The Magic of Captain Beefheart

So today I'm driving from Michigan to Wisconsin, and as I cross clear the northern border of Milwaukee County I decide to pursue one of my hobbies and exit the freeway to complete the last leg of my drive on small state highways. At the same time I turn on Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band's famous live album recorded at the Paradiso in Amsterdam in November 1980.

Highway 43 in Wisconsin runs along the coast through towns with names like "Cascade" and "Random Lake," ranging from unincorporated hamlets to villages with populations in the high hundreds. Farm land surrounds these small social bastions, and this time of year it is green and verdant and with the window down the air practically tingles with life.

I don't know if Beefheart is the right music for this drive. I hear something in the licks and rhythms that reminds me of "The Music of Erich Zann" a short story by Lovecraft that was published in National Amateur in 1922. In the story a man plays beautiful, but chaotic and jagged, music to keep at bay the forces of the outer dark that lurk beyond the window of the small boardinghouse attic where he lives. That window is a one way passage beyond the universe, where the dread creatures try to gain ingress into the world. That's what Beefheart sounds like sometimes, like his music belongs in a grimoire, some old battered tome gilded with runes and sigils, that contains (in addition to the music of Beefheart) invocations that, on alternating pages, summon and then banish the spirits of the dark.

Though I doubt Karl Barth ever read Lovecraft (though perhaps he did, the greatest theologian of the twentieth century was reputed to be a man of exceptionally broad reading), but as I pass by a Reformed Church in a place called "Whitelaw" I am reminded of Barth's Lovecraftian vision of evil as das nichtige--the nothingness, that property of the void that was rejected in the divine commands that formed the universe at the dawn of time. Reminded because das nichtige can only come into the world to enact evil when free human will opens fissures in the fabric of reality that it can capitalize on. Maybe without Beefheart there are no green cornfields that run along tree lines of pine and white spruce, where the shadows play out over anthers of the corn so that it seems to undulate like the ocean beneath a whisper of a breeze. With a lot of music you can detect elements of the sound out in the world, but not always so with Beefheart, and maybe that is the point. Because maybe Beefheart knew it too, and that's why he wrote "Abba Zaba," to let us know that it was all okay, that he was on the frontier of human experience rocking as hard as he could to keep the universe closed to the nothingness. After all, he played with the Magic Band.