Beefheart News - Chuck Prophet, Robyn Hitchcock et al

I had been posting lately quite a bit of the wondrous Chuck Prophet thanks to the Sealyman and Robyn Hitchcock thanks to The Twilightzone but did anyone spot this?

From the Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band 

& Captain Beefeart Appreciation Society Facebook pages!

"Last Friday, an all-star ensemble celebrated the music of Captain Beefheart by performing the "Safe as Milk" LP in its entirety, along with a second set of deep cuts and classic tracks. ✨️🌟✨️ What a night! Photos: instagram.com/@aleril_antarai (9/29/2025)

Very Special Guests: Robyn Hitchcock, Shannon Shaw, Chuck Prophet, Nick Waterhouse, Cyril Jordan, Blag Dahlia, Kelley Stoltz, Lydia Walker.

The evening’s “Magic Band”: Joe Gore, Allyson Baker, Pete Straus, Warren Huegel, Marc Capelle, Jamin Barton, Meryl Theo Press.

DJ sets by David Katznelson

Visuals by Ether Wave

Folkyeah Presents

A portion of the proceeds + winning bids from the silent auction are being donated to Creativity Explored. Over 40 years of supporting artists with disabilities in San Francisco. ❤️"

 

 

The Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band Appreciation Society

Allyson Baker from the San Francisco rock band Dirty Ghosts has very kindly written something for this page about last Friday's event at the Chapel in San Francisco, celebrating Captain Beefheart's debut album Safe As Milk. Allyson was the musical director of the show and also one of the musicians playing on stage on the night. To watch the full show click on the link at the bottom of this post.

Here is Allyson's report on the show:

The project kind of got started, when I played guitar on two Beefheart songs live with Robyn Hitchcock and my husband, who drums for Robyn, early in 2025 in San Francisco. We had a lot of fun playing those tunes (Electricity and Zig Zag Wanderer) and talked about the possibility of doing more. Coincidentally at the end of the night Britt Govea, the head of Folkyeah! Presents, the promoter of the show told me of an idea that had been floating around his head of having all of Safe as Milk performed live with Robyn and other guest singers. Britt asked if I would musical direct to which I eagerly replied YES!

The next day Britt and I got to planning - I was given free reign to choose a band and make a setlist - Safe As Milk and second set of later material. I called all of the Beefheart diehard musicians and people who I imagined would be perfect for the show and assembled a great core band: Joe Gore on 2nd guitar, Warren Huegel on drums, Pete Straus on bass, Jamin Barton on theremin/harp/sax, Marc Capelle on trumpet and Meryl Theo Press and Lydia Walker on backup vocals. The band and I worked hard to get as close to sounding like the real thing as we could get.

We got an amazing cast of singers on board alongside Robyn: Shannon Shaw, Chuck Prophet, Kelley Stoltz, Blag Dahlia, Lydia Walker, Nick Waterhouse and Cyril Jordan of the Flamin Groovies who jumped on stage with his guitar for Diddy Wah Diddy.

It was an incredible night and I’m so thankful to everyone who came and those who were involved. There was so much love for Captain Beefheart in the room that night it was palpable. Wanted to share this with the other Beefheart fans out there who had heard about the show but proximity may have been an issue! You can find me on instagram @dirtyghosts and as more video/pix/audio surface I will post as it comes.

- Allyson Baker

Thanks again to Allyson for writing that piece exclusively for this page. Here is the video for the full event:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkXtRAqRAcs

Here is a link to the audio of the full event:

https://archive.org/.../beefheartcelebration2025-08-29t02...

YOUTUBE.COM

Captain Beefheart Tribute at The Chapel SF Aug 29th 2025

folkyeah presents Allyson Baker's Captain Beefheart tribute show at The Chapel in San Francisco on August 29 2025, performing all of Safe As Milk and more!Se...

Captain Beefheart Celebration evening SF Aug 29th 2025 Robyn Hitchcock et al

This from the Captain Beefheart Appreciation Society Facebook Page :Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band

 Allyson Baker from the San Francisco rock band Dirty Ghosts has very kindly written something for this page about last Friday's event at the Chapel in San Francisco, celebrating Captain Beefheart's debut album Safe As Milk. Allyson was the musical director of the show and also one of the musicians playing on stage on the night. To watch the full show click on the link at the bottom of this post.

Here is Allyson's report on the show:

The project kind of got started, when I played guitar on two Beefheart songs live with Robyn Hitchcock and my husband, who drums for Robyn, early in 2025 in San Francisco. We had a lot of fun playing those tunes (Electricity and Zig Zag Wanderer) and talked about the possibility of doing more. Coincidentally at the end of the night Britt Govea, the head of Folkyeah! Presents, the promoter of the show told me of an idea that had been floating around his head of having all of Safe as Milk performed live with Robyn and other guest singers. Britt asked if I would musical direct to which I eagerly replied YES!

The next day Britt and I got to planning - I was given free reign to choose a band and make a setlist - Safe As Milk and second set of later material. I called all of the Beefheart diehard musicians and people who I imagined would be perfect for the show and assembled a great core band: Joe Gore on 2nd guitar, Warren Huegel on drums, Pete Straus on bass, Jamin Barton on theremin/harp/sax, Marc Capelle on trumpet and Meryl Theo Press and Lydia Walker on backup vocals. The band and I worked hard to get as close to sounding like the real thing as we could get.

We got an amazing cast of singers on board alongside Robyn: Shannon Shaw, Chuck Prophet, Kelley Stoltz, Blag Dahlia, Lydia Walker, Nick Waterhouse and Cyril Jordan of the Flamin Groovies who jumped on stage with his guitar for Diddy Wah Diddy.

It was an incredible night and I’m so thankful to everyone who came and those who were involved. There was so much love for Captain Beefheart in the room that night it was palpable. Wanted to share this with the other Beefheart fans out there who had heard about the show but proximity may have been an issue! You can find me on instagram @dirtyghosts and as more video/pix/audio surface I will post as it comes.

- Allyson Baker

Thanks again to Allyson for writing that piece exclusively for this page. Here is the video for the full event:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkXtRAqRAcs

Here is a link to the audio of the full event:

https://archive.org/.../beefheartcelebration2025-08-29t02...

folkyeah presents Allyson Baker's Captain Beefheart tribute show at The Chapel in San Francisco on August 29 2025, performing all of Safe As Milk and more! Set 1: "Safe as Milk" 1 intro 2 The Dust Blows Forward ’n the Dust Blows Back 3 Sure 'Nuff 'N Yes I Do 4 Zig Zag Wanderer 5 Call on Me 6 Dropout Boogie 7 I'm Glad 8 Electricity 9 Yellow Brick Road 10 Abba Zaba 11 Plastic Factory 12 banter/tuning 13 Grown So Ugly 14 Autumn's Child Set 2: 15 Big Eyed Beans From Venus 16 Clear Spot 17 band intro 18 Moonlight On Vermont 19 Too Much Time 20 Apes-Ma 21 Hot Head 22 Ashtray Heart 23 Bat Chain Puller 24 Diddy Wah Diddy 25 (band intro) 26 Tropical Hot Dog Night Robyn Hitchcock - lead vocals (3,4,8,11,12,13,15,16,17,18,25,26) Lydia Walker - lead vocals (5,9,14) Kelley Stoltz- lead vocals, saxophone (6,10,20,21) Shannon Shaw - lead vocals (7) Chuck Prophet - lead vocals, electric guitar (19) Blag Dahlia (of Dwarves)- lead vocals (1,2,22,23) Nick Waterhouse - lead vocals, percussion (24) Joe Gore (of Tom Waits and PJ Harvey bands) - electric guitar Allyson Baker (of Dirty Ghosts) - electric guitar, musical director Peter Straus (of Dwarves) - electric bass Warren Huegel - drums Marc Capelle - flugelhorn Jamin Barton - saxophone, harmonica, theremin, backing vocals Meryl Theo Press - backing vocals Lydia Walker - backing vocals Cyril Jordan (of Flamin' Groovies) - electric guitar (24) video and audio processing - Douglas Hilsinger set listing and band credits - Michael Zelner

Robyn Hitchcock "Shadow Cat” 2008 | TWILIGHTZONE

 Robyn Hitchcock "Shadow Cat" 2008

Robyn Hitchcock is a wizard with an electric guitar and can create crackling, energetic rock & roll with the right band behind him, but sometimes it seems he's happiest when he's working all by his lonesome, and some of the finest albums in his catalog feature him in solo semi-acoustic mode (most notably I Often Dream of Trains and Eye)...
...Shadow Cat is an accidental sibling to these works, a collection of 14 solo Hitchcock tracks recorded between 1993 and 1999, most of which haven't surfaced before (though a version of "Statue with a Walkman" appeared on the vinyl edition of Storefront Hitchcock, the same album included another take on Jimi Hendrix's "The Wind Cries Mary," and "The Green Boy" surfaced on the outtakes compilation A Star for Bram). Some of these tracks can be politely described as experiments that don't quite work, most notably two a cappella numbers performed with the aid of a vocoder ("Because You're Over" and "Real Dot"), and a few are simply lesser compositions that don't sound especially memorable, such as "High on Yourself" and the truncated opener "For Debbie Reynolds." But for fans who like Hitchcock best when he's in a deep and atmospheric mood, Shadow Cat certainly has its rewards, and the languid "Baby Doll," the minimal but absorbing "Beautiful Shock," the stripped-down rock guitar figures of "Never Have to See You Again," and the ominous yet playful title cut are welcome examples of what Hitchcock does so well. Shadow Cat shouldn't be mistaken for a "new" Robyn Hitchcock album, but as a sampler of odds and ends from his notebooks it rescues a few worthy songs from an obscurity they don't deserve, and it's a fine reminder of why Hitchcock is still regarded as one of the most gifted and singular British songwriters around. - Review by Mark Deming

Robyn Hitchcock "This Is The BBC” 2006 | TWILIGHTZONE!

Robyn Hitchcock "This Is The BBC" 2006

This Is the BBC is an album by Robyn Hitchcock, released on the Hux Records label in April 2006...
...It rounds up fourteen tracks recorded for radio, primarily with Andy Kershaw between 1995 and 1999. It can therefore be viewed as a sequel piece to The Kershaw Sessions. The tracks cover Hitchcock's contemporary material at the time of recording, and include a version of the evocative "I Saw Nick Drake" with lyrical amendments. It also includes a cover of Bob Dylan's "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry". The packaging features Hitchcock's artwork and significantly utilises a painting by his father Raymond as a cover, which dates to 1954. (Raymond Hitchcock is also pictured in the booklet.) - wiki

ride your pony here . . . .  

ALBUM RE-POST of THE WEEK! Robyn Hitchcock "Spooked” 2004 | Twilightzone

Robyn Hitchcock "Spooked" 2004

Robyn Hitchcock enlisted the help of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings for Spooked-- his first full-length collaboration (not counting, of course, The Soft Boys and The Egyptians)-- and, consequently, it's the most "American" album he's ever made. The record is a departure from Hitchcock's usual eccentric left-of-the-dial pop, a left turn almost as unique as the story behind the album's creation: One of Hithcock's friends sent him a photo of the coronation of a new Miss Ohio named Robyn Hitchcock; the coincidence reminded the English singer of a striking live performance of Gillian Welch's "Miss Ohio"... - Pitchfork

Sometime after the release of 2003's sparse and slightly chilly Luxor, Robyn Hitchcock attended his first Gillian Welch show. Impressed by the duo's rootsy adherence to the organic -- two guitars, two voices -- he approached the longtime fans -- Hitchcock unknowingly signed David Rawlings' guitar at a Boston in-store in 1989 -- and exchanged digits. The unlikely partnership came to fruition at Nashville's Woodland Studios a few months later, and in just six days the lovely, intimate, and typically eccentric Spooked was born. Produced by Rawlings and culled from hours of off-the-cuff originals, Dylan songs, and general weirdness, Spooked harks back to his mercurial I Often Dream of Trains period. References to fungus and food abound, but wrapped in the wooly blankets of Rawlings' signature picking and Welch's winsome harmonies, they take on a fireplace warmth that renders them amiably nostalgic rather than blatantly surreal. On the dew-soaked opener, "Television," Rawlings lays down a beautiful descending lead that wouldn't have sounded out of place on the duo's debut, and its juxtaposition with Hitchcock's "bing a bon a bing bong" vocal entrance is jarring, but when the three of them come together mid-song to harmonize, the results are quietly majestic. Much of the record revisits -- musically at least -- Hitchcock's colorful past. "Everybody Needs Love," with its breathy urgency and electric sitar, sounds like something off of Element of Light, and the lurching "Creeped Out" -- featuring Welch on drums -- could have been the B-side to 1985's "Brenda's Iron Sledge." This is Hitchcock's most rewarding and creative endeavor since 1993's Egyptian-led Respect, and the fact that Rawlings and Welch are there as eager tools to flesh out his English netherworld makes the fellowship feel even more collaborative. It's a testament to both camps' willingness to try anything -- hearing Welch and Rawlings repeating "crackle, crackle, pop" beneath Hitchcock's spoken word sales pitch to extraterrestrials looking to vacation on Earth is a pretty good example -- that ultimately succeeds in making Spooked the left-field gem that it is. - Review by James Christopher Monger

tracklist:

01 Television 

02 If You Know Time 

03 Everybody Needs Love 

04 English Girl 

05 Demons & Fiends 

06 Creeped Out 

07 Sometimes A Blonde 

08 We're Gonna Live In The Trees 

09 Tryin' To Get To Heaven Before They Close The Door 

10 Full Moon In My Soul 

11 Welcome To Earth 

12 Flanagan's Song

Television . . . . . Robyn Hitchcock

Robyn Hitchcock "Groovy Decoy” 1985 | TWILIGHTZONE

Robyn Hitchcock "Groovy Decoy" 1985

Four years after its release, Robyn Hitchcock pulled Groovy Decay from circulation, replacing it with Groovy Decoy, an alternate version of the record assembled mainly from demos he recorded with Soft Boys bassist Matthew Seligman. . .

. . .the album included some versions that are identical to the Decay material, as well as a handful of new songs. By and large, Groovy Decoy is a better record, with more immediate and gripping versions of the songs that comprised the original album, but the material remains some of the weakest Hitchcock has written. 

~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide

Personnel:
Robyn Hitchcock (vocals, guitar); James A. Smith (vocals); Anthony Thistlethwaite (saxophone); Chris Cox (trumpet); Andy Metcalfe (piano); Matthew Seligman, Sara Lee(bass); Rod Johnson (drums) 

traxfromwax:
1. Fifty-Two Stations 2. America 3. St. Petersburg 4. Nightride To Trinidad 5. How Do You Work This Thing? 6. The Cars She Used To Drive 7. It Was The Night 8. Young People Scream 9. The Rain 10. When I Was A Kid 11. Midnight Fish

Robyn Hitchcock "Black Snake Diamond Role” 1981 | TWILIGHTZONE

 Now we haven’;t posted any uploads from  RYP over at TWILIGHTZONE for a while apart from sharing his posts of the Chuck Prophet stuff he clearly share a love of but we share his interest in Robyn Hitchcock too!

Robyn Hitchcock "Black Snake Diamond Role" 1981

"For all his weirdness, Hitchcock starts out his career in a reverent fashion. The Byrds and John Lennon are all over this, and it's welcome. Two other ex-Soft Boys back him up, along with Psychedelic Fur drummer Vince Ely. So in that sense, BSDR isn't all that different from Underwater Moonlight by the Soft Boys the previous year. And that's another good thing.
The album opens with quite a surprise in "The Man Who Invented Himself." This bouncy, melodic song is built on piano and horns, and you wonder if there wasn't a disc mix-up at the factory. But then Robyn's trademark lyrics hit you:
When you need her love so badly, and she's trying to relax;
You can't work it with your fingers, so you try it with an ax.
Um, okay.
"Brenda's Iron Sledge" again sounds fairly conventional (and rocks a bit harder), but then you hear about Brenda shoveling liverwursts onto a barge for some reason. Note to Americans - "sledge" in this case refers to a barge, rather than a heavy hammer. "Do Policemen Sing?" returns Robyn to his familiar deranged universe, as he twists a Lennon line into a Barrett-like paranoid curiosity. On "The Lizard," Hitchcock actually sounds like The Doors.
The real highlight of the record is "Acid Bird," which almost sounds like a tribute to "Eight Miles High," as opposed to being an actual cover of it. "City of Shame" has more funny lyrics. And "Love" is a truly gorgeous, mellow tune with some unexpected vocal harmonies.
A really great start to a unique solo career. Recommended to most rock fans, although his later material will not appeal to many of them." reviever: astradyne2

The Band:

Robyn Hitchcock: Bass, Vocals, Guitar, Keyboards, Piano 

Kimberley Rew: Guitar 

Matthew Seligman: Bass 

 Morris Windsor: Drums, 

Vocals / James Smith: 

Vocals / Knox: 

Guitar / Rob Appleton: 

Vocals / Gary Barnacle: 

Saxophone / Vince Ely: 

Drums / Howie Gilbert: 

Vocals / Thomas Dolby: Ocean