Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
beware of high priced bootlegs, March 13, 2006
most of the copies of this cd on amazon are counterfeit.
be sure to ask the seller what label his cd is on.
if it's a mini-lp version, it is a copy.
the pictured cd is not authentic.
they sell for $10 on ebay.
don't pay these bootleggers $110 or $69.99 for a $10 bootleg.
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Classic reverberating wails, clanks, and squacks..., March 16, 2006
Coming off of the liberating heels of 1970's "Trout Mask Replica", Don Van Vliet first changed the name of his band from "His Magic Band" to "The Magic Band" and proceeded to record another tight, vigorous, arrhythmic sonic landscape. Though this album doesn't have quite the free form feeling of its precedessor (which included tape recorder chants, false starts, off microphone chatter, and lots of interesting other random tidbits), it stretches the boundaries of rock music in much the same manner. "Lick My Decals Off, Baby" includes 15 autonomous and amazingly crafted songs. Almost as if someone took the "Trout Mask" sessions, applied a razor to the inbetweens and said "THERE! Those are the songs! Now stop it with all that other nonsense!" In this way "Lick My Decals Off, Baby" sounds like an "organized" and only slightly less spontaneous "Trout Mask". This more structured arrangement may have emerged from Van Vliet's alleged desire to actually start making money from The Magic Band. Apparently the previous drummer left after "Trout Mask" and was lured back by a promise of potential cash. In some ways Van Vliet succeeded. The album climbed to number 20 on the UK charts.
Regardless of its commercial status, this album remains one of the band's true masterpieces. The angular and staccato rhythms of "Trout Mask" clank and crunge here with an equal intensity. The title track finds Van Vliet squacking fervently about removing the labels that society affixes to us distracted folk. Apparently many in the early 1970s read the title saliciously (and lines such as "She stuck out her tongue 'n the fun begun" probably didn't help). But some claim that an executive dubbed the title "obscene" just to avoid having to play the album's surreal promotional film (the original of which now belongs to a museum) on the air. "Woe-is-uh-Me-Bop" provides one of the best examples of Van Vliet's fusion of free jazz and blues. The hilarious world play in "I Wanna Find a Woman That'll Hold My Big Toe Till I Have To Go" approaches a psychic toungue-twisting level. And "The Smithsonian Institute Blues" continues Van Vliet's theme of humanity's impending downfall - unless we change our ways: "The new dinosaur is walkin' in the old one's shoes" and "All you new dinosaurs / Now it's up t'you t'choose / 'fore your feet hit the tar, you better kick off them old shoes". "The Clouds Are Full of Wine" features Van Vliet's vocals floating rather pleasantly over a layer of cacophony like a bird soaring over a bomb site. And "Flash Gordon's Ape" pulls out all of the stops. A literal typhoon of sound rises up and mercilessly attacks. Somehow it still manages to hold together as a song, incredible as that seems. It definitely leaves an impression at the album's closing.
"Lick My Decals Off, Baby" marks the end of The Magic Band's early extrusions into the avant garde. Beefheart's next four albums gradually toned down his trademark cacophony and angularity. Some fans even accused him of "going commercial". Not until 1978's "Shiny Beast" did Beefheart once again begin to re-explore the musical terrain he left behind here. Why the shift occurred remains open to speculation. And Van Vliet continued to give vague cryptic answers as to why. Regardless, he left behind a string of masterpieces upon his "retirement" in 1982. "Lick My Decals Off, Baby" remains one of them.
Lastly, at the time of the writing this album still langours unjustly with an "out of print" status. Non-bootlegged fresh copies thus fetch treasure trove prices. Which is too bad for those who want to hear this masterwork. Hopefully someone will take a brave stand and make this incredible work readily available again.
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
best album you've never heard of..., September 26, 2005
LMDO,B unequivocally rates 11 STARS (+) as a true masterpiece of rock-n-roll and the genre-defying avant-garde to which Beefheart (moreso than his Magic Bands) aspired. What we have here (unreleased on CD, as yet: PLEASE SOMEONE reissue this icon of ROCK AS ART on CD!), is the esteemed Captain Beefheart (nee Don Glen Vliet) elevating the then nascent and flowering juggernaut of rock music to the pantheon of ART. Mr. Van Vliet did likewise with TROUT MASK REPLICA yet with much less finesse and dynamic range. While TMR sounded like a caveman's paroxysm of rock-n-roll ejecta mimicking vaguely a pop band trying to play Coleman-style free-jazz, LMDO,B finds the dear Captain uttering and caterwauling his trademark grunts of apopletic free-verse in-n-around this version of The Magic Band's now more highly refined "music". Now, these or any musican's would never have arrived at this herky-jerky brand of marimba-laden quirk rock without the manic and insightful cauldron that is the brain of Captain Beefheart. Apocryphal tales tell of the "cult- like" conditions in which the Captain wrought his will upon the Magic Band in what amounts to mental badgering to play the sounds that quite likely haunted Van Vliet like the creatures that also sprung from his pens & brushes simultaneously (Van Vliet now enjoys a successful painting career as an avant-garde artist of the visual stripe). He admonished players to play percussive sounds that evoked "a cat rolling down the stairs in a cardboard box" and other non-academic exhortations. And DESPITE (or maybe BECAUSE OF) the tyrranical influence upon the Magic Band (s), LMDO,B rises to the apogee of Beefheart's masterpiece, not Trout Mask Replica. The sheer driving force of neo-blues romps like "Smithsonian Institute Blues" not only takes the listener through the paleontological recesses of Van Vliet's interests but actually has hip-thrustingly great rhythms: who knew you could dance to Captain Beefheart!?! Other toe-tappers like "Woe Is Uh Me Bop" or the title track not only are ripping rockers, but delineate a blue-print for RIO/Prog/Artrock that has yet to be equaled (but has been paralleled by Don's buddy Zappa or weird-rockers The Residents). Off-kilter time signatures relentlessly throb to twin guitars and some of the hardest bass and drums TO THIS DAY. Beefheart warns us in the title track that "this song AIN'T no sing-song"; and most people must have thought this meant NO MUSIC where actually the converse is true: here is the newest, most PROGRESSIVE form of this little American invention we call ROCK. All you symphonic/keyboard/synth-swell afficionados better run for your ABBA-esque carillons of key chimes bliss, for as Beefheart belts out traffic-jam volumes of sax in I LOVE YOU, YOU BIG DUMMY, the mountain comes tumbling down with the rolling rocks of drum crashes and a heartbeat bass that throbs in the temples to remind you that not only is prog rock cerebral: GREAT prog rock also gushes out from the loins like a crazy, horny giant. The music on this album is intelligent, beautiful, chaotic, complex, VERY AMERICAN and too much to understand by most humans. When it hits you, though, it's as if a musical Cupid has speared your heart with an arrow of mighty, miasmic sausage and twisted your appreciation around to the visceral mindfulness that Captain Beefheart has so graciously painted into our earholes. Wake up & listen!
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~ Captain Beefheart
~ Captain Beefheart
~ Captain Beefheart
~ Captain Beefheart
~ Captain Beefheart
by Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band 
