Strictly Personal [Original recording remastered]

I first heard this when it was released, in the UK, on Sunset Records, a budget label who also released the Bonzo Dog Band albums etc. This was one of the albums that nearly everybody I knew at the time had in their collection. In the late 1970s when Punk and second hand record shops arrived in Dundee this was one of the albums that people couldn't give away. In that era peopel were casting off their previous music collections and getting rid of anything Prog Rock or Hippy, this album falling into the latter category.

I deeply resented being told that I shouldn't like all the stuff I liked before so I clung on my own judgement and still consider this as a classic, not just of Beefheart's career but I would put it in my top 10 1960s albums, and there is a lot of competition there.

There are a couple of things to clear up here, the first is the opening track Ah Feel Like Ahcid (unfortunately Amazon does not have the mechanism for customers to feedback with absent or incirrect track titles). Many assumed that this was an LSD reference but Beefheart insists that it was just a phonetic spelling of the phrase in the song "I feel like I said...", however, even if this is the case I am sure that the record company, if not Beefheart himself, were trying to exploit this ambiguity.

The second big bone of contention is the post production phasing etc, Beefheart came out publicly and denounced this say that the record company had destroyed his album, he later did a similar thing with Unconditionally Guaranteed and Bluejeans & Moonbeams. In these later albums I am inclined to take his objections as face value but in this case I think he is being rather disingenuous. Beefheart embraced the production of Strictly Personal prior too and immediately after it's release. It was only after disappointing sales that he started to complain about the post production treatments. Personally I do not understand the objections people have to this, I love this album. I do however, secretly, welcome this controversy because it lead to the demand for the release of the Mirror Man Sessions album that is now hugely expanded on it's current CD release.

Beefheart genius in his early work was his subversion of traditional music forms, here with the opener Ah Feel Like Ahcid and Gimme Dat Harp Boy put Beefheart up there with the cream of blues vocalists, his voice is just wonderful. The artist is often not best placed to judge the merit of his own work and I really don't mind people contradicting themselves about the value of their work.

His dig a the then leader of the British Invasion, Beatle Bones and Smokin' Stones sounds as edgy now as it did then, apparently John Lennon took exception, however it is a rather cool dig; if someone is going to have a go at you in song then you would want it to sound as cool as this.

Don't let anyone put you off this is a true classic album. There was a "Greatest Albums of All Time" programme on television some years back, one of the many similar polls around the millennium. John Peel took part in the programme and when asked about which Beefheart albums he thought everyone should listen to he said "All of them, everyday." John was confident enough just to say what he thought and never tried to be cool with the result that he was paradoxically never cool and totally cool all the time. Beefheart has gone in and out of fashion amongst the arbiters of cool but for me he will always be a legend, buy this album and turn on to a genius.

There is so much dross around. Virtually all popular music ambles around middle c, 4/4 rythm and "I love and I am in the dark" type lyrics. Completely peurile stuff. Yep, a lot of the stuff that youth produce is "wallpaper" or Cultural Babyfood.

If we were to use visual analogies with music, then "Strictly Personal" is the "David" of youth music. It stands solid and uncompromising in your living room - "cheese in the corner with a mile long beard", so there you go.

I was always under the impression this was the definitive Beefheart Album, but I heard that Don Van Vliet freaked when it was over-produced with the then state of the art gizmos "what the hell, what the heck". This album is brilliant from beginning to end, it has the personality and solidity of dirty granite.

The guitar playing is completely gutsy and rootsy. "Ah feel like Ahcid" has such a satisfying guitar sound. I can't help feeling that this is where Keith Richards thought "Oh, yes!" and so shaped his future guitar playing. The lyrics are pure, simple and banal "flash chicken legs".

"Safe as Milk". Rock music. You could just imagine this being played live booming out over the speakers. "Gracious Ladies bi-lines hanging on to vine". This track makes the band into a juggernaut, just laying waste to anything that stands in its way.

"Trust us". Psychedelia abounds in this. I can Don Van Vliets point here; but then the production makes the sound what it is. Rythmically, it just chops and changes and you wonder what the hell is going on, but then the final passage splendidly completes things.

"Mirror Man". Like the opening guitar riff. Van Vliet ladling voice over the music "mirrrrrrroooooooooor...mirrrrrroooor..." Guitars, bass and drums turn into huge percussive heart over which Van Vliet gives an indistinguishable of harp and vocals. I really like the final gasp of harp at the end of the track.

This is only half of the story, play on...

In 1968 I was 14 and attitude-dancing. There was nothing quite like swanning around the school playground with a copy tucked under your arm of an album no-one had heard of - or at least anyone who didn't listen to John Peel of a Saturday afternoon.

And 'Strictly Personal' was the real deal; the second album by the most subterranean of all the underground artists of the time; the record sleeve you waved triumphantly at the bloke from the fifth form trying haplessly to pull the same stunt with 'In Search of the Lost Chord'. If you were into Beefheart, you were very much (if you'll forgive a cliched anachronism) 'in the loop'.

Hearing for the first time 'Beatle Bones 'n' Smokin' Stones' shook me rigid. I'd encountered nothing like those spidery backward guitars, that massive, blockbusting percussion, the phasing, the wierd sucking noises that seemed to waft in from a dental surgery in a madhouse, Don Van Vliet's voice roaring up from an abyss into which you ventured on pain of terminal psychotic damage.

But it was also invigorating, shot through with a searching, edgy and deeply satisfying spirit of electronic adventure which, warped enough to frighten horses, children and parents, was unavailable from the sugary confections of the pop charts or even from (otherwise fine) contemporary artists like Cream, Floyd, Family and Fairport. Two or three tracks from Peel and I was hooked, badly needing to investigate further this extraordinary, terrifying music.

On finding the sleeve in my local record shop, my initial shock was confirmed and compounded as soon as I saw the inner photo. Here they were, five extraterrestrials, monochrome emissaries from the outer circle of Hell, sorcerous manifestations of a very bad dream indeed. It was, and in a funny way remains, the most nightmarish image I have seen; the perfect visual crystallisation of the record's aural malificence.

Despite Van Vliet's oft-quoted unhappiness with Bob Krasnow's production (for a while the Cap'n was none too pleased with his old sparring partner Frank Zappa's desk duties for 'Trout Mask Replica', either) the album delivered on every count. The music might've shone "like diamonds in the mud" (CB) but what mud! As a trippy period-piece from the back-end of psychedelia, or an endlessly fascinating and inventive excursion into musical realms never visited by anyone before and only rarely since, to these ears SP remains a masterpiece.

Like Sun Ra - that other visionary/genius/loony with the Saturnian public image and the unusual taste in headgear - Van Vliet proved disappointingly human, as we discovered the following year when he visited Britain to promote 'Trout Mask Replica'. And what we all thought might fry our synapses if we closed the curtains and listened under the influence of anything stronger than a sherbet fountain turned out to be laced with humour, albeit of a singular and surreal hue.

Although the Captain has passed on, perhaps reincarnated as either a Pemon shaman or Steve Ellis from the Love Affair - the latter perhaps the more Beefheartian concept - various of his confreres are keeping alive the flame and making sublime music as The Magic Band. Far from the ghostly alchemists of the SP sleeve or the lysergic pantomime dames of TMR, they too are all-too-human, portly, affable and jolly, more friendly Father Christmases than baleful Baron Samedis.

When you're 14 and attitude-dancing, your only reference-points a bizarre sleeve photo and the most exhilarating music you've ever heard, it's easy to get swallowed whole by the daft hyperbole. Beefheart's persona would today be considered a carefully stage-managed 'brand'. But in 1968 it felt genuinely otherworldly, truly 'alternative'.

It still does.