Off, Baby “feels refined, distilled” (if not much less weird than its predecessor) in the apt description of the booklet notes. With Clear Spot and The Spotlight Kid, Beefheart embarked on an idiosyncratic tour of the Mississippi Delta in oddly orchestrated blues, swamp boogie conjuring and abstract versions of New Orleans brass rhythms.
Strange time signatures and hairpin rhythmic turns pop up, evoking the freedom from conventional forms of early Delta blues. Some of the outtakes were later developed into fully realized tracks on albums recorded a few years later. Beefheart’s lyrics were often penetrating for their remarkable invention and startlingly right images.
