This is part five of my exploration of Captain Beefheart’s Ten Commandments of Guitar Playing. If you’re just coming across this post, you should start with the first post. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading them. Please leave a comment if you have any additions or thoughts on things I may have missed or misinterpreted.

9. Keep your guitar in a dark place

When you’re not playing your guitar, cover it and keep it in a dark place. If you don’t play your guitar for more than a day, be sure you put a saucer of water in with it.

These last two commandments are related. They are both about the care and feeding of your creativity. The first is about respecting your talent. Treat it as a living thing.

Don’t neglect it or take it for granted when you’re not using it. Put it in a dark place so that it’s completely turned off. You’re not letting your car idle in the garage, you’ve got it stored entirely away under a protective barrier. Make sure it’s fed and watered and comfortable, but that it’s hibernating.

Also, notice that he mentions not using it for more than a day as an exception. You should use it every day, but if you do spend more than a day without using it, let it know you’re still thinking about it.

His dish of water is, of course, metaphorical, I think you can “water” your creativity by consuming related art from other people. Read, listen to music, watch a movie, just make sure that you are getting information and experiences that when you pick it back up will inform what you do. Take a trip to a museum, walk through a field of flowers or volunteer somewhere.

10. You gotta have a hood for your engine

Keep that hat on. A hat is a pressure cooker. If you have a roof on your house, the hot air can’t escape. Even a lima bean has to have a piece of wet paper around it to make it grow.

Just like you’ve got to treat your creativity like a living thing, you can’t let it roam around free in the wild. You’ve got to create a habitat for it. There has to be a fence around the field where you keep it.

When you’re charged up and in the middle of a creative burst, you’ll feel like you can do anything, but you shouldn’t. Keep yourself contained. Set limitations for yourself about what you’re trying to accomplish.

Maybe it’s just picking a song to master or writing a short story. Focusing on one project lets you put all the horsepower produced by your engine into one thing, no wasted energy or confusion.

Whether you’re writing a children’s book or a blues song, decide what your project is and focus on that. All the heat from your heater will be keeping that project warm during the coldest moments.

Make decisions that limit what the project is so that you can finish it. People that never complete things are continually moving the target for what the project is and what finished means. If you say you’re going to write a poem on a postcard and mail it to yourself every day, you’ve limited the length of the poem, and you know that each one has to be done before the mail gets picked up. Sometimes it’s not going to be a great poem, but you’ll be finishing things and creating.

If you place the right limitation on yourself, the right hat on your head or wet piece of paper towel on your bean, your talent will grow. The number of projects you complete will grow, and they will be better than you think possible.

This is part two of my personal exploration of Captain Beefheart’s Ten Commandments of Guitar Playing. You can read the first part here.

3. Practice in front of a bush

Wait until the moon is out, then go outside, eat a multi-grained bread and play your guitar to a bush. If the bush doesn’t shake, eat another piece of bread.

Play until that bush shakes. Sustain yourself with the basics, eat and drink and wait for the moment when you think all the forces have gathered and then let loose. Does the bush shake? Does the earth quake? Then, your practice is over. If not, circle your wagons and try again.

The interesting thing is that the bush isn’t capable of reacting. Is the guitar playing like a strong wind? Is it the vibrations? The force of the playing?

Nope, it’s you.

You decide when you’re ready. You know when the bush shakes or the tree cries or the rock in your garden explodes with laughter. It’s inside your head.

Don’t listen to other people. You’re the judge. If you can’t handle it yet, practice in front a bush until it shakes.

It reminds me of a zen story about a master who told his student to meditate on an ox until he understood it. When the student failed, the teacher told him he had to stay in his hut until he had a total understanding of the ox. After a week, the teacher came by and asked again. The student said he still did not understand the ox. The teacher said, “You may leave the hut now if you want, but you can never return.”

The student tried but found he couldn’t leave. When the teacher asked why, the student said, “I can’t get out the door. My horns are too wide to fit.”

Practice until the bush shakes. It’s probably already shaking and you just haven’t noticed yet.

4. Walk with the devil

Old Delta blues players referred to guitar amplifiers as the “devil box.” And they were right. You have to be an equal opportunity employer in terms of who you’re bringing over from the other side. Electricity attracts devils and demons. Other instruments attract other spirits. An acoustic guitar attracts Casper. A mandolin attracts Wendy. But an electric guitar attracts Beelzebub.

Are you too meek in your art? What are kinds of ideas are you trying to attract? Do you think you’re being dangerous, flirting with the dark side and you’re attracting Casper the Friendly Ghost?

Dare to be loud. Don’t let fear hold you back from fully exploring your ability to create. Flirt with the darkness and see what’s there. It’s not that the good stuff comes solely from the darkness, but if you never go there, you’re cutting yourself off from a vast source of inspiration.

Also, you can choose to whisper your art or to limit your release of it, but you can also face your fear directly and sometimes bring over devils and demons from the other side. They’re always there, what happens when we recognize them and explore them instead of denying their existence?

The fact that you have an amplifier means you can play it louder and share it with more people.

Use the tools at your disposal to face your fears and shame, to summon the forces you want. Make sure you’re being challenged. Walk with the devil for a while and see where it leads.

After all, you don’t have to show anyone else what you’ve created until the bush shakes.

Read part three here

A few years ago, I posted Captain Beefheart’s 10 Commandments of Guitar Playing. You can read that post to see all of them, but this week I wanted to take some time to comment on them a few at a time. HIs list is different than most “how to be creative” lists because it’s a poem, a magic spell and yet it still has very practical advice embedded in it.

Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet) was an outsider musician famous for his unique sensibilities, intensity and for doing things like kicking a drummer of out of his band for being unable to follow the instruction to “play a strawberry.” Instead of struggling to be original, he seemed instead to be trying to find a way to make his endless creativity intersect with the rest of the world.

I am giving my imperfect interpretations below. Please leave your take in the comments.

Captain Beefheart’s 10 Commandments of Guitar Playing

1. Listen to the birds

That’s where all the music comes from. Birds know everything about how it should sound and where that sound should come from. And watch hummingbirds. They fly really fast, but a lot of times they aren’t going anywhere.

He’s not saying to mimic the songs of the birds, which you might assume since this list is about music, but to look at their method. Their music is not something they decide to do, it’s part of who they are. Birds don’t sit in front of a piano feeling anxiety about being able to write a top ten hit or a perfect love song. They don’t struggle to come up with something to sing, they know where it comes from so they have to let it out. They don’t make mistakes because it’s not possible for them to sing something that they wouldn’t sing. They just keep going with their endless song.

“Birds know everything” because they have no presuppositions about how their music should sound. There is nothing to know. Our knowing how it should sound or directing it to sound like we want gets in the way. Listen to the bird, don’t critique the bird or try and convince the bird to sing something else.

And, don’t forget the hummingbirds going full speed even when they aren’t going anywhere. They aren’t waiting for inspiration. Their effort is not based on a destination or a goal. While listening to the bird is wonderful, don’t forget to take action.

Constant effort based on your true self is his first commandment.

“Listen to the birds” could be read to mean, figure out who you are and put all your effort into being that thing without pretense or judgment.

2. Your guitar is not really a guitar

Your guitar is a divining rod. Use it to find spirits in the other world and bring them over. A guitar is also a fishing rod. If you’re good, you’ll land a big one.

Never mistake the tools of your art for the art itself. Your word processor is not a word processor. Your paintbrush is not a paintbrush. Your ballet shoes are not ballet shoes. They are tools that take the spirits in the other world and transform them into something in the real world. They are what you use to find the ideas you need.

It’s interesting that Captain Beefheart also uses a magical example and a real-world example for this one. A divining rod, or dowsing rod, was a forked stick that you could use to find water underground using spiritual or pseudo-scientific means. So, both a fishing pole and a dowsing rod are used by a person above a giant hidden space to try and discern what’s underneath.

Is that space the subconscious mind? Other people think so. But, it doesn’t matter what metaphor you use. The important thing is to find the tool you need explore that space to get access to the ideas you need.

David Lynch also talks about ideas as catching fish, but his fishing pole is a camera and a paintbrush. In his book on creativity Lynch extends the fish metaphor, but I think it lines up nicely with what Captain Beefheart is saying. For example, Lynch says, “Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure.They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.”

What is your divining rod? What is your metaphor for the place where the ideas reside?

Click here to read part two!