You can hardly beat going to a show in the Sports Arena when it comes to things like parking the car and walking thru nightshirt dairy vibrations and approaching, across railroad tracks, that funky building with the neon bewilderment “SPORTS ARENA-DANCING” And inside: arcane trophies, painted concrete walls, wooden floor, ringside, bleachers, fans, gas station grand opening plastic pennants—and wagon wheel light fixtures that evoke a whole 1950’s Atlanta country music scene that flourished there, I’m told, with the T.V, Wranglers from T.V. Ranch-Tennessee and Smitty Smith, Cotton Carrier, Paul Rice and silent Boots Woodall. And that sports microphone hanging from the ceiling that evokes another hunk of Atlanta 50’s-60’s TV/Municipal Auditorium Essence: that whole thing with Ed Capral, Tiger Kirkland, Ray Gunkle and Freddy Blassie filing a tooth into a fang to bite all those pencil-neck, grit-eating Geek southerners while Skull Murphy tapped the steel plate in his head and hid salt for his opponents’ eyes in his trunks, and Promoter Paul Jones putting Sputnik Monroe on the card at the Larry Bell Auditorium in Marietta.

Yes, the Sports Arena is some place and there’s a new vibration layer being put down by Grateful Deads and Beefhearts. Instead of “Dim Lights, Thick Smoke and Loud, Loud Music,” working class country music/ dance hall/honky tonk/Live Atlanta Wrestling patrons the Sports Arena is becoming a gathering place for freaks, longhairs and the Woodstock Altamont generation.

Well, what’d they hear at the Beefheart/Cooder/ Booger concert? What’d you hear? I heard Booger do what sounded like the same song a number of times. Maybe they’re going somewhere with that wah-wah Urgle machine plus static drum pattern music, but right now it fails to tickle my musical fancy.

And Ry Cooder? He seemed like a real nice guy who should. find a good band to play guitar for and stop coming on with those blackface vocals. He was able to transcend this whiteboy-playin’-de-bues thing in the guitar work. There was, some real nice rock and roll there sometimes. He sure had a good looking set of holy trinity guitars: a Fender, a Gibson and wasn’t that a new series Martin D-45? Cooder’s mandolin thing didn’t work out too well, but his work on the Stones’ “‘Love in Vain” proves that he can play it fine sometimes—his break is the best thing in the midst of that Jagger-singing-de-blues vocal-(comparable to the misbegotten “Prodigal Son” on Beggar’s Banquet).

And Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band!? First of all, let me admit my prejudice in favor of musicians who just get up and play and do what comes naturally (no matter how crazy it may be). So at first I was disturbed at the “dramatic” nature of the Magic Band’s visuals—for example, Ed Marimba?) and Rockette Morton(?) coming out on stage and staring sinisterly at the people, and that choreographed double drum solo with the whistle mallet, and Morton’s shades-of-Joe Maphis-guitar jive dance frenzy (which I appreciated in the end because he never stopped—what unbelievable endurance!). But these people aren’t just any group. What they do and what they play, if reports are true, is almost totally dictated by Don Van Vliet/Beefheart. And what they do is put on a show. And what they play are incredibly tight, complex compositions. An article in Rolling Stone says Beefheart (who doesn’t read music) teaches those drum solos and guitar parts to his men lick for lick.

I never could understand any of the lyrics and my main memory of the vocals is that Beefheart could sing bass to a fog horn. But his soprano sax playing struck me as funny, irritating and great. I’ve heard very little of and know next to nothing about Coltrane/Ornette Coleman/EricDolphy/Archie Shepp approach to music, but I’ve got a feeling Beefheart may belong on that list; perhaps his real place is at the beginning of a list that is just starting to evolve. To be sure, there were times that I began thinking how incredible it would have been had they stopped a piece after those wonderful passages that just built and spronged out in cosmic power instead of continuing to the point where I’d get a little bored and start thinking about the music instead of listening to and experiencing it. But just as I would feel somewhat bored and begin to wonder what was happening, like at the intermission of “2001” the first time I saw it, they’d be back into a musical thing that would do what the Beyond Infinity Room sequence did—take me to the heart of what I sense as pure art/experience, powerful stuff that takes hold of your senses and mind and lets you go stunned into a blissful, puzzled consciousness that leads to an awareness of the weird and great things men and women can do, the power of which is only feebly conveyed by words.

Film director Joseph Losey (“Eva,” “The Servant,” “Accident”, and ” Secret Ceremony”) has said, ” Entertainment, to me, is anything that is so engrossing, so involves an audience singly or en masse, that their lives from that moment are totally arrested, and they are made to think and feel in areas and categories and intensities which aren’t part of their normal lives” (Cahiers du Cinema No. 9-American). Seeing Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band was that kind of entertainment. I’ve never heard their records, and I can’t imagine what it’s like to hear their music without seeing them do it. Anyway, I’d like to say thanks to the Captain, Rockette, Ed, Ghost-Who-Walks/Zoot Horn Rollo and the drummer whose name I don’t know. And thanx and a tip of the hat to Robin and Joe of the Twelfth Gate—fine people, may they help us enjoy more of the same quality.

—spud connah