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From: wfi@unc.UUCP (William F. Ingogly)
Newsgroups: net.music,net.books
Subject: Ted Hughes and Capt. Beefheart
Message-ID: <345@unc.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 8-Apr-85 12:58:44 EST
Article-I.D.: unc.345
Posted: Mon Apr  8 12:58:44 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 10-Apr-85 06:19:27 EST
Organization: CS Dept., U. of N. Carolina at Chapel Hill
Lines: 98
Xref: watmath net.music:6929 net.books:1637

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DEFINITIONS:

       Ted Hughes -- A contemporary British poet, author of a
                     book of poetry called "Crow." Ted Hughes
                     was once married to the American poet
                     Sylvia Plath. His most recent book of
                     poetry (to the best of my knowledge) is 
                     "River," which I recommended to net.books 
                     readers a month or two ago. The poems in
                     "Crow" seem to be about death and the 
                     death of innocence that results from 
                     mankind's acquisition of language.

  Capt. Beefheart -- An avant-garde blues/rock composer. His
                     most recent album (to the best of my
                     knowledge) is "Ice Cream For Crow." The
                     Captain's music sounds like what might
                     result if Howlin' Wolf decided to become
                     a beat poet and hired an avant-garde jazz
                     group to back him up. The songs in "Ice
                     Cream For Crow" seem to be about death
                     and the possibility of rebirth.

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SPECULATIONS:

   In the cycle of poems in Ted Hughes' "Crow," the character named
Crow is presented as an anti-romantic and entropic force in the
universe. Mankind's real fall is the result of language; the Garden of
Eden was only possible before human beings acquired verbal skills. I
find the Captain's album "Ice Cream For Crow" his most disturbing
work; it seems to be obsessed with death and dissolution. Perhaps it's
a meditation on the Captain's own mortality. There's an interesting
connection between these two works that may or may not be
coincidental.

  The poem called "Crow and the Birds" presents Crow as a no-nonsense
scavenger who makes his living from the detritus and misfortune of
civilization (although the dropped ice-cream is admittedly a comically
trivial misfortune):

      ...While the bullfinch plumped in the applebud
         And the goldfinch bulbed in the sun
         And the wryneck crooked in the moon
         And the dipper peered from the dewball

         Crow spraddled head-down in the beach-garbage, guzzling
                                           a dropped ice-cream.

   Captain Beefheart's song "Ice Cream For Crow" presents life as
celebration and dance, but a dance on the edge of the grave. His Crow
seems to be a totemic, mystical symbol of death. Crow leads the
dance:

     ...light the fire piano
        the moon showed up
        and it started to show
        tonight there'd be ice cream
        ice cream for crow...

But later on in the song, the Captain's Crow is presented as an agent
of possible rebirth through images of healing:


     ...tonight there's gonna be
        a feather treatment...

     ...cut the cake
        we'll all get well...

   On the album cover, Beefheart appears in a black and white photo of
the desert. He holds his hat in his hand, and is alone. The image is
altogether a mournful one, as though the good Captain were going to
his own funeral. The photo is set against a window shade covered with 
one of his paintings; the colors are black and blood-red. Is the shade
going down on a life? Is the connection between Ted Hughes' image of
crow 'guzzling a dropped ice-cream' and Beefheart's image of ice cream
at the crow dance (moonlight == ice cream?) coincidence? What do you
think?

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UNCONNECTED AFTERTHOUGHT:

   Paul Simon uses imagery from Ted Hughes' "Crow" in his song "My
Little Town:" (the following from memory)

    ...And after it rains there's a rainbow
       But all of the colors are black...

   This is no accident, since a quote from Ted Hughes' poem "Two
Legends" preceeds the song's lyrics on the back of the "Still Crazy"
album.
                                    
                                  -- Enjoy it,  Bill Ingogly