Strictly Personal

Artist: Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band
Label: EMI Int'l
Category: Music

Average customer rating:

Format: Import
Media: Audio CD
Number Of Discs: 1

UPC: 724382965428
EAN: 0724382965428
ASIN: B000006XF9

Release Date: 1995-03-16

Strictly Personal

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Tracks:

Ah Feel Like Ahcid
Safe As Milk
Trust Us
Son Of Mirror Man - Mere Man
On Tomorrow
Beatle Bones 'N' Smokin' Stones
Gimme Dat Harp Boy
Kandy Korn

Similar Items:

The Mirror Man Sessions
The Spotlight Kid/Clear Spot
Safe as Milk
Doc at the Radar Station
Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller)

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Recorded six months after the raucous Mirror Man sessions, Strictly Personal is marred only by odd phase-shifting effects and the insertion of backwards tapes allegedly added by Beefheart's manager to make him sound closer to the "acid rock" trend then prevailing. Still, Beefheart's playful nature comes shining through. His stream-of-consciousness leads him to the Beatles' "Strawberry Fields Forever" during "Beatle Bones 'n' Smokin' Stones." "Ah Feel Like Ahcid" is Beefheart's trademark over-the-top Howlin' Wolf blues set three steps ahead. Drummer John French, in particular, gives Beefheart's music its listener-challenging edge, jumpcutting as the rhythm becomes familiar. That he gets weirder and fully realized from here is a testament to Beefheart's lifelong obsession with uncovering something new underneath the same old rock. --Rob O'Connor

Album Description

1968 1994 8 Tracks

Customer Reviews:

Beware.......2006-08-04

Unless you are a devout captain beefheart fan, I suggest not getting this album. But instead just get SAFE AS MILK and MIRROR MAN, they have all the songs this has but better versions. As an album compared to all other music it is amazing, but compared to the captains other out put it is only sub-par. I dont feel like the psycedelic phazing gets in the way, its just that all but one of these songs appears on Safe As Milk and Mirror Man and those versions are much better.

Magic Band Lives Up to Its Name.......2006-07-10

A source of frustration for purists, and no small degree of rumor and speculation for us all, given the murky circumstances surrounding the release of Strictly Personal. Some accounts claim that, as the unwitting Captain toured Europe with his Magic Band, producer Bob Krasnow flat-out hijacked the record, muddying what was destined to be an American blues masterpiece with trendy mixing gizmos like flangers and phasers. Soon enough, Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet) would accuse Krasnow of washing out the record's essential sound with "psychedelic Bromo-seltzer," but many insist that scraps of evidence exist to suggest that Van Vliet gave at least tacit approval to the mixing approach before the band left for tour.

While arriving at the truth of the mix-down process appears to be all but impossible at this point, at least we have the important part: the document itself--the confounded bridge between the eccentric pop ditties of Safe As Milk and the free-form legendary freakdom of Trout Mask Replica.

The record opens with "Ah Feel Like Ahcid," a swampy, whimsical reworking of Son House's immortal "Death Letter." From there, we're thrown straight into the throbbing, scraping menace of "Safe As Milk," quite possibly the most ferociously violent song ever recorded in the rock idiom. After an inspired personal statement by The Captain, and an echo-drenched interlude featuring drummer John French, the album marches up to its peak with "Trust Us." In many ways the centerpiece of Strictly Personal, it builds around one of Van Vliet's more elaborate, tonally complex vocal arrangements, and the searing intricacies of the blaring, squalling guitar work (teen-whiz Jeff Cotton and the exquisitely canny Alex St. Clair Snouffer, both turned up past eleven) reach prospects of high drama seldom heard in the genre. Unfortunately, this is one of the spots where Krasnow's production does detract somewhat from the brilliance of the performances. As other reviews have noted, though, two earlier takes of "Trust Us," recorded in hot-wired, well-rehearsed sessions with the same personnel the previous year, are currently available on CD--one of them on the Safe As Milk re-release, the other on The Mirror Man Sessions.

Surprisingly enough, the point at which the mix-down gimmickry threatens to surge out of control, during the lovable concert staple "Beatle Bones 'N' Smokin' Stones," is the one place where it actually seems to work--perhaps because in this instance it compliments the nature of the song, an outrageous, giddy send-up of the psychedelia that Van Vliet's British counterparts were so drawn to at the time, with French and bassist Jerry Handley taking obvious delight in a warped caricature of the patented McCartney-Starr groove. The album closes with "Kandy Korn," another fan favorite, but this is where the production values plummet to almost intolerable lows, and for proper appreciation of this brilliant, shimmering tune, I would point you once again to The Mirror Man Sessions. The take you'll find there builds to one of the heaviest endings ever laid down--I can't help wishing Strictly Personal closed with that version, or at least something that highlighted, instead of now-dated studio effects, the formidable muscles of this band.

Overall, though, it's tough to quibble with even that, given the many treasures to be had in this compelling, idiosyncratic record--which may very well be (sure, I'll throw it out there) the greatest achievement in the last forty years of American blues.

Without question the most inventive.

Can't help myself.......2006-04-18

I love this album like a brother; it's my most poignant momento of the late 60s. For me, it captures the essence of that time, with its mind-blown style and roman-fleuve character, where every track tells a story, albeit a confusing one. The first three tracks are particularly compelling, in which rambling vocals and ragged guitar trade off each other in a way that would make Jagger and Richards weep, if they paid attention. (Oh yeah, I'm a Stones fan too.) But only the Good Captain invokes that Philip K. Dick world in which everything, including your sanity, is up for grabs. Damn, it's good.

A great album with a bizarre history..........2005-10-02

The history of Captain Beefheart and His Magic band fluctuates like a hyperactive echocardiogram. The personal, pointed, dissonant, and impassioned music confounded most record labels (and probably many listeners). Producers probably pondered and whacked thier heads with the question "how can I sell this stuff?" Nonetheless, they seemed to think that this music had market potential (otherwise they wouldnt've bothered at all). This perspective probably lies behind the strange, enigmatic, and now legendary story of "Strictly Personal", the band's second full-length album.

Somewhere between 1967 and 1968 Beefheart and His Magic Band struck out to do a double album magnum opus. The non-commercial project became foiled in record company politics and some other general nonsense. Consequently, the band fell out with their previous label, Buddha Records, over this very project (dubbed "It Comes to You In a Plain Brown Wrapper"). Buddha apparently began to focus on popular and more "happy" (or "bubblegum") music. And subsequently the band found their way to Liberty Records and producer Bob Krasnow.

The band had already recorded quite a bit of material for the failed double-album project. It sat moldering in Buddha's vaults for years (The 1999 CD releases of "Safe As Milk" and "Mirror Man" contain nearly all of this material - released, paradoxically, by the "new" Buddha records). With little rehearsal the band cranked out "Strictly Personal" in the spring of 1968. Much of the material overlapped with the aborted Buddha sessions. Notably, very shortened versions of "Mirror Man" (now called "Son of Mirror Man - Mere Man") and "Kandy Korn". The only new addition was the rough grunting blues number "Ah Feel Like Ahcid". Pieces of the song exist throughout the album. And the final notes of "Strictly Personal" come from a reprise of this song. Beefheart (aka Don Van Vliet) expressed confusion at the suggestion that the song was about "Acid" (a popular pop culture reference at the time). But it contains some greatly evocative Beefheart lyrics (and has some affinities with the later "China Pig").

Krasnow mixed the album while the band toured in 1968 and he subsequently added a mileu of "psychedelic" effects to the songs. Examples of this pervade the album. Supposedly he wanted the Magic Band to cash in on the "far out" music of the time. Some stories say Krasnow did this without the band's consent. Others say Beefheart actually approved of the new mix until the music press delivered consistent negative reviews of the production. Either way, a lot of the nuances of the music became buried in the thick mix or frosted over with psuedo-psychedelia. Consequently, more than any other Beefheart album (excluding his "Tragic Band" recordings from the mid 1970s), this album sounds the least like Beefheart. The album's title then becomes pregnant with irony.

It speaks volumes of the material on "Strictly Personal" that it remains a classic. The songs and the performances manage to shine through the rather annoying production. Mike Barnes, Beefheart biographer, calls "Strictly Personal" the band's "acid-rock statement". This gives too much credit to the production. Without Krasnow's layering the album would have sounded more like "Trout Mask Replica" than "The Piper At The Gates of Dawn". The re-released Buddha recordings (sans psychedelia) reveal this.

Some of Beefheart's strongest songs remain obscurely buried here. "Safe As Milk", the anti-hippie "Trust Us", the Trout Mask presage "On Tomorrow", and the song that cost the band John Lennon's approval, "Beatle Bones 'N' Smoking Stones". This album shows a definite progression from "Safe As Milk" towards "Trout Mask Replica" (which turned out to be a vindicating double-album release). Some of the innovations require work and digging to expose. But they exist down deep in the psychedelic stratifications of sludge. The effort pays off in droves. Beefheart begins to really emerge here, albeit slowly and somewhat frustratingly due to the mix. Still, Beefheart fans should not miss this album that comes with a history as murky as its production.

Flawed But, Again, Kind of Brilliant.......2001-07-21

He tried a more "personal" take on the blues here, and moved the rhythms out towards the kind of jazz-influenced polyrhythmic wildness that his bands kept working with for the next 14 years.

The songs and the lyrics are "authentically strange" as John Peel remarked in a documentary. To me they're idiosynchratic and somewhat flawed. They're just not coherent enough for my liking, and the music's a bit uneven - it has great stuff in there, but alternates into more straight, ostensibly commercially viable sections that drag this down a bit.

The production, the mixes are bad.

The better part of this material is available on the "I May Be Hungry But I Sure Ain't Weird" collection, which is alternate takes of these tracks plus a few more things from this time frame, and "Mirror Man" which was cut by the same band (originally to be bundled with this album in a 2-LP set) and has far superior versions of "Mirror Man" and "Kandy Korn". "I May Be Hungry" has been placed, in two pieces, on the new issues of "Safe As Milk" and "Mirror Man".

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