Customer Reviews

Lick My Decals Off Baby

5 star:		(35)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

most of the NEW 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 $39 here and on ebay.
don't pay $39.99 for a bootleg copy.

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.

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!

This is one of the best things Captain Beefheart ever did. More accomplished than "Trout Mask Replica" (which is a brilliant but messy blueprint), crazier than "Safe as Milk" and better-sung than "Doc at the Radar Station." Van Vliet was still at the peak of his powers on this one, and once you get past the apparent dissonance, "Decals" is actually a pretty easy record to take. "Woe-Is-A-Me-Bop" and "Bellerin' Plain" are both classics, as is the title track and "Doctor Dark," and the drumming and marimba playing are stellar. I understand Art Trip,percussionist on this landmark 1970 recording, now has his own chiropractic office in Mississippi, on the Gulf Coast. That's appropriate because what Beefheart did was take the irregular-metered blues of Mississippi guitarists like Skip James and rev it for the modern world; there is also a persistent hint of Latin music in much of what he does. Few people have ever made rhythms more repressive and more free, at the same time. It is an absolute crime that this record is only available in this very expensive import version. And "Flash Gordon's Ape" is absolutely nuts, one of the greatest things I have ever heard and just the thing to get you through heavy traffic in Atlanta, Los Angeles or any other place where the rhythm of everyday life is just too much.

Upon first listen, each of these many short songs might seem much longer than they are. And at first, startling, and then for some, perhaps annoying, and then for some even fewer, haunting. I hear that guitar...I hear the Captain's gravelly voice...I hear unusual, yet honest to goodness tunes... I'm left with an education that I half expected but never intellectualized. LICK MY DECALS OFF, BABY is somewhere between brilliant innovation, insufferable art installation, and the music of our subconscious. LICK MY DECALS OFF, BABY is almost certainly CAPTAIN BEEFHEART and THE MAGIC BAND's most cohesive, most challenging, and most inspired project. Ironic, twisted, but not nearly as disturbing or distracting as its predecessor, TROUT MASK REPLICA, this record is the distillation of Don Van Vliet's particular recipe for Delta Blues, and his own "cosmic music" as Gram Parsons might have put it. Hardly for mass consumption, LICK MY DECALS OFF, BABY pushes the forms and conventions of Rock Music to the breaking point.

LICK MY DECALS OFF, BABY is not just the far-end of Delta Blues. It is a mistake to assume that Don Van Vliet was not listening to other artists' produce... TROUT MASK REPLICA, or SAFE AS MILK, or LICK MY DECALS OFF, BABY, were not created in a vacuum! The guitar opener to the stunning "Bellerin' Plain" is reminiscent of JEFFERSON AIRPLANE, and one can also hear the fringe of once so-called "Free-Form Jazz," such as CHARLES MINGUS, on these tracks. The blowing at the tail end of "Bellerin' Plain," or on "The Buggy Boogie Woogie" or parts of "Flash Gordon's Ape" sound a bit like the close of JIMI HENDRIX's track "If 6 Was 9." However, what might be effects in mainstream music are here the heart of the matter, which is then exposed and discarded. Also a bit of KING CRIMSON's album, In The Court Of The Crimson King (another envelope pusher) echoes on this record. BUT, there really is nothing like LICK MY DECALS OFF, BABY.

For the unschooled, this record might often seem like pointless kanoodling or cinematic rambling. Upon repeated listening however, the astonishing precision of this record is revealed. "Bellerin' Plain" alone proves that. I do not know of a more urgently powerful piece of modern music, whether it be Rock, Jazz, Pop, or Avant Garde. It is a false cacophony we hear, but in fact, here are true compositions that haunt your nightmares, and when finally resolved to you, and embraced as a changing factor of your life, these same tunes will dress your dreams, and you will realize, that they always have.

I spent years hunting down the lp my first time around, so when the CD was first issued almost 20 years ago, I jumped on it before I even owned a player. There are few pieces of "popular music" that are unconditionally guaranteed to be the object of study a couple hundred years from now, but this album is a pretty safe bet. Simply brilliant. To say it is influential is practically ridiculous. Who else could play this stuff? Maybe Sun Ra, if his background was blues instead of jazz. Hard to recommend this, because I suspect (or at least kind of hope) that most people won't get more than a minute through the first song. Definitely designed for the few, the proud, and mainly, the adventurous. If you're into the Captain, spend anything to get this.

The other reviews have this covered. In summary:

It's certainly not for everyone. It helps if you understand music a little (musicians are at some advantage), otherwise you might mistake the strange interleaved rythms as a disorganized cacophony (which it most certainly isn't).

It's unlike any other music in the Rock 'n Roll genre. The closest thing I can think of is the avant garde classical such as Berio, Davidovsky et al. It's incredibly tightly organized. Listen to the perfectly-synced but totally abstract guitar and marimba duet before "The sky is full of wine not whiskey or rye". I've heard this same one played live on the bootleg "Easy Teeth", so this was no tape chop-up.

It is really sad that it's out of print. It's like having a major Picasso or Miro sitting in someone's attic.

This is definitely the master Beefheart album. I believe it's also Don Van Vliet's favorite (but since he's now a recluse this can't be verified).

This follow-up to "Trout Mask Replica" had some deep shoes to fill... "Lick My Decals Off, Baby" proves, once again, that Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band was perhaps the ONLY band of their era to constantly strive for individuality, and produce a sound like no other. No pop-radio hits here. Just the off-the-wall, chaotic mix of jazz, blues, and avant-garde rock'n'roll that the world came to expect from the Captain and Crew. Songs like "Woe-Is-Uh-Me-Bop" and the title track, present Beefheart exactly as he is/was: a collage artist of sound. A TRUE artist. Incredible record, my favorite by Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band.

Three things differentiate Don Van Vliet from every musical recording before or since:

1) conflicting rhythms that oppose violently and then miraculously converge creating a new type of crescendo (anti/pseudo crescendo?) or denouement (anti/pseudo denouement) ... ? That's the problem -- language will not explain Van Vliet's groundbreaking ... anti-rhythms. The resultant crescendos or denouements turn out to be highly satisfying because of their novelty, no ... invention, no... genius.

2) lyrics which can range from throwaway to brilliantly moving and insightful, even in the same song. And even the throwaway lyrics will please once one comes to realize that Van Vliet never took himself (read: pop music) seriously. He's often smiling at you for having bought-in to his niche of pop culture.

3) virtuosity that goes WAY beyond ANY pop music and even much jazz and classical

All of these qualities are evident in most of Van Vliet's work but are most abundant and mature here. To those who rave about "Trout Mask Replica" all I can say is I could never get it compared to the more pop-styled, melodic and accessible "Clear Spot" and "Spotlight Kid."

But "Lick My Decals Off, Baby" is different from everything, is not at all pop music. But it IS accessible after a few listens. These are overall his most profound lyrics and certainly his most complex and engaging rhythms even with a few throwaways. This is the one that will place and keep The Captain in the history of music.

I could go into detail, writing about certain examples on certain selections but it's probably best for one to just listen with an open ear/mind. When you get to the brilliance, you won't be able to miss it if you let it grow on you with just a very few listens.

This album and Trout Mask Replica are the Captain's best works. Too bad that "Decals" isn't in print anymore.

Trout Mask Replica however is the better known work. Which, I think, is very unfortunate because I think that "Decals" is also a masterpiece.

I think that the Captain won't really be appreciated until many years from now after most of us are dead and gone. He has been an influence to a lot more musicians than is generally known.