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Song heard late last night.

By Ann Althouse

Last night I finally entered the code that got XM radio paying on line ? I've had this feeling that I only want to listen to music in my car ? and I got back to Bob Dylan's radio show ? "Theme Time" ? the theme was "birds," and he played the craziest song:

Captain Beefheart singing "Ice Cream for Crows."

ADDED: Ben Ratliff wrote this in 2002:

Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, with its clashing meters, crisscrossing melody lines vaulting over wide intervals, and precision timing, was always several steps closer to jazz. ... [T]he great intuitive artist of rock, Captain Beefheart (born Don Van Vliet) ... is said to be in poor health, at home in Northern California after 20 years of forswearing music for a successful second career in oil painting....

[MTV turned down the] video for the song ''Ice Cream for Crow''... Apparently, the video was too arty for the channel. But Mr. Van Vliet himself made great television. By the time of [his 1982] Letterman appearance he could no longer be understood as a hippie: he was unique, a wearily abstract, imperiously folksy 41-year-old. Mr. Van Vliet strolled on the set with a water bottle in a paper bag. Mr. Letterman: ''Do you need a glass?'' Mr. Van Vliet: ''No, but the war is a pimple on the pope's pet dragon.'' A pause. ''What did I mean?''

What do the paintings look like? This.

AND: Why am I always forgetting the possibilities of the internet? Here:

AND: At the end of that Letterman clip, Van Vliet talks about living in the Arizona desert and how hot it is ? 114° ? and he doesn't sound as though he likes it. Letterman asks him why he lives there. Answer: "I love the tension, the discipline."

Full post as published by Althouse on March 10, 2008 (boomark / email).