Ice Cream for Crow
| Ice Cream for Crow | ||||
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| Studio album by Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band | ||||
| Released | September 1982 | |||
| Recorded | May–June, 1982 at Warner Brothers Studios, North Hollywood, California | |||
| Genre | Blues rock, experimental rock, spoken word, alternative rock, new wave | |||
| Length | 37:29 | |||
| Label | Epic, Virgin | |||
| Producer | Don Van Vliet | |||
| Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band chronology | ||||
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| Singles from Ice Cream for Crow | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| AllMusic |   |
| Robert Christgau | A− |
Ice Cream for Crow is the twelfth studio album by Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, released in September 1982. It is the last Don Van Vliet recorded before abruptly retiring from music to devote himself to a career as a painter. It spent two weeks in the UK album charts, reaching number 90, but failed to make the Billboard Top 200.
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. Don Van Vliet proposed that half of the tracks from Bat Chain Puller be included on Ice Cream for Crow, but Zappa refused Vliet's request, leading Vliet to compose mostly new material for the album (the one exception is the a cappella track "81 Poop Hatch", which Vliet included from his own copy of the Bat Chain Puller tape, although "The Thousandth And Tenth Day Of The Human Totem Pole" was rerecorded). The songs "Semi-Multicolored Caucasian", "The Past Sure Is Tense" and "The Witch Doctor Life" had been written for earlier albums but not used.
"Skeleton Makes Good" was written in one evening. 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".
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. 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.
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