Current mood:
nostalgic
Candle Mambo is a song from the Captain Beefheart album 'Shiny Beast'. I first heard it towards the end of an after party party, das doob was being passed round and Alex Wilkins put this album on the stereo. It was almost too much to take in all at once, like hearing a whole new musical genre all at once. Snatches of songs soared, others lumbered clunkily around the room, some tromboned mixing with fits of giggles from the listeners. The music was actually funny, and more bizarrely the instrumentals were the funniest of all.
Like a lot of my favourite albums it was a while before I bought a copy after first hearing it. I remember buying it for £5.99 in Imperial music on Park Street. I think that shop closing down was my day the music died. It had been my first stop for every artist that devoured my late teens. Zappa, Beefheart, Mercury Rev, Godspeed, Philip Glass, Jurassic 5, The Sugarhill Gang, Lou Reed and others. I put Shiny Beast on in the CD player in my car which I had weeks before learned how to drive. It was about 8 months before that CD player was nicked, during the bleak end of the year, and Shiny Beast was still in it on that day.
The first half of the album demonstrates one strength Beefheart has over Zappa, he can make songs funny and sweet, even a little sad, at the same time. Zappa didn't do sweet, and certainly didn't do sad, but Candle Mambo shows all three in the same song. It's absurdly upbeat and all about the xylophone. The subject is the dance that the candles perform on the walls and ceilings of some room in which two people are themselves dancing. The lyrics display Beefheart the poet at his most innocent and effective:
While your lights are spinning round,
Your feathers of fire winning night
And turning light, and turning light
Candle crack, candle break
Correct the night's mistake
The candles are putting their glow, not only on the moment, but also the memory of the moment; the "night's mistake". Just as the many layers of time have immortalised that summer and it's nights which I can only recall flashes of. The song tastes like the mouth of a girl kissed amongst the smoke and ash of a reading Festival fire. It tastes of bubblegum, vodka and cider. It tastes of not knowing you're having the best summer of your life. Paul Simon wrote "how terribly strange to be seventeen", keep a dry eye to that and you're a stronger person than me, but if 'Old Friends/Bookends' is the reflection on that immortal past, Candle Mambo is the soundtrack, for me anyway.
Tropical Hot Dog Night is altogether a more masculine, ballsy song. There's an awful lot of that in Beefheart, starting with 'Where There's Woman' on 'Safe as Milk'. But it's not a sneering misogyny the likes of which Zappa has, it's a masculinity only possible through the presence of divine, almost mythological women. Beefheart's secret pleasure, for me, is a primeval, almost pre-human mythology. He can be all caveman sometimes. This is as much about his percussive rhythms, forcing you back to an age of skins, bones, totem poles and skulls, as it is his lyrics:
"I'm playing this music
So the young girls'll come out
To meet the monster tonight"
And again the timelessness:
"I don't wanna know about wrong or right
I don't want to know I'm anywhere tonight"
Tennyson's "Nature red in tooth and claw" finds it's maniac rebirth in Beefheart. 'You Know You're a Man' opens with an incredible riff, and the statement
Ah you know you're a man
Yeah, she makes you understand
Yeah, you know you're a man
Yeah, you know you're a girl about the same time
About the same time I know I'm a man,
It's something deeper than the "world of sexual incompetents, encountering
each other, under disco circumstances" that Zappa was obsessed by. It's the Neanderthal glow that forges itself between a man and a woman, weather outside a cave thousands of years ago or outside a tent at a festival. This finds it's fulfilment in Ice Cream For Crow, which is pretty much a pile of dust, bones and feathers by the time it gets to 'The Thousand and Tenth Day of the Human Totem Pole'. I think Ted Hughes would have liked that song. Shiny Beast is only half of the title of this album though, the caveman dancing under candlelight, the parenthesized Bat Chain Puller could almost refer to the second half of the album which turns on a sixpence after the song of the same name. Its an altogether more lumbering, clunking, tribal rhythm and the songs move further away from the jauntiness of the first five songs, until we are brought almost to a standstill with the bizarre monologue 'Apes-Ma'.
I have to say I don't regularly venture so far, Shiny Beast is the half of the album I adore. I'll save Bat Chain Puller for when I'm an elder, looking out to younger folk through the flames of a pagan fire, recounting the blissful joy of a summer long past and using Candle Mambo to raise its spirit.
I have nothing much to say about the album itself - I shall take your word for it having never heard it - but I must agree that the day Imperial Music closed was one of the saddest days of my life. I felt like a bit of my youth had just been lost to me forever. Obviously I still have all the fabulous music I bought there, but fighting the masses in the aisles of the Fopp across the street is hardly a comparable experience to the lovely warm glow of discovering something brilliant in Imperial.