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Captain Beyond - Captain Beyond CD (album) cover

CAPTAIN BEYOND

Captain Beyond

 

Heavy Prog

4.00 | 289 ratings

From Progarchives.com, the ultimate progressive rock music website

ClemofNazareth
Special Collaborator
Prog Folk Researcher
3 stars Captain Beyond was formed in 1971 by two members of Iron Butterfly’s early 70s touring group, along with Johnny Winter’s drummer Bobby Caldwell. Longtime session singer Rod Evans auditioned as singer and was quickly hired. All three had just come off long tours and their respective groups were embarking on extended hiatus, but these musicians were either still interested in touring, or just needed the money.

The band’s name is rumored to have been suggested by Yes bassist Chris Squire, who ran into the group during a tour. Their debut was quickly recorded and released by Capricorn Records to very little fanfare, and even less promotion. The album is heavily- blues influenced, with the predictable murky production of cheap recording equipment that was so prevalent at the time. Only the lyrics and the occasional creative arrangement set them apart from dozens of similar groups of that day. The album starts quite strong, but struggles a bit toward the end.

“Dancing Madly Backwards (On a Sea of Air)” is a bit of a dig at the Haight-Asbury brand of hippies at a time when the flower-power era was fast coming to an end. Like much of the rest of the album, the references here are pretty dated:

“’cause I’m not sitting on the Golden Gate – love and peace and war and hate;

Well I’m not going to sit around and wait, all I’m a doing is losing my faith”.

These guys are pointing out that they are not a bunch of pot-smoking hippies (they’re just a bunch of pot-smoking singers in a rock and roll band,):

“We’re all on stage and that’s for sure, searching is endless when there ain’t no cure”.

The music is straight-ahead blues with a southern tinge and pretty sparse – guitar, drums, bass and piano, but the various percussion instruments and some slide guitar add a little spice.

“Armworth” is one of the more unique anti-war songs I’ve heard. Again, a bit dated, as this album came out as the Vietnam War was gasping its last breaths. This is a bitter, reflective tune about a guy who’s lost an arm in battle, and is trying to find some meaning or reason to attach to the loss:

“Where did they put it fella’, where and which way?

Did it start the mad charge that the enemy made, or is it with my brother in a meaningless grave?”

The mostly instrumental “Myopic Void” is a spacey, psychedelic ditty that emphasizes the Johnny Winter influence on the band. There’s a short meaningless chorus toward the end, something about dancing on the ceiling, but this is just a short blues rant with some funky slide guitar and pulsating rhythm.

“Mesmerization Eclipse” is obviously a song about being stoned, very heavy with a twanging guitar riff and rolling drums. Imagine Ronnie Van Zant singing along to Jimi Hendrix’ guitar and you get the idea.

The next song appears on the album, but was rarely sung live for whatever reason. “Raging River of Fear” has a tempo that is reminiscent of Creedance Clearwater Revival, but the vocals are all southern-fried rock. This is about fear, apprehension, maybe even dread, all emotions that many of us were feeling leading up to the mid-70s, with lots of social changes going on, political turmoil, and racial tensions becoming violent across much of the country. This actually sounds a lot like some of the stuff Santana was doing around the same time – layered harmonic vocals, extended instrumental passages heavy on guitar, and a thundering drum finale. The last of the great 70s blues band sounds.

“Thousand Days of Yesterdays” is a nostalgic piece of longing for simpler days that we all felt slipping away in 1972 (boy, if we only knew just how far the slide would be!). This is slow, sad, reflective, mellow, lots of cymbals and bells, spacey vocals, and a respite with “Frozen Over” before the song picks up again for a few more minutes of the same.

“Frozen Over” is an Allman Brothers clone musically, and the lyrics suggest this is a song about a drug overdose by some chick –

“Ah, your face is frozen over, it’s not the one I knew; honey your face is frozen as can be – baby your face is like a block of ice, cold as the deep dark sea”.

“I Can’t Feel Nothin’” is another two-part work, this with what sounds like some dull cow- bell (very appropriate for the early 70s), soaring blues licks, and staccato vocals, another hazy stoned song with nothing to really set it apart other than some pretty decent extended blues jam toward the end. This album was recorded in just two days shortly after the members got together after finishing long tours with their respective former bands, so it’s inevitable that there would be some filler.

“As the Moon Speaks” is a kind of spoken-word/chanting psychedelic jaunt across the brain, just another head-trip tune to fill some space, punctuated by a short jam burst titled “Astral Lady”.

The album wraps up with two short reprises, one of “As the Moon Speaks”, and the other for “I Can’t Feel Nothin’”, the latter being the heaviest groove yet, and a strong finish to the album.

Captain Beyond was a super-group of sorts in 1972, not as much for the actual players in the band as for the stature of the bands they had just come from. The band’s management at the time must have been terrible, since they were not given exposure through a nationwide tour (even though there were tours aplenty across the U.S. in those days). They would release another album a year later adding brass, another guitar, organ, and plenty of percussion, but the sound was more muddled and less pure than the debut. A final album followed later in the decade, but by then the band was attempting to cash in with a harder formula rock sound and didn’t manage to set themselves apart enough to challenge the heavy rotation of southern-rock bands flooding the market, and the players largely drifted apart with some returning to established groups and others simply fading away. This first album was definitely their peak.

This is not the kind of music that will likely appeal to fans of the 70s European progressive rock sound, but for those who favor groups like Cream, Uriah Heep, Deep Purple, Iron Butterfly, Babe Ruth, and other blues-influenced music, this is an very interesting period piece that makes for a few good listens and some nostalgic wanderings into the distant musical past. Probably three and a half stars, but I’ll go with three.

peace

ClemofNazareth | 3/5 |

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