Ice Cream for Crow

While Ice Cream for Crow was being produced, Herb Cohen had settled his lawsuit with Frank Zappa over the latter withholding the master tapes to Captain Beefheart's unreleased Bat Chain Puller album.[3] As a cost-saving measure, Don Van Vliet proposed that 3 recordings from Bat Chain Puller - "Human Totem Pole", "Odd Jobs", and "81 Poop Hatch" - be included on Ice Cream for Crow.[4] Zappa ultimately refused this request, and Vliet was left to rework an outtake version of Human Totem Pole, and hastily compose "Skeleton Makes Good" in one evening (although the acappella "81 Poop Hatch" was in fact included from Vliet's own copy of the Bat Chain Puller tape). The songs "Ice Cream For Crow", "Semi-Multicolored Caucasian", "The Past Sure Is Tense" and "The Witch Doctor Life" had also been written for earlier albums but not used.[3]

According to Vliet's biographer Mike Barnes, "the most original and vital tracks [on the album] are the newer ones." Thus, Ice Cream for Crow, while rooted in past musical ideas, points toward a new musical direction for Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band. Indeed, Barnes writes that the album "feels like an hors-d'oeuvre for a main course that never came".[5]

The album cover features a painting by Van Vliet and a portrait photo of him by Anton Corbijn. A music video was made to promote the title track, directed by Van Vliet and Ken Schreiber, with cinematography by Daniel Pearl, which was rejected by MTV for being "too weird". However, the video was included in the Letterman broadcast on NBC-TV, and was accepted into the Museum of Modern Art, where it has been used in several of their programs related to music.[6][7] Van Vliet explained in a 1982 interview on Late Night with David Letterman that the album's title represented the contrast between the black of a crow and the white of vanilla ice cream.[8]

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[9]
Robert Christgau	A−[10]
The Rolling Stone Album Guide	[11]
Spin Alternative Record Guide	9/10[12]

Robert Christgau gave the album an A−, saying, "Ornette or no Ornette, the Captain's sprung delta atonality still provides surprising and irreducible satisfactions, but his poetry repeats itself more than his ideas warrant. Any surrealist ecologist who preaches the same sermon every time out is sure to provoke hostile questions from us concrete-jungle types."[10] The New York Times wrote that "the stripped-down instrumentation and the absence of decoration in Cliff R. Martinez's sparse drumming serve to emphasize the classicism of the melodies and rhythmic patterns."[13] The Globe and Mail noted that "the real strength of Captain Beefheart ... is his mind-boggling and apocalyptic lyrics, which often suggest the hallucinogenic humorous, scatalogical and dreadful spiels of William Burroughs."[14]

Ned Raggett of AllMusic called the album "a last entertaining blast of wigginess from one of the few truly independent artists in late 20th century pop music, with humor, skill, and style all still intact", with the Magic Band "turning out more choppy rhythms, unexpected guitar lines, and outré arrangements, Captain Beefheart lets everything run wild as always, with successful results". Raggett says that Beefheart's "entertainingly outrageous" spoken word performances are successfully cohered with the Magic Band's "insanely great arrangement."[9] Disc jockey John Peel, in his narration to the BBC documentary The Artist Formerly Known as Captain Beefheart, called Ice Cream for Crow one of Captain Beefheart's best albums.[15]

• Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet) – vocals, harmonica, soprano sax, Chinese gongs, prop horn
• Jeff Moris Tepper – steel appendage guitar, slide guitar, acoustic guitar
• Richard "Midnight Hatsize" Snyder – bass guitar, marimba, viola
• Gary Lucas – glass-finger guitar, slide guitar, guitar, National steel duolian
• Cliff R. Martinez – drums, shake bouquet, glass washboard, metal drums

Additional personnel

• Eric Drew Feldman – Rhodes piano, synthesized bass
• Janet Van Vliet and Jeff Moris Tepper – production assistance
• Don Van Vliet – arranger and producer
• Phil Brown – engineer and mastering

(The descriptions "steel-appendage guitar" and "glass-finger guitar" were Beefheartian coinages for slide guitar, respectively using a metal tube or a glass "bottleneck" on the fret finger. Similarly, "shake bouquet" is his name for the maracas.)