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Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band: Lick My Decals Off, Baby

Lester Bangs, Creem, March 1971

GAZING ACROSS pop music's stale horizons, past all the cynical ineptitude, pseudo-intellectual solemnity, neurotic regression and dismal dead-ends for great bands, there is one figure who stands above the murk forging an art at once adventurous and human: Don Van Vliet, known to a culture he's making anachronistic as Captain Beefheart.

Total word count of piece: 2172

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