One of my favourite rock journalists on the Club 16 radio show was Carl-Ludwig Reichert. His shows influenced my musical taste immensely. On one occasion he presented an hour of what you could call unusual blues songs, I guess that was the rough theme of the show. In that one single hour I heard for the first so much incredible music by rarely heard artists, almost every song could be listed among my alltime favourites, and I'll be introducing them all in the course of time. For the very first time I was able to hear a tune by Captain Beefheart, an artist I had read so much about, but so far had never heard on radio, and it was at the time unthinkable to find any of his records at our local record stores. 'The Spotlight Kid' really knocked me out, a blues song like nothing else I had heard before. It begins with Captain Beefheart a cappella in a broken sprechgesang voice: "Said the momma t’ the baby in the corn you are my first born you shall here on in be known as The Spotlight Kid"and then on goes a slowmo warped blues song with an electric guitar and a xylophone playing in unison (or maybe not really). The quality of the song was truly otherworldy , the lyrics just as surreal as the music. I've been a huge Captain Beefheart fan ever since, and I've got nearly all there is from him on record and in books. Sadly he died last year in December at the age of 69, 3 days after my birthday.
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