Track Listing

1. I'm Gonna Booglarize You Baby
2. White Jam
3. Blabber 'n' Smoke
4. When It Blows Its Stacks
5. Alice In Blunderland
6. Spotlight Kid
7. Click Clack
8. Grow Fins
9. There Ain't No Santa Claus On The Evenin' Stage
10. Glider
11. Low Yo Yo Stuff
12. Nowadays A Woman's Gotta Hit A Man
13. Too Much Time
14. Circumstances
15. My Head Is My Only House Unless It Rains
16. Sum Zoom Spark
17. Clear Spot
18. Crazy Little Thing
19. Long Neck Bottles
20. Her Eyes Are A Blue Million Miles
21. Big Eyed Beans From Venus
22. Golden Birdies

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4297 in Music
• Released on: 1990-12-03
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .22 pounds

Amazon.co.uk Review
These two albums, which appear on one CD in reverse chronological order, capture Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart consolidating his position here as the greatest surrealist white bluesman of the 20th century. The Spotlight Kid is relatively subdued and rambling by Beefheart's standards, with his Magic Band never quite lifting off. That said, "White Jam" is poignant in a Mad Hatter sort of way, while "I'm Gonna Booglarise You Baby" and "Click Clack" more than pass muster. The earlier Clear Spot, however, may well be Beefheart's finest album. Stax horns jostle with Zoot Horn Rollo's zig-zagging slide guitar, with producer Ted Templeman keeping all the deranged lateral musical thinking of "Nowadays A Woman's Gotta Hit A Man" and "Sun Zoom Spark" tightly ravelled up for maximum impact. Moods range from the bizarrely soulful "Too Much Time" to the spacebound bottleneck frenzy of "Big Eyed Beans From Venus". --David Stubbs

CD Description
After the unique TROUT MASK REPLICA, Beefheart moved slowlyto what we mortals would call music, very much like the stuff on SAFE AS MILK. His "music from Venus" had never been quite so easy on the ear and CLEAR SPOT was a hit album, of sorts. Nobody other than John Lennon has been able to approximate the English language so brilliantly as this man. How canyou resist "My Head Is My Only House Unless It Rains" or "Her Eyes Are A Blue Million Miles?" The Captain can also foolus with a real love song, the sublime "Too Much Time".

Customer Reviews

This album could ruin your CD collection
If this is the first time you've been tempted to buy Beefheart you've probably had him recommended by a friend whose taste you trust. You should love your friend for you are about to inahbit the world of one the towering geniuses of twentieth century music.
Think of Howling Wolf on Acid and a collection of musicians at the cutting edge of their profession and you aren't even close. But don't get the idea this is incoherency masquerading as avante gardist elitism. Its the real thing and it manages to sound deeply knowledgeable about its Delta Blue's ancestory as well as predicting nearly everything of worth in the history of popular music.
What is so rewarding about these albums is that the more you listen to them the better they get. Beefheart's voice is an amazing instrument and the musicianship of the instrumentalists is more of the quality you would expect in a Jazz outfit.
In terms of single-minded uniqueness I can only think of Hendrix and Tom Waits who are comparable.
Beefheart's is perhaps the least commercialy known of a generation of musicians including the Rolling Stones, The Doors, Janis Joplin and Hendrix who all, in their own way, interpreted the legacy of the Delta Blues in their own way. I think time will show that it is at least arguable that out of this generation his was the most authentic and incindiary.
Buy it and ruin the rest of your CD collection.

Clear Spot blows every album ever made into Outer Space.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Spotlight Kid, blah, blah, blah. I thought I was really cool listening to Spotlight Kid and Trout Mask Replica in my bedroom that time. But let me tell you about the real deal: CLEAR SPOT. Whether you know it or not, this is an all-time classic record. Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band take RHYTHM and BLUES and pump it so full of electricity and passion and tenderness and crazy poetry that it just about blows apart. This is music for the heart and mind and body and who knows what else? It has a psychedelic edge that cuts into you with verve. Ever heard a gravel voice like that? Ever been picked up by rhythms and flung clean across the room? This album was made by a bunch of men in the desert. Don't ask me why. Get real. Get clear. Get CLEAR SPOT. 5 thousand twinkling stars.

Incendiary avant-garde blues rock!
I picked this up about four years ago at a time when I was fed up with hearing variations of a 'standard' type of music and it totally refreshed me to hear something that is at once familiar and yet strikingly new.

Clear Spot is heavy metal blues, 1972 style. It is arguably Beefheart's most "commercial" album (all things being relative), and while it doesn't match the avant-garde oddness of Trout Mask Replica, the application of Beefheart's musical and rhythmical preoccupations into something approaching a standard verse-chorus-verse formula allows the Magic Band to demonstrate just how exciting and fresh 'traditional' song structures can be made to sound. "Low Yo Yo Stuff", "Nowadays a Woman's Got to Hit a Man", "Crazy Little Thing", "Long Neck Bottles", "Big Eyed Beans From Venus", "Sun Zoom Spark" and the title track are taut, tight four-minute bursts of energy. None of them are exactly "blues", but they are certainly the extended family of the blues tradition, with slide guitar leads; harmonica breaks and gravelly, half-narrated vocals.

Part of what makes this album so special is the range of percussive rhythms that underpin most of the "standard" song structures. Long before Paul Simon upped and left for Africa, the Magic Band's rhythm section were producing a "push-pull" effect of contrasting rhythm, similar in effect to the native percussions of Africa and Latin-America. Each player has a definite rhythmic part and the way these parts fit together is the secret of this album. While the songs might sound straightforward, listening to the underlying drum beats and timings really throws you off-guard again, and keeps the music sounding fresh.

You also get the Stax-soul era "Too Much Time", complete with female backing singers and a rasping horn section - possibly Beefheart's most commercial track ever recorded (it got plenty of airplay on the Motown stations until it was discovered that Beefheart wasn't quite the act they thought he was) - and unusually for Beefheart, two love songs. The beautiful "Her Eyes Are A Blue Million Miles", used in the Big Lebowski soundtrack but in context here and all the better for it, and "My Head Is My Own House Unless It Rains", which is in equal parts Delta Blues, Big Star and something else which is undefinable but strangely addictive.

Warner rereleased this album as a double with 'The Spotlight Kid' which isn't in the same league in my opinion, but still offers "White Jam" and "When It Blows, It Stacks" for company. If you've ever wanted to gamble on an album to kick off the mystery of Beefheart, I'd really recommend that this double album is the one to get.