Captain Beefheart
When I was living in New Zealand there was a national radio station. On Staurdays, for 24 hours, the mike was handed over to the listeners to play whatever they liked. It was broadcast over the entire country. At 8pm one saturday I put it on as i always did and the citizen DJ in that timeslot said, “And now I’m going to play ‘Trout Mask Replica’ in its entirety.” This was in 1987. The nation of New Zealand, in primetime, listened to one of the most radical musical experiments of the century. And it had soul.
“The past sure is tense!” I don’t think this quote is relevant to your post here, but it pops into my head on an almost daily basis, usually to mean what is happening at that very moment sure is tense. I don’t know why, but even with the temporar displacement (?), it seems appropriate! RIP DVV!
Oh, and he wrote the immortal line, “It sounds like someone’s had too much to think”
a couple of months ago i googled him and spent about a week thinking about how incredible the mere existence of Don van Vliet was (oh rotten speller….) a permanent example of the possibility of avant-garde art outside of the academy and major corporate media that nonetheless can find an audience and have influence etc ad naus. “Always with a little humor,” as the Stalinist apparatchik in The Manchurian Candidate says