There's one difference, though:
From Trout Mask on, Captain Beefheart wasn't trying to be anybody but himself - although some of his earlier music did seem like an odd, inaccurate attempt at straight-up blues/R&B. I don't know Wyatt's career well enough to pinpoint when he stopped trying to do jazz or soul music, and just started being himself without worrying about genre - although none of what I've heard, going back to Soft Machine I, sounded like soul music at all, and only peripherally like jazz. And I think Talking Heads pretty quickly realized that even working with Bernie Worrell, they couldn't ever do anything but a sort of strange white-boy art-school version of funk. All of them, though, could play music fairly well - they were just better at creating stylistically original work than at copying others correctly. And I suspect none of them ever tried all that hard to make music that sounded exactly like other peoples' music, or sounded like anything but what they heard in their heads.
But the Shaggs, on the other hand, were always trying to be Herman's Hermits crossed with church camp singalongs, and wound up doing something else because they really were inept.
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