Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band - Mirror Man - color vinyl - LP

This is the last, sweet feast of madness before convention crept into the mind of Don Van Vliet and he began making music that sounded, relatively speaking, normal. Recorded prior to Strictly Personal and originally intended for an album to be called It Comes in a Plain Brown Wrapper, the music of Mirror Man represents Captain Beefheart’s early, insane blues phase. Is it a cash grab by Buddha to capitalize on Beefheart’s rising profile? Yes, probably. Does it matter? No, it doesn’t, because there isn’t enough prime beefheart in the world to go around.

Calling this “blues music” is misleading in the sense that it doesn’t adequately communicate the musical adventurousness of Beefheart. Yet the blues has always been a solitary journey, whether it’s one man and a guitar commiserating over a lost love or one madman and a few lost souls divorced from reality in the desert lamenting the lost significance of reason. Maybe “post-modern blues” is a better description, since Beefheart’s music works best against the decaying backdrop of an overpopulated, overstimulated world that had already sacrificed its babies to the red, green and blue god of color television.

Despite its dubious origins as an album of  unreleased early songs, Mirror Man is nearly as essential as the band’s first four “legitimate” albums. True, there are only four songs on it, some of which were tightened up for Strictly Personal, but the quality of the playing clearly marks it as classic Beefheart and no fan should consider their collection complete without it. Sealed reissue on color vinyl.

Track list:

A1. Tarotplane 

A2. Kandy Korn 

B1. 25th Century Quaker 

B2. Mirror Man 

All selections written by Don Van Vliet.