This week a short story involving Don Van Vliet DBA Captain Beefheart and vegetables. It was embedded in a March 2015 post about Pat Robertson and stoners being “enslaved to vegetables.” I am not making this up.

I’ve edited the post for your amusement. I find veggies quite funny.

Here we go:

I saw Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band open for Frank Zappa  right after the latter had a semi-hit album with Apostrophe. It wasn’t the usual Zappa crowd; it was sprinkled with people who thought Don’t Eat The Yellow Snow was the cat’s ass. Beefheart finally got pissed off by the talkative yahoos in the audience and said, “Playing to you people is like trying to turn pickles back into cucumbers”

One could even say he was bongo furious.

2022 Update: I googled “Captain Beefheart and pickles” and found a different variation on that quote from that long ago night at Winterland in San Francisco: “It’s like playing for a jar of pickles and trying to turn them back into cucumbers.”

Here’s a third variation on the Pickles & Beefheart theme: “It’s like singing into a jar of pickles, trying to turn them back into cucumbers.”

Memory is a funny thing.

Who’s right? Beat the hell outta me.

That concludes this edition of rock Rashomon.

Since the spotlight is on Captain Beefheart, he gets the last word: