Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band

From: Southern California

Active: 1965-1982

I first heard them: while watching a rerun of this very Saturday Night Live performance. I thought it was literally the single worst piece of music I had ever heard. My tastes have changed since then.

Sound: "complicated sounds designed for serious 'heads'"

Further listening: Both that quote and the picture are from John Allison's Scary Go Round, in which a character explains that "the most popular number of times people listen to Trout Mask Replica is 'once', followed by 'a quarter'". I confess that most of the Beefheart corpus is beyond me. But here's one that isn't:

"Electricity (live)" (1968)