1)
The Spotlight Kid. I read a review of this in
Creem when I was 15, and stumbled on a copy in the cutout bin at Just A Song in Albany a couple of years later. I couldn't really understand what he was doing, but I dug the rekkid's swampy rock ambience. The dumbass blues-rock fan in me responded to the blooze echoes in the train song "Click Clack." (When I was an Air Force instructor I used to do a walk on playing the harp intro to "Grow Fins.") And Eliot Ingber AKA Winged Eel Fingerling's gtr solo on "Alice In Blunderland" almost scared me to death.
2)
Strictly Personal. My second college roommate forced me to listen to this until I liked it. Ominous psychedelia thanks to Beefheart's manager Bob Krasnow, who overdubbed phasing effects on the tracks while the Magic Band was touring Europe, this also prepared me to hear stuff like Son House and R.L. Burnside. My terminal semester in college was spent very laboriously learning how to play "Kandy Korn" (and snorting angel dust). Confusingly, the song "Safe As Milk" (performed in Paris, 1980, in the clip below) appeared on this album and not on...
3)
Safe As Milk. Before Don was a psychedelic weirdo, the Magic Band was a desert blues band -- heroes to the bikers around Lancaster, California, who had a local hit with a cover of "Diddy Wah Diddy." This was their first album, a variegated and assured statement that includes blues simulacra, garage rock, sweet soul, twisted psych, and songs like "Electricity" and "Abba Zabba" that would remain live staples throughout Don's career.
4)
Trout Mask Replica. The acid test. As important of a record as, oh, I dunno, the first Velvet Underground album, and you can still clear a room with it. Bruce introduced me to it one track at a time. Dan McGuire reckons it's overrated, but his poetry-rock schtick owes a lot to
TMR (as do David Thomas', Tom Waits', Mick Farren's, etc.). Sounds like chaos, but it was through-composed (although not in eight hours, a bit of self-mythologizing claptrap Don spoon-fed
Rolling Stone's Langdon Winner) and subsequent Magic Bands would play the songs note-for-note up till the end. The "house sessions," released on Revenant's
Grow Fins box set, give you the instrumentals in better fidelity.
5)
Lick My Decals Off, Baby. The apex. In the same spirit as
TMR, but probably a better record, if only because by 1970, Harkleroad, Boston, and French had become so adept at following Don's direction, with Tripp's marimbas as the icing on the cake. "Peon" and "One Red Rose That I Mean," solo gtr laments, can make you weep.
6)
Clear Spot. Produced by Ted Templeman, who gave the world the Doobie Bros. and Van Halen, this was Don's idea of a commercial record, ca. '73. It has a clearer sound than anything he'd cut since
Safe As Milk, and more live staples ("Low Yo Yo Stuff," Nowadays A Woman's Gotta Hit a Man," "Big Eyed Beans From Venus"), a couple of which are essayed below by the peerless 1980 band.
7)
Mirror Man. Recorded in late '67 (not '65 like
St. Lester said), these four tracks (including an extended versh of "Kandy Korn" that I like real much) came from sessions to record an abortive second album that was to have been called
It Comes To You In A Plain Brown Wrapper. More (including songs that'd wind up on
Strictly Personal) first appeared in '92 on a Brit CD called
I May Be Hungry But I Sure Ain't Weird and have subsequently shown up as bonus tracks on reissues of
Safe As Milk and
Mirror Man. Sundazed just released 'em again on vinyl. So it goes.
8)
Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller). This came out the summer I moved to Texas, featuring the mainstays of the band Bruce and I saw twice in '77 (Tepper, Feldman, Williams), plus another gtrist and Bruce Fowler from Zappa's
Bongo Fury band (which we'd seen in Albany) on trombone. I didn't like it at the time -- I think I'd heard so many audience recorded bootleg versions of "Suction Print" that the clear studio recording sounded "not right" to my feedback-scorched ears. In the fullness of time, it sounds fine, and songs like "Tropical Hot Dog Night" and "Ice Rose" added something new to the canon. Based on the
Dust Sucker bootleg, I'd say this is a vast improvement over the
Shiny Beast album that Don recorded in 1975, which Gail Zappa apparently intends to keep locked in the vaults until nobody cares anymore. The doomy title track (rendered below by the 1980 band) was best.
9)
Doc At the Radar Station. I missed seeing Don when he came through in Dallas in '78 because I was unloading trucks behind the future Peaches while my boss schmoozed with label flacks inside. Feh. By the time Don cut this, the "new wave" had acknowledged his influence, and the band (Tepper, Feldman, Williams, Fowler, French) was a mix of old hands and new acolytes. For what it's worth, I think this is his best rekkid. Ask me sometime and I'll play "Flavor Bud Living" (which I practiced incessantly in 1997, when I lived upstairs from a kid who practiced "Spoon Man" on bass incessantly) for ya.
10)
Ice Cream for Crow. I got this on cassette when I was stationed in Korea. Don was recycling ideas from the '67
Plain Brown Wrapper time, and he sounded tired. It was no surprise when he announced he was retiring from music and going off to make art (and money). I think this is a fitting swan song.