Here's Captain Beefheart live in Paris, from 1973:
I wonder what the French made of Beefheart.
Many years ago I had a strange conversation with a young Frenchman – on a Greek island, as it happens – after it transpired that we shared an admiration for the Pretty Things. His English was about as bad as my French, so it wasn't easy. His favourite track was "Get the Picture?" from the eponymous album. "I'm gonna quit yer….get the picture?" This was, he was quite certain, a most profound lyric that required detailed analysis. No no, I said, it's perfectly simple: he's telling his woman he's going to leave her. Despite my best efforts, and the argument – to me a clincher – that really, I should know because after all I was the native English speaker, I was quite unable to convince him, and he left still believing he was right and that I was an idiot.
Imagine my surprise then, some years later, to read in an interview with the Pretties' lead vocalist Phil May that he had at that time beem heavily influenced by the phenomenological works of Edmund Husserl, and in particular his Logische Untersuchungen. In "Get the Picture?", apparently, he'd had the idea of expressing Husserl's central idea of the importance of the Whole – whereby the object ceases to be something simply "external" and seen as providing indicators about what it is, and becomes a grouping of perceptual and functional aspects that imply one another under the idea of a particular object or "type" – through the prism of a simple boy-girl relationship.
So maybe it's the French who are best placed to pick up on the sense of alienation and Kierkergaardian Despair that runs like a thread through the Beefheartian oeuvre -
Well I had this girl
Threatened 'n leave me all the time
Threatenin' t' go down t' N'Orleans-uh
'N get herself lost 'n found
Maybe you had uh girl like this
She's always threatenin' t' go down t' N'Orleans
'N get herself lost 'n found"
Perhaps Beefheart himself sensed this French affinity. What else could explain his live performance on the beach at Cannes of "Sure Nuff n Yes I Do"? Some nice slide guitar there – though of course this is early Beefheart, before his post-structuralist phase.
Mick Hartley 
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