Notes

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Soundboard

From Home Page Replica Website - www.shiningsilence.com

Cover says "Source: Recorded at Cowtown, Kansas City, April 22 1974 - A rare early FM broadcast" - this was a QUAD broadcast of the Missouri concert. Sound is pretty good stereo. Performance, like all the 1974 tour with the Buckwheat backing band, is not great but Beefheart's singing and apparent good mood compensate for that. Features a blues jam with "Keep On Rubbing" and "Be Your Dog". Over an hour long at 64:53.


From Captain Beefheart Timeline - http://www.beefheart.de/index.html

Magic Band #29: Tragic Live Band
Unconditionally Guaranteed Promo Tour

Don Van Vliet: Five days before the tour - a tour all over the world, starting in America - they just dropped me. It was terrible, awful; I learned them the music note by note at the time, and just before such a big tour they cut the collaboration because they think they are essential. I like this new band very much. these guys already could play from the start, that's important.
[Bert Jansen: THE CAPTAIN! Captain Beefheart: Magie Voor Eenzamen Of Voor Het Volk? OOR, June 19, 1974]

Barry Alfonso: Scrambling to put a group together in time for a tour only a few weeks away, DiMartino hired a lounge-circuit rock combo down in Hollywood to be an ersatz Magic Band. Among these musicians was keyboardist Michael Smotherman, who, like his bandmates, had little or no idea who Captain Beefheart was. "Talk about worlds colliding," he remembers. "We started practicing these songs of Don's, things like Big Eyed Beans From Venus, and they seemed totally alien, totally foreign to our ways of thinking. At the time, we were all guys in leather jackets and tight jeans, and we treated Don with this slightly patronizing attitude. He was, like, this old kook to us. We truly didn't know shit."
Somehow, Beefheart managed to teach these musicians his songs, and they toured together in Europe and the U.S. into the fall of '74.
[The Dust Blows Forward booklet]

Magic Band #29: "Tragic Live Band"

* Captain Beefheart Don Van Vliet vocals, harmonica, saxophone, clarinet
* Fuzzy Fuscaldo guitar
* Ty Grimes drums
* Del Simmons tenor saxophone, flute
* Dean Smith guitar
* Michael Smotherman keyboards
* Paul Uhrig bass


Roger Ames: So there's a New Magic Band with a keyboard player from Buckwheat, a drummer from Ricky Nelson's band (Ty Grimes), a bass player from Bobbie Gentry's old band (Paul Uhrig), and a throwback sax player who led his own band in Dixieland days. Dean Smith is on lead, Fuzzy Fuscaldo on rhythm.
[Roger Ames: CaptainBeefheart. People Weekly. September 1974]

Steve Lake: These people being 54-year-old ex-Charlie Parker clarinet and-all-other-reeds-man Del Simmons, guitarist Dean Smith and Fuzzy Fuscaldo (the latter recently with Curtis Mayfield), keyboard player Michael Smotherman from the now defunct Buckweat, bassist Paul Uhrig from Bobbie Gentry's group (!), and drummer Ty Grimes, fresh from Rick Nelson's Stone Canyon Band. Impeccable enough credentials for the average Los Angeles session, one imagines, but hardly the boys to get to grips with Big Eyed Beans From Venus or Ah Feel Like Ahcid.
[Steve Lake: Music is A Poor Second Every Time. Melody Maker. June 1974]