BLUE MILLION MILES (Don Van Vliet) As Burroughs might have said each song, each painting "has a fish pond in it, quite a flower garden ... it's extraordinary if you really keep your ears and eyes open". Propulsive, unstoppable shipmate you are a dissident rasping at the helm: your vessel bears deadly musical cargo my captain, hallucinogenic cocktails torn from madness down the street. We all pray you will come stepping once as a phantom to serenade us, hoping not for an ominous barrage of noise but rhythmic codes and signature; that uncanny sense of overlapping riffs. Two words saturated with your presence: "Her Eyes", again and again fishing for a look into another to sense an ocean in "Her Eyes" that are a blue million miles further than you see, quietly crooning, curving your voice in line with the waves each sparse, raucous syllable clipped to reverberate gently as a piece of gravel is cosseted with silk. © Peter Gillies 2011 ARGONAUT i.m. Captain Beefheart '"Tell me, captain, why they go-- The hero-sailors, with the sky-bound eyes-- To shores that beckon--bailing clouds of surge?"' - Brian Louis Pearce, 'The Argonauts' Tell me, captain, why the fish face? The clowning stopped an age ago, once you'd run away from the circus and started brushing up on freedom, made colours sing out in the desert. You're off! Over the hills and far away with the fairies, the wind, a misplaced saxophone honk, disingenuous muttered asides, the half-forgotten mumble of MS. You're not gonna booglarize us anymore. Those days have gone. Today no longer reverberates, there is only your bad-ass blues in the electric howl of morning, our memories of where you might have been, your name scratched on the mirror, abandoned vinyl his- sing as you return to starpoint via clear spot, boogler risin' all the way. © Rupert M Loydell 2011