Acidheads keep annoying Beefheart with their inane jive.

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“Zappa is the most disgusting character I have ever encountered. Ever! This sham, this bum who is under the impression that he is an artist claimed that he discovered me! I mean people say I discovered Zoot Horn Rollo which is crap; he found me and I found him. He was on when I met him. It was just that he thought he was off. But Zappa! - and the thing is he didn't have to be what he is, he just chose to be a shit. He's got a real burden - nose-to-the-grindstone, red-faced erection. He claimed that he produced "Trout Mask"; he was asleep at the switches, man. He's like a switchman with Parkinson's disease. Herbie Cohen reminds me of a red marble in a can of lard and Zappa reminds me of a cataract. The only reason I performed on "Willy the Pimp" was because I wanted to straighten Zappa out. I thought that if he came in contact with a real artist he might see the light but he was too far gone by then. Listen man, you'd be degrading yourself as a writer by even mentioning his name in your article.” … All I can say is that Beefheart and company are no vegetarians, they're cannibals. Their music comes right out and eats up the audience.

sad, angry grown-ups, dreary music, stewed meat, church and school

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The Kinks were a guiding light to me when I was young. I went to the same schools as them, junior, secondary and art school. As I went into Year One of secondary school at eleven years old, the bassist Pete Quaife’s younger brother was just leaving, so there was quite a big age gap, but I followed in their wake, and I was very aware of every move they made ahead of me. Everyone in Muswell Hill seemed to have a vague connection to them, even my mum. She worked at Crouch End library and Dave Davies’s girlfriend – a beautiful natural blonde – worked there too. Mum used to come home with tales of how volatile Dave was. In junior school I’d ask the teachers, ‘Did you teach them? What were they like? Do you think you might have any of their old exercise books at home?’ I was extremely curious, much more so than I was in any lessons. I didn’t aspire to be a musician – there wasn’t that equality at the time, it was inconceivable that a girl could cross over into male territory and be in a band. When I got to secondary school, people were much more interested in them: the older boys dressed like them, long hair in side or front partings, very low-cut hipster trousers – we called them bumsters – and stack-heeled boots. The young male teachers dressed like that too. To Muswell Hill kids, the Kinks were heroes, they came from the same place as us and they made something of themselves.

Farren's trying to turn the clock back to the Sixties underground scene

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Crowded into beat-up station wagons, covering hundreds of miles a day, eating garbage food and living in cheap motels, the pace was crushing. Although Presley has never been directly associated with drugs, there is no doubt that the majority of musicians playing these backroad circuits depend heavily on amphetamines, Benzedrine and No-Doze. If the speed didn’t get to Presley, certainly the strain of seemingly endless one-nighters did. Nice white boys didn’t wear flash pink suits from the black side of town. They didn’t listen to black radio and learn R&B hits, and they didn’t get involved in brawls with rednecks who took exception to ’nigger lovin’ faggots’ getting the females in an uproar.

“Every day, every night was the same. He chewed his fingernails, drummed his hands against his thighs, tapped his feet and every chance he got he’d start combing his hair.”

a flattened-out reworking of the classic Bo Diddley rhythm

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“Don came to spend a couple of days at my place in Venice. As usual, he popped some street acid someone gave him, with absolutely no knowledge about its quality or quantity. Anyway, Don started coming down off his peak, but was still hallucinating somewhat and was feeling a tad paranoid. He wanted something to drink. So he wandered into the kitchen, didn’t turn on the light because he claimed acid made it possible for him to see in the dark – like a cat. I could hear him opening cupboard doors, looking for a drinking glass. As I was a bit buzzed myself, it was too much of an effort to tell him which cupboard the glasses were in. A couple of months earlier I went to a friend’s big pot luck Thanksgiving Day bash and my task was to make a big baked yam/sweet potato casserole. So, for some reason I bought a huge bag of yams – but couldn’t possibly prepare all of them, so I put the remaining potatoes, in their net bag, up in the cupboard. Any kind of tuber of the potato family, left in the dark for a couple of months, will grow long tendrils whilst seeking root space and/or sunlight. And that’s what almost ten remaining pounds of yams did: grew lots and lots of two to three-foot long tendrils. When Don opened the cupboard door in the dark, hundreds of long, thin white tendrils cascaded down on him. He let out a shriek. Seconds later, he bolted out through the kitchen door, ashen, eyes the size of boiled eggs, still screaming and waving his arms frantically. Bits and pieces of severed yam tendrils were flying everywhere and hanging from his hair. He started flashing that he’d been attacked by aliens hiding in my kitchen cabinet.”

drunk Thunderbird wine, warm, out a glove compartment.

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WS: I remember my brother and I would go in there. We used to stop in there and they used to have these boxes on these wrought-iron type legs, it was real flimsy. They had all these 45s OK? What we did is we would look at the name of the record company, you know – certain companies. That’s the ones we’d buy. We’d buy the song by labels. Go play ‘em, if they turned out to be good, we’d keep ‘em, if they didn’t, we’d throw ‘em away. I still have those records; I could show them to you. They had stamps on them – 35 cents. That’s what they were selling at, that price. There was Bo Diddley, Magic Sam, Big Walter, Little Walter, Libby and La Fayette. Lot of those 45s we’d go ahead and copy … you know, learn off the records. My brother was the one that had the collection, but I have the records now in my house.

JF: Denny Walley mentioned something about going in there. He said that they were old jukebox records. They’d take ‘em out of the jukebox and put them in the racks.

WS: That’s right.

A Quick Trip Through My Adolescence

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"sometimes I think the whole reason pop music was invented in the first place was to vent sick emotions in a deceptively lulling form.THEY WERE LITERALLY EXPLOSIVE WITH ALL THAT PENT UP LUST AND FEAR AND GUILT AND DREAD AND HATE AND RESENTMENT AND CONFUSION.And it gave them a kind of anarchic power which can still move us."