Captain Beefheart

Captain Beefheart

Don Van Vliet (Template:Pron-en; born Don Glen Vliet January 15, 1941– December 17, 2010) was an American musician and visual artist best known by the stage name Captain Beefheart. His musical work was conducted with a rotating ensemble of musicians he called The Magic Band, active between 1965 and 1982, with whom he recorded 12 studio albums. Noted for his powerful singing voice with its wide range, Van Vliet also played the harmonica, saxophone and numerous other wind instruments. His music blended rock, blues and psychedelia with free jazz, avant-garde and contemporary experimental composition. Beefheart was also known for exercising an almost dictatorial control over his supporting musicians.

During his teen years in Lancaster, California, Van Vliet acquired an eclectic musical taste and formed "a mutually useful but volatile" friendship with Frank Zappa, with whom he sporadically competed and collaborated. He began performing with his Captain Beefheart persona in 1964 and joined the original Magic Band in 1965. The group drew attention with their cover of Bo Diddley's "Diddy Wah Diddy", which became a regional hit. It was followed by their acclaimed debut album released in 1967 on Buddah Records, Safe as Milk. After being dropped by two consecutive record labels, they signed to Frank Zappa's newly formed Straight Records. Zappa as producer granted Beefheart the unrestrained artistic freedom in making 1969's Trout Mask Replica, ranked fifty-eighth in Rolling Stone magazine's 2003 list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. Having not been paid for a European tour, and worn out from years of Beefheart's abusive behavior, the entire "Magic Band" left him in 1974. A brief and critically panned flirtation with more conventional rock music resulted in two albums he later disowned. Beefheart then formed a new Magic Band with a group of younger musicians and regained contemporary approval through three final albums: Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) (1978), Doc at the Radar Station (1980) and Ice Cream for Crow (1982).

Van Vliet has been described as "one of modern music's true innovators" with "a singular body of work virtually unrivalled in its daring and fluid creativity". Although he achieved little commercial or mainstream critical success, he sustained a cult following as a "highly significant" and "incalculable" influence on an array of New Wave, punk, post-punk, experimental and alternative rock musicians. Known for his enigmatic personality and relationship with the public, Van Vliet made few public appearances after his retirement from music (and from his Beefheart persona) in 1982 to pursue a career in art, an interest that originated in his childhood talent for sculpture. His expressionist paintings and drawings command high prices, and have been exhibited in art galleries and museums across the world. Van Vliet died in 2010 after many years of suffering from multiple sclerosis.

Biography

Early life and musical influences, 1941–1962

Van Vliet was born Donald Glen Vliet in Glendale, California, on January 15, 1941, to Glen Alonzo Vliet, a service station owner of Dutch ancestry from Kansas, and Willie Sue Vliet (née Warfield), who was from Arkansas. He claimed to have as an ancestor Peter Van Vliet, a Dutch painter who knew Rembrandt. Van Vliet also claimed that he was related to adventurer and author Richard Halliburton and the cowboy actor Slim Pickens, and said that he remembered being born.

Van Vliet began painting and sculpting at the age of three, his subjects reflecting his "obsession" with animals, particularly dinosaurs, fish, African mammals and lemurs. At the age of nine he won a children's sculpting competition organised for the Los Angeles Zoo by a local tutor, Agostinho Rodrigues. For some time during the 1950s Van Vliet worked as an apprentice to Rodrigues, who considered him a child prodigy; he also claimed to have been a lecturer at the Barnsdale Art Institute in Los Angeles at the age of eleven. Accounts of Van Vliet's precocious achievement in art often include his statement that he sculpted on a weekly television show, and that his parents discouraged his interest in sculpture, turning away several scholarship offers, including one from the local Knudsen Creamery for him to travel to Europe with six years' paid tuition to study marble sculpture, based upon their perception of artists as 'queer'. Van Vliet later admitted personal hesitation to take the scholarship based upon the bitterness of his parents' disencouragement.

Van Vliet's artistic enthusiasm became so fervent, he claimed that his parents were forced to feed him through the door in the room where he sculpted. When he was thirteen the family then moved from the Los Angeles area to the more remote aerospace and farming town of Lancaster, near the Mojave Desert. It was an environment that would greatly influence Van Vliet creatively from then on. Van Vliet remained interested in art; his paintings, often reminiscent of Franz Kline's, were later featured on several of his own albums. Meanwhile he developed his taste and interest in music, listening "intensively" to the Delta blues of Son House and Robert Johnson, jazz artists such as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk and Cecil Taylor, and the Chicago blues of Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters. His earliest musical work was with local groups such as the Omens and The Blackouts, in the latter of which Frank Zappa was a drummer.

He had dropped out of school by that time, and spent most of his time staying at home. His girlfriend lived in the house, and his grandmother lived in the house, and his aunt and his uncle lived across the street. And his father had had a heart attack; his father drove a Helms bread truck, part of the time Don was helping out by taking over the bread truck route [and] driving up to Mojave. The rest of the time he would just sit at home and listen to rhythm and blues records, and scream at his mother to get him a Pepsi.

Frank Zappa

Van Vliet claimed he had never attended public school, alleging "half a day of kindergarten" to be the extent of his formal education and saying that "if you want to be a different fish, you've got to jump out of the school." In contrast his associates said that he attended through high school and dropped out during his senior year to help support the family after his father had a heart attack. (His graduation picture appears in the school's yearbook.) While attending Antelope Valley High School in Lancaster, Van Vliet became close friends with fellow teenager Frank Zappa, the pair bonding through their interest in Chicago blues and R&B. Van Vliet is portrayed in both The Real Frank Zappa Book and Barry Miles' biography Zappa as fairly spoiled at this stage of his life, the center of attention as an only child. He spent most of his time locked up in his room listening to records, often with Frank Zappa, into the early hours in the morning, eating leftover food from his father's bread truck and demanding that his mother bring him a Pepsi. His parents tolerated such behavior under the belief that their child was truly gifted.

Zappa and Van Vliet began collaborating on pop song parodies and a movie script called Captain Beefheart vs. the Grunt People, the first appearance of the Beefheart name. It came from a term used by his Uncle Alan. Alan had a habit of exposing himself to Don's girlfriend, Laurie. Alan would urinate with the bathroom door open and, if she was walking by, mumble about his penis, saying "Ahh, what a beauty! It looks just like a big, fine beef heart." In a 1970 interview with Rolling Stone, Van Vliet requests "don't ask me why or how" he and Zappa came up with the name. He would later claim in an appearance on Late Night with David Letterman that the name referred to "a beef in my heart against this society."

Van Vliet enrolled at Antelope Valley Junior College as an art major, but decided to leave the following year. He once worked as a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman, during which time he sold a vacuum cleaner to the writer Aldous Huxley at his home in Llano, pointing to it and declaring, "Well I assure you sir, this thing sucks." After managing a Kinney's shoe store, Van Vliet relocated to Rancho Cucamonga, California, to reconnect with Zappa, who inspired his entry into musical performance. Van Vliet was quite shy but was eventually able to imitate the deep voice of Howlin' Wolf with his wide vocal range. He eventually grew comfortable with public performance and, after learning to play the harmonica, began playing at dances and small clubs in Southern California.

Initial recordings, 1962–1969

In early 1965 Alex Snouffer, a Lancaster rhythm and blues guitarist, invited Vliet to sing with a group that he was assembling. Vliet joined the first Magic Band and changed his name to Don Van Vliet, while Snouffer became Alex St. Clair (sometimes spelled Claire). Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band signed to A&M and released two singles in 1966. The first was a version of Bo Diddley's "Diddy Wah Diddy" that became a regional hit in Los Angeles. The followup, "Moonchild" (written by David Gates) was less well received. The band played music venues that catered to underground artists, such as the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco.

Sometime in 1966 demos of what became the Safe as Milk material were submitted to A&M. Jerry Moss (the "M" in A&M) reportedly described the new direction as "too negative" and the band was dropped from the label. By the end of 1966 they were signed to Buddah Records and John French had joined on drums. French had the patience required to translate Van Vliet's musical ideas (often expressed by whistling or banging on the piano) for the other players. In French's absence this role was taken over by Bill Harkleroad. The lyrics on the album were written by Van Vliet in collaboration with the writer Herb Bermann, who befriended Van Vliet after seeing him perform with his wife in Lancaster in 1966. The song "Electricity" was a poem written by Bermann, who gave Van Vliet permission to adapt it to music.

The Safe as Milk material needed much more work, and 20-year-old guitar prodigy Ry Cooder was asked to help. They began recording in spring 1967, with Richard Perry producing (his first job as producer). The album was released in September 1967. Richie Unterberger of Allmusic would call the album "blues-rock gone slightly askew, with jagged, fractured rhythms, soulful, twisting vocals from Van Vliet, and more doo wop, soul, straight blues, and folk-rock influences than he would employ on his more avant-garde outings". Among those who took notice were The Beatles: John Lennon and Paul McCartney were known as great admirers of Beefheart. Lennon displayed two of the album's promotional bumper stickers in the sunroom at his home. Later The Beatles planned to sign Beefheart to their experimental Zapple label (plans that were scrapped after Allen Klein took over the group's management). Van Vliet was often critical of The Beatles, however. He considered the lyric "I'd love to turn you on", from their song "A Day in the Life", to be ridiculous and conceited. Tiring of their "lullabies", he lampooned them with the Strictly Personal song "Beatle Bones 'n' Smokin' Stones", that featured the sardonic refrain of "strawberry fields, strawberry fields forever". He spoke badly of Lennon after getting no response from him after sending a telegram of support to him and wife Yoko Ono during their 1969 "Bed-In for peace". Van Vliet did meet McCartney during the Magic Band's 1968 tour of Europe, though McCartney later claimed to have no recollection of this meeting.

Doug Moon left the band due to his dislike of the band's increasing experimentalism. Ry Cooder has recounted Moon becoming so angered by Van Vliet's unrelenting criticism that he walked into the room pointing a loaded crossbow at him, only to be told "Get that fucking thing out of here, get out of here and get back in your room", which he obeyed. (Other band members have disputed this account.)

The group had been scheduled to play at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. During this period Vliet suffered severe anxiety attacks that made him convinced that he was having a heart attack. These attacks were likely exacerbated by his heavy LSD use, and the fact that his father had died of heart failure a few years earlier. In a performance at Mt. Tamalpais shortly before the scheduled Monterey festival, the band began to play "Electricity" and Van Vliet froze, straightened his tie, then walked off the ten-foot stage and landed on the manager. This undid any opportunity of breakthrough success at Monterey in the vein of others who performed. Ry Cooder immediately decided he could no longer work with Van Vliet.

In August, guitarist Jeff Cotton was recruited to fill the guitar spot vacated by Cooder and in October and November 1967 the Snouffer/Cotton/Handley/French line-up recorded material for what was planned to be the second album. Originally intended to be a double album called It Comes to You in a Plain Brown Wrapper for the Buddah label, it was released later in pieces in 1971 and 1995. After rejection from Buddah, Bob Krasnow encouraged the band to re-record four of the shorter numbers previously recorded, to add two more, and recorded shorter versions of "Mirror Man" and "Kandy Korn". The music was already weakly recorded with a trebly thin sound; Krasnow then implemented a strange mix full of "phasing" that by most accounts (including Beefheart's) diminished the music's strength; this was released in October 1968 as Strictly Personal on Krasnow's Blue Thumb label. Stewart Mason in his Allmusic review of the album would describe it as a "terrific album" and a "fascinating, underrated release", "every bit the equal of Safe as Milk and Trout Mask Replica". Langdon Winner of Rolling Stone would call Strictly Personal "an excellent album. The guitars of the Magic Band mercilessly bend and stretch notes in a way that suggests that the world of music has wobbled clear off its axis." With the lyrics demonstrating "Beefheart's ability to juxtapose delightful humor with frightening insights". This was also the period in which Van Vliet furthered his own mythology through interviews. In 1971 some of the recordings done for Buddah were released as Mirror Man, bearing a sleeve note claiming that the material had been recorded "one night in Los Angeles in 1965". This was a ruse to circumvent possible copyright issues; the material was actually recorded in November and December 1967. Essentially a "jam" album, described as pushing "the boundaries of conventional blues-rock, with a Beefheart vocal tossed in here and there. Some may miss Beefheart's surreal poetry, gruff vocals, and/or free jazz influence, while others may find it fascinating to hear the Magic Band simply letting go and cutting loose".

During his first trip to England in January 1968, Captain Beefheart was briefly represented by mod icon Peter Meaden, an early manager of The Who. The Captain and his band members were initially denied entry to the United Kingdom, because Meaden had illegally booked them for gigs without applying for appropriate work permits. After returning to Germany for a few days, the group was permitted to re-enter the UK. By this time, they had terminated their association with Meaden. It was January 27, 1968, that saw one of Beefheart's most memorable live performances, when he and the Magic Band performed on the beach at Cannes on the Mediterranean coast of France. Alex St. Claire left the band in June 1968 after their return from a second European tour and was replaced by teenager Bill Harkleroad. Handley also left the band a few weeks later.

Trout Mask Replica, 1969

Critically acclaimed as Van Vliet's magnum opus, Trout Mask Replica was released in June 1969 on Frank Zappa's newly formed Straight Records label. By this time, the Magic Band had enlisted bassist Mark Boston, a friend of French and Harkleroad. Van Vliet had also begun assigning nicknames to his band members, so Harkleroad became "Zoot Horn Rollo", and Boston became "Rockette Morton", while John French assumed the name "Drumbo", and Jeff Cotton became "Antennae Jimmy Semens". Van Vliet's cousin Victor Hayden, "The Mascara Snake", performed as a bass clarinetist. Van Vliet wanted the whole band to "live" the Trout Mask Replica album. The group rehearsed Van Vliet's difficult compositions for eight months, living communally in a small rented house in the Woodland Hills suburb of Los Angeles. Van Vliet implemented his vision by asserting complete artistic and emotional domination of his musicians. At various times one or another of the group members was put "in the barrel," with Van Vliet berating him continually, sometimes for days, until the musician collapsed in tears or in total submission to Van Vliet. Drummer John French described the situation as "cultlike" and a visiting friend said "the environment in that house was positively Manson-esque." Their material circumstances also were dire. With no income other than welfare and contributions from relatives, the group survived on a bare subsistence diet, and were even arrested for shoplifting food (with Zappa bailing them out). French has recalled living on no more than a small cup of beans a day for a month. A visitor described their appearance as "cadaverous" and said that "they all looked in poor health." Band members were restricted from leaving the house and practiced for 14 or more hours a day.

Physical assaults were encouraged at times, along with verbal degradation. Beefheart spoke of studying texts on brainwashing at a public library at about this time, and appeared to be applying brainwashing techniques to his bandmembers: sleep deprivation, food deprivation, constant negative reinforcement, and rewarding bandmembers when they attacked each other or competed with each other. At one point Cotton ran from the house and escaped for a few weeks, during which time Alex Snouffer filled in for him and helped to work up "Ant Man Bee". French, who had thrown a metal cymbal at Cotton, ran after him yelling that he too wanted to come. Cotton later returned to the house with French's mother, who took him away for a few weeks, however he later felt compelled to return as did Cotton. Mark Boston at one point hid clothes in a field across the street, planning his own getaway.

John French's 2010 book Through the Eyes of Magic describes some of the "talks" which were initiated by his actions such as being heard playing a Frank Zappa drum part ("The Blimp (mousetrapreplica)") in his drumming shed, and not having finished drum parts as quickly as Beefheart would have liked. French writes of being punched by band members, thrown into walls, kicked, punched in the face by Beefheart hard enough to draw blood, being attacked with a sharp broomstick, and eventually of Beefheart threatening to throw him out of an upper-floor window. He admits complicity in similarly attacking his bandmates during "talks" aimed at them. In the end, after the album's recording, French was ejected from the band by Beefheart throwing him down a set of stairs with violence, telling him to "Take a walk, man" after not responding in a desired manner to a request to "play a strawberry" on the drums. Beefheart installed a hanger-on, Jeff Bruschelle, as the new Drumbo (playing on French's drumset) and did not include French's name anywhere on the album credits as a player or arranger.

According to Van Vliet, the 28 songs on the album were written in a single 8½-hour session at the piano, an instrument in which he had no skill in playing, an approach Mike Barnes compared to John Cage's "maverick irreverence toward classical tradition", though band members have stated that the songs were written over the course of about a year, beginning around December 1967. (The band did watch Federico Fellini's 1963 film 8½ during the creation of the album). It took the band about eight months to actually mold the songs into shape, with French bearing primary responsibility for transposing and shaping Vliet's piano fragments into guitar and bass lines, which were mostly notated on paper. Bill Harkleroad in 1998 said in retrospect: "We're dealing with a strange person, coming from a place of being a sculptor/painter, using music as his idiom. He was getting more into that part of who he was instead of this blues singer." The band had rehearsed the songs so thoroughly that the instrumental tracks for 21 of the songs were recorded in a four and a half-hour recording session. Van Vliet spent the next few days overdubbing the vocals. The album's title came from its cover artwork, which was photographed and designed by Cal Schenkel; Van Vliet wearing the raw head of a carp, bought from a local fish market and fashioned into a mask by Schenkel.

Trout Mask Replica incorporated a wide variety of musical styles, including blues, avant-garde/experimental, and rock. The relentless practice prior to recording blended the music into an iconoclastic whole of contrapuntal tempos, featuring slide guitar, polyrhythmic drumming (with French's drums and cymbals covered in cardboard), and honking saxophone and bass clarinet. Van Vliet's vocals range from his signature Howlin' Wolf-inspired growl to frenzied falsetto to laconic, casual ramblings. The instrumental backing was effectively recorded live in the studio, while Van Vliet overdubbed most of the vocals in only partial synch with the music by hearing the slight sound leakage through the studio window. Zappa as producer would say of Van Vliet's approach that it was "impossible to tell him why things should be such and such a way. It seemed to me that if he was going to create a unique object, that the best thing for me to do was to keep my mouth shut as much as possible and just let him do whatever he wanted to do whether I thought it was wrong or not."

Van Vliet used the ensuing publicity, particularly with a 1970 Rolling Stone interview with Langdon Winner, to promulgate a number of myths which were subsequently quoted as fact. Winner's article stated, for instance, that neither Van Vliet nor the members of the Magic Band ever took drugs, but guitarist Bill Harkleroad later contradicted this. Van Vliet claimed to have taught both Harkleroad and bassist Mark Boston to play their instruments from scratch; in fact the pair were already accomplished albeit young musicians before joining the band. Last, Van Vliet claimed to have gone a year and half without sleeping. When asked how this was possible, he replied to have only eaten fruit.

Critic Steve Huey of Allmusic writes that the album's influence "was felt more in spirit than in direct copycatting, as a catalyst rather than a literal musical starting point. However, its inspiring reimagining of what was possible in a rock context laid the groundwork for countless experiments in rock surrealism to follow, especially during the punk and New Wave era." In 2003, the album was ranked fifty-eighth by Rolling Stone in their list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time: "On first listen, Trout Mask Replica sounds like raw Delta blues", with Beefheart "singing and ranting and reciting poetry over fractured guitar licks. But the seeming sonic chaos is an illusion -- to construct the songs, the Magic Band rehearsed twelve hours a day for months on end in a house with the windows blacked out. (Producer Frank Zappa was then able to record most of the album in less than five hours.) Tracks such as "Ella Guru" and "My Human Gets Me Blues" are the direct predecessors of modern musical primitives such as Tom Waits and PJ Harvey". Guitarist Fred Frith noted that during this process "forces that usually emerge in improvisation are harnessed and made constant, repeatable."

Critic Robert Christgau would give the album a B+, saying that "I find it impossible to give this record an A because it is just too weird. But I'd like to. Very great played at high volume when you're feeling shitty, because you'll never feel as shitty as this record". BBC disc jockey John Peel said of the album: "If there has been anything in the history of popular music which could be described as a work of art in a way that people who are involved in other areas of art would understand, then Trout Mask Replica is probably that work."

Later recordings, 1970–1982

Lick My Decals Off, Baby (1970) continued in a similarly experimental vein. An album with "a very coherent structure" in the Magic Band's "most experimental and visionary stage", it was Van Vliet's most commercially successful in the United Kingdom, spending twenty weeks on the UK Albums Chart and peaking at number 20. An early promotional music video was made of its title song, and a bizarre television commercial was also filmed that included excerpts from "Woe-Is-uh-Me-Bop", silent footage of masked Magic Band members using kitchen utensils as musical instruments, and Beefheart kicking over a bowl of what appears to be porridge onto a dividing stripe in the middle of a road. The video was rarely played but was accepted into the Museum of Modern Art, where it has been used in several programs related to music. The LP sees the addition of Art Tripp III, formerly of the Mothers of Invention, playing drums and marimba. Lick My Decals Off, Baby was the first record on which the band were credited as "The Magic Band", rather than "His Magic Band"; journalist Irwin Chusid interprets this change as "a grudging concession of its members' at least semiautonomous humanity." Robert Christgau gave the album an A-, commenting that "Beefheart's famous five-octave range and covert totalitarian structures have taken on a playful undertone, repulsive and engrossing and slapstick funny". Due to licensing disputes, Lick My Decals Off, Baby has since become a very expensive rarity, whether on vinyl or CD. It was ranked second in Uncut magazine's May 2010 list of "The 50 Greatest Lost Albums".

Beefheart performing in 1974.

The next two records, The Spotlight Kid (simply credited to "Captain Beefheart") and Clear Spot (credited to "Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band"), were both released in 1972. Clear Spot's production credit of Ted Templeman made Allmusic consider "why in the world Clear Spot wasn't more of a commercial success than it was," and that while fans "of the fully all-out side of Beefheart might find the end result not fully up to snuff as a result, but those less concerned with pushing back all borders all the time will enjoy his unexpected blend of everything tempered with a new accessibility." The song "Big Eyed Beans from Venus" is noted as "a fantastically strange piece of aggression." A Clear Spot song, "Her Eyes Are A Blue Million Miles", appeared on the soundtrack of the Coen brothers' cult comedy film The Big Lebowski (1998). The atmosphere of The Spotlight Kid is "definitely relaxed and fun, maybe one step up from a jam." And though "things do sound maybe just a little too blasé," "Beefheart at his worst still has something more than most groups at their best."

In 1974, immediately after the recording of Unconditionally Guaranteed, which markedly continued the trend towards a more commercial sound heard on some of the Clear Spot tracks, the Magic Band, which had by then coalesced around the core of Art Tripp III, Alex St. Clair, Bill Harkleroad and Rockette Morton, decided they could no longer work with Van Vliet. They left to form Mallard. Van Vliet quickly formed a new Magic Band of musicians who had no experience with his music and in fact had never heard it. Having no knowledge of the previous Magic Band style they simply improvised what they thought would go with each song, playing much slicker versions that have been described as "bar band" versions of Beefheart's songs. A review described this incarnation of the Magic Band as the "Tragic Band", a term that has stuck over the years. Mike Barnes would say that the description of the new band "grooving along pleasantly", was "an appropriately banal description of the music of a man who only a few years ago composed with the expressed intent of shaking listeners out of their torpor". The one album they recorded, Bluejeans & Moonbeams (1974) has, like its predecessor, a completely different, almost soft rock sound from any other Beefheart record. Neither was well received; drummer Art Tripp recalled that when he and the original Magic Band listened to Unconditionally Guaranteed that they "were horrified. As we listened, it was as though each song was worse than the one which preceded it." Beefheart later disowned both albums, calling them "horrible and vulgar", asking that they not be considered part of his musical output and urging fans who bought them to "take copies back for a refund".

From 1975 to 1977 Beefheart released no new records. (The original version of Bat Chain Puller was recorded in 1976 but remains unreleased.) He did appear on the Tubes' 1977 album Now, playing saxophone on the song "Cathy's Clone", and the album also featured a cover of the Clear Spot song "My Head Is My Only House Unless It Rains". In 1978 he appeared on Jack Nitzsche's soundtrack to the film Blue Collar. In the same year a completely new Magic Band was formed, consisting of Richard Redus, Richard "Midnight Hatsize" Snyder, Jeff Moris Tepper, Bruce Fowler, Eric Drew Feldman, Cliff R. Martinez and Robert Williams. These were from a younger generation of musicians eager to work with Beefheart and extremely capable of playing his music. In several cases they had been fans for years, and had learned his music from listening to his records. With this band, Van Vliet crafted a final trio of albums, which he produced himself.

Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller), released by Warner Bros. Records in 1978, was described by Ned Ragget of Allmusic to "be manna from heaven for those feeling Beefheart had lost his way on his two Mercury albums". Doc at the Radar Station (1980) helped establish Beefheart's late resurgence. Released by Virgin Records during the post-punk scene, the music was now accessible to a younger, more receptive audience. He was interviewed in a feature report on KABC-TV's Channel 7 Eyewitness News in which he was hailed "the father of the New Wave. One of the most important American composers of the last fifty years, [and] a primitive genius"; Van Vliet said at this period, "I'm doing a non-hypnotic music to break up the catatonic state... and I think there is one right now." Huey of Allmusic would cite the Doc at the Radar Station as being "generally acclaimed as the strongest album of his comeback, and by some as his best since Trout Mask Replica", "even if the Captain's voice isn't quite what it once was, Doc at the Radar Station is an excellent, focused consolidation of Beefheart's past and then-present". Van Vliet's biographer Mike Barnes speaks of "revamping work built on skeletal ideas and fragments that would have mouldered away in the vaults had they not been exhumed and transformed into full-blown, totally convincing new material." In this period, Van Vliet made two appearances on David Letterman's late night television program on NBC, and also performed on Saturday Night Live.

Van Vliet and the new Magic Band.

The final Beefheart record, Ice Cream for Crow (1982), was recorded with Gary Lucas (who was also Van Vliet's manager), Jeff Moris Tepper, Richard Snyder and Cliff Martinez. This line-up made a video 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 also accepted into the Museum of Modern Art. Van Vliet announced "I don't want MTV!" during his interview with Letterman, in reference to MTV's "I want my MTV" marketing campaign of the time. Ice Cream for Crow features long instrumental performances by the Magic Band with performance poetry readings by Van Vliet. Ragget of Allmusic called the album a "last entertaining blast of wigginess from one of the few truly independent artists in late 20th century pop music, with humor, skill, and style all still intact"; with the Magic Band "turning out more choppy rhythms, unexpected guitar lines, and outré arrangements, Captain Beefheart lets everything run wild as always, with successful results". Barnes writes that "the most original and vital tracks [on the album] are the newer ones", saying that it "feels like an hors-d'oeuvre for a main course that never came". Promotional work proposed to Beefheart by Virgin Records was as unorthodox as him making an appearance in the 1987 film Grizzly II: The Predator. Soon after, Van Vliet retired from music, considered by Piero Scaruffi to resent "the hypocritical atmosphere that manages it" and "the consumerist mechanisms that regulate it", establishing a new career as a painter. Gary Lucas tried to convince him to record one more album, but to no avail.

Paintings

Throughout his musical career, Van Vliet remained interested in art; his paintings, often reminiscent of Franz Kline's, were used on several of his albums. In 1987, Van Vliet published Skeleton Breath, Scorpion Blush, a collection of his poetry, paintings and drawings.

In the mid 1980s, Van Vliet became somewhat reclusive and abandoned music, stating he had gotten "too good at the horn" and could make far more money painting. Beefheart's first exhibition had been at Liverpool's Bluecoat Gallery during the Magic Band's 1972 tour of the UK, and was interviewed on Granada regional TV standing in front of his bold black and white canvases. He was inspired to begin an art career when a fan, Julian Schnabel, who admired the artwork seen on his album covers, asked to buy a drawing from him. His debut exhibition as a full time painter at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York in 1985 was initially regarded as "another rock musician dabbling in art for ego's sake", though his primitive, non-conformist work has received more sympathetic and serious attention since then, with some sales approaching $25,000. Two books have been published specifically devoted to critique and analysis of his artwork: Riding Some Kind of Unusual Skull Sleigh: On The Arts Of Don Van Vliet (1999) by W.C. Bamberger and Stand Up To Be Discontinued, first published in 1993, a now rare collection of essays on Van Vliet's work. The limited edition version of the book contains a CD of Van Vliet giving readings of six of his poems: "Fallin' Ditch", "The Tired Plain", "Skeleton Makes Good", "Safe Sex Drill", "Tulip" and "Gill". A deluxe edition was published in 1994; only 60 were printed, with etchings of Van Vliet's signature, costing £180.

Cross Poked Shadow of a Crow No. 1 (1990)

In the early 1980s Van Vliet established an association with the Michael Werner Gallery. Eric Feldman stated later in an interview that at that time Michael Werner told Van Vliet he would need to stop playing music if he wanted to be respected as a painter, warning him that he would only be considered a "musician who paints" otherwise. In doing so, it was said that he had effectively "succeeded in leaving his past behind." Gordon Veneklasen, one of the gallery's directors in 1995 described Van Vliet as an "incredible painter" whose work "doesn't really look like anybody else's work but his own." Van Vliet has been described as a modernist, primitivist an abstract expressionist, and an outsider artist. Morgan Falconer of Artforum concurs, mentioning both a "neo-primitivist aesthetic" and further stating that his work is influenced by the CoBrA painters. The resemblance to the CoBrA painters is also recognized by art critic Roberto Ohrt. Some have compared it to the work of Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Antonin Artaud, Francis Bacon, Vincent van Gogh and Mark Rothko.

According to Dr. John Lane, director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in 1997, although Van Vliet's work has associations with mainstream abstract expressionist painting, more importantly he is a self-taught artist and his painting "has that same kind of edge the music has." Lane explained that in contrast to the busied, bohemian urban lives of the New York abstract expressionists, the rural desert environment Van Vliet is influenced by is a distinctly naturalistic one, making him a distinguished figure in contemporary art, whose work will survive in canon. Van Vliet has stated of his own work, "I'm trying to turn myself inside out on the canvas. I'm trying to completely bare what I think at that moment" and that "I paint for the simple reason that I have to. I feel a sense of relief after I do". He has stated of precedent influences that there are none. "I just paint like I paint and that's enough influence." He has however stated his admiration of Georg Baselitz, the De Stijl artist Piet Mondrian, and Vincent van Gogh; after seeing van Gogh's paintings in person, Van Vliet quoted himself as saying that "the sun disappoints me so".

Exhibits of his paintings from the late 1990s at both the Anton Kern and Michael Werner Galleries of New York City received favorable reviews, the most recent of which were held between 2009 and 2010. Falconer stated the recent exhibitions show "evidence of a serious, committed artist." It was claimed that he stopped painting in the late 1990s. A 2007 interview with Van Vliet through email by Anthony Haden-Guest, however, showed him to still be active artistically. He produced few paintings for exhibition as he immediately destroyed any he was unsatisfied with.

Life in retirement

Van Vliet in Anton Corbijn's 1993 Some Yo Yo Stuff.

After his retirement from music, Van Vliet was rarely seen in public. He was known to reside near Trinidad, California with his wife Janet "Jan" Van Vliet. By the early 1990s he had become wheelchair-bound and was suffering from a debilitating long-term illness, eventually revealed to be multiple sclerosis, and described as such by his biographer Mike Barnes. The severity of his illness was sometimes disputed. Many of his art contractors and friends considered him to be in good health. Other associates such as his longtime drummer and musical director John French and bassist Richard Snyder have stated that they noticed symptoms consistent with the onset of multiple sclerosis, such as sensitivity to heat, loss of balance, and stiffness of gait, by the late 1970s.

One of Van Vliet's last public appearances was in the 1993 short documentary Some Yo Yo Stuff by filmmaker Anton Corbijn, described as an "observation of his observations". Around 13 minutes long and shot entirely in black and white, with appearances by his mother and David Lynch, the film showed a noticeably weakened and dysarthric Van Vliet at his residence in California, reading poetry, and philosophically discussing his life, environment, music and art. In 2000, he appeared on Gary Lucas' album Improve the Shining Hour and Moris Tepper's Moth to Mouth, as well as speaking on Tepper's 2004 song "Ricochet Man" from the album Head Off, and is credited for naming Tepper's 2010 album A Singer Named Shotgun Throat.

Van Vliet often voiced concern over and support for environmentalist issues and causes, particularly the welfare of animals. In 2003 he was heard on the compilation album Where We Live: Stand for What You Stand On: A Benefit CD for EarthJustice singing a version of "Happy Birthday to You" retitled "Happy Earthday". The track is 34 seconds long and was recorded over the telephone.

Death

The Michael Werner Gallery announced on Friday, December 17, 2010, that Van Vliet had died at a hospital in Arcata, California, weeks short of his 70th birthday. The gallery stated him to be "a complex and influential figure in the visual and performing arts," and "one of the most original recording artists of his time". The cause was named as complications from multiple sclerosis.

Dweezil Zappa dedicated the song "Willie the Pimp " to Captain Beefheart , at the "Zappa Plays Zappa " show at the Beacon Theater in New York City on Dec 17, 2010.

Jeff Bridges exclaimed "Rest in peace, Captain Beefheart!" at the conclusion of the December 18, 2010 episode of NBC's Saturday Night Live.

Relationship with Frank Zappa

Van Vliet seated left on stage with Zappa in 1975.

Van Vliet met Frank Zappa when they were both teenagers and shared an interest in rhythm and blues and Chicago blues. They collaborated together from this early stage, and Zappa gave Van Vliet his stage name of Captain Beefheart. In 1963, the pair recorded a demo at the Pal Recording Studio in Cucamonga as the Soots, with the intention of a major label signing them. Their efforts were unsuccessful, as "Beefheart's Howlin' Wolf vocal style and Zappa's distorted guitar" was "not on the agenda" at the time.

The friendship between Zappa and Van Vliet over the years was sometimes expressed in the form of rivalry as musicians drifted back and forth between their groups. Van Vliet embarked on the 1975 Bongo Fury tour with Zappa and The Mothers of Invention, mainly due to the fact that conflicting contractual obligations made him unable to tour or record independently. Their relationship grew highly acrimonious on the tour to the point of them refusing to talk to one another. Zappa became irritated by Van Vliet, who drew constantly, including while on stage, filling one of his large sketch books with rapidly executed portraits and warped caricatures of Zappa. Musically, Van Vliet's primitive style greatly contrasted with Zappa's compositional discipline and abundant technique. Mothers of Invention drummer Jimmy Carl Black would consider the situation as "two geniuses" on "ego trips". While estranged for years afterwards, they reconnected at the end of Zappa's life, after his diagnosis with terminal prostate cancer. Their collaborative work appears on the Zappa rarity collections The Lost Episodes (1996) and Mystery Disc (1996). Particularly notable is their song "Muffin Man", included on the Zappa/Beefheart Bongo Fury album as well as Zappa's compilation album Strictly Commercial (1995). This song was used as a finale in Zappa's concerts for many years afterwards. Beefheart also provided vocals for "Willie the Pimp" on Zappa's otherwise instrumental album Hot Rats (1969). One track on Trout Mask Replica, "The Blimp (mousetrapreplica)", actually features Magic Band guitarist Jeff Cotton talking on the telephone to Zappa superimposed onto an unrelated live recording of the Mothers of Invention (the backing track was later released in 1992 as "Charles Ives" on You Can't Do That on Stage Anymore, Vol. 5 ). Van Vliet also played the harmonica on two songs on Zappa albums: "San Ber'dino" (credited as "Bloodshot Rollin' Red") on One Size Fits All (1975) and "Find Her Finer" on Zoot Allures (1976).

The Magic Band

The Magic Band were Beefheart's backing musicians from 1965 to 1982. The name of the band was an extension of the "Captain Beefheart" persona that Frank Zappa, Vic Mortenson and others helped Van Vliet create; the idea being that Captain Beefheart was magic, and thus would have a "magic band." He would simply drink a Pepsi, and the band would appear behind him.

The original Magic Band was Alex Snouffer, a local Lancaster rhythm and blues guitarist, Doug Moon (guitar), Jerry Handley (bass), and Mortenson (drums), the last soon replaced by Paul Blakely. Personnel of the Magic Band for Beefheart's first album were John "Drumbo" French, Ry Cooder, Snouffer, and Handley. French would work on five more Beefheart albums, while Snouffer would work with Beefheart on and off on three more albums. Zoot Horn Rollo (Bill Harkleroad) joined the Magic Band as guitarist for Trout Mask Replica and stayed with Beefheart through May 1974.

While appearing humorous and kind-hearted in public, by all accounts Van Vliet was a severe taskmaster who abused his musicians verbally and sometimes physically, and paid them little or nothing. Drummer John French recalled that the musicians' contract with Van Vliet's company stipulated that Van Vliet and the managers were paid from gross proceeds before expenses, then expenses were paid, then the band members evenly split any remaining funds – in effect meaning that band members were liable for all expenses. As a result French was paid nothing at all for a 33-city U.S. tour in 1971 and a total of $78 for a tour of Europe and the U.S. in late 1975. In his 2010 memoir Beefheart: Through The Eyes of Magic French recounted being "screamed at, beaten up, drugged, ridiculed, humiliated, arrested, starved, stolen from, and thrown down a half-flight of stairs by his employer".

The musicians also resented Van Vliet taking complete credit for composition and arranging when the musicians themselves pieced together most of the songs from taped fragments or impressionistic directions such as "Play it like a bat being dragged out of oil and it's trying to survive, but it's dying from asphyxiation." John French summarized the disagreement over composing and arranging credits metaphorically:

If Van Vliet built a house like he wrote music, the methodology would go something like this... The house is sketched on the back of a Denny's placemat in such an odd fashion that when he presents it to the contractor without plans or research, the contractor says "This structure is going to be hard to build, it's going to be tough to make it safe and stable because it is so unique in design." Van Vliet then yells at the contractor and intimidates him into doing the job anyway. The contractor builds the home, figuring out all the intricacies involved in structural integrity himself because whenever he approaches Van Vliet, he finds that he seems completely unable to comprehend technical problems and just yells, "Quit asking me about this stuff and build the damned house."... When the house is finished no one gets paid, and Van Vliet has a housewarming party, invites none of the builders and tells the guests he built the whole thing himself.

Post-Beefheart, receiving only a "grumpy" reception from him, the band reformed in 2003 with John French on lead vocals, Gary Lucas and Denny Walley on guitars, Rockette Morton on bass, and Robert Williams on drums. At the start of their only European tour, Williams left and was replaced by Michael Traylor. The band released two albums before ceasing their activities in 2006.

They toured the UK in 2005, playing a selection of small venues. John Peel was initially skeptical about the re-formed Magic Band. He played a live recording of the band recorded at the 2003 All Tomorrows Parties festival on his show; afterwards he couldn't speak and had to put on another record to regain his composure. A year or so later the band did a live session for him. The band's albums are Back To The Front (on the London-based ATP Recordings, 2003) and 21st Century Mirror Men (2005). After playing over 30 shows throughout the United Kingdom and Europe, and just one in the United States, the band concluded their activities in 2006.

Influence

Van Vliet has been the subject of at least two documentaries, the BBC's 1997 The Artist Formerly Known As Captain Beefheart narrated by John Peel, and the 2006 independent production Captain Beefheart: Under Review.

According to John Peel, "If there has ever been such a thing as a genius in the history of popular music, it's Beefheart... I heard echoes of his music in some of the records I listened to last week and I'll hear more echoes in records that I listen to this week." His narration to the BBC documentary adds: "A psychedelic shaman who frequently bullied his musicians and sometimes alarmed his fans, Don somehow remained one of rock's great innocents". Mike Barnes would call him an "iconic counterculture hero", who with the Magic Band "went on to stake out startling new possibilities for rock music". Lester Bangs cited Beefheart as "one of the four or five unqualified geniuses to rise from the hothouses of American music in the Sixties". John Harris of The Guardian praised how the "pulses with energy and ideas, the strange way the spluttering instruments meld together". A Rolling Stone biography would describe his work as "a sort of modern chamber music for [a] rock band, since he plans every note and teaches the band their parts by ear. Because it breaks so many of rock's conventions at once, Beefheart's music has always been more influential than popular." In this context, it is performed by the classical group, the Meridian Arts Ensemble. Piero Scaruffi would characterize "three basic elements": "the ballad out of tune, with guitar interlaced with jolting rhythm, vocal miasma and a rogue harmonica". Scaruffi ranked Trout Mask Replica number one on his list of the greatest rock albums of all time. He says that "the distance between Captain Beefheart and the rest of rock music is the same distance that there was between Beethoven and the symphonists of his time". Nicholas E. Tawa, in his 2005 book Supremely American: Popular Song in the 20th Century: Styles and Singers and What They Said About America, included Beefheart among the prominent progressive rock musicians of the 1960s and 70s, while the Encyclopædia Britannica describes Beefheart's songs as conveying "deep distrust of modern civilization, a yearning for ecological balance, and that belief that all animals in the wild are far superior to human beings."

Many artists have cited Van Vliet as an influence, beginning with the Edgar Broughton Band, who covered "Dropout Boogie" (mixed with The Shadows' "Apache") as early as 1970. The Minutemen were great fans of Beefheart, and were arguably among the few to effectively synthesize his music with their own, especially in their early output, which featured disjointed guitar and irregular, galloping rhythms. Michael Azerrad describes The Minutemen's early output as "highly caffeinated Captain Beefheart running down James Brown tunes", and notes that Beefheart was the group's "idol". Others who arguably conveyed the same influence around the same time or before include John Cale of The Velvet Underground, Laurie Anderson, The Residents and Henry Cow. Genesis P-Orridge of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, and poet mystic Z'EV, both pioneers of industrial music, would cite Van Vliet along with Zappa among their influences. More notable were those emerging during the early days of punk rock, such as The Clash and John Lydon of the Sex Pistols (reportedly to manager Malcolm McLaren's disapproval), later of the post-punk band Public Image Ltd.

Cartoonist and writer Matt Groening tells of listening to Trout Mask Replica at the age of 15 and thinking "that it was the worst thing I'd ever heard. I said to myself, they're not even trying! It was just a sloppy cacophony. Then I listened to it a couple more times, because I couldn't believe Frank Zappa could do this to me - and because a double album cost a lot of money. About the third time, I realised they were doing it on purpose; they meant it to sound exactly this way. About the sixth or seventh time, it clicked in, and I thought it was the greatest album I'd ever heard." Groening first saw Beefheart and the Magic Band perform in the front row at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in the early 1970s. He later declared Trout Mask Replica to be the greatest album ever made. He considered the appeal of the Magic Band as outcasts who were even "too weird for the hippies". Groening served as the curator of the All Tomorrow's Parties festival that reunited the post-Beefheart Magic Band.

Van Vliet's influence on post-punk bands was demonstrated by Magazine's recording of "I Love You You Big Dummy" in 1978 and the tribute album Fast 'n' Bulbous - A Tribute to Captain Beefheart in 1988, featuring the likes of artists such as the Dog Faced Hermans, The Scientists, The Membranes, Simon Fisher Turner, That Petrol Emotion, the Primevals, The Mock Turtles, XTC, and Sonic Youth, who included a cover of Beefheart's "Electricity" as a bonus track on the deluxe edition of their 1988 album Daydream Nation. Other post-punk bands influenced by Beefheart include Gang of Four, Pere Ubu, Stripper, Babe the Blue Ox and Mark E. Smith of The Fall. The Fall covered "Beatle Bones 'N' Smokin' Stones" in their 1993 session for John Peel. Mike Verna (drummer/vocalist for Stripper) recorded a version of "Harry Irene" on his 2008 solo album, Audrey. Beefheart is considered to have "greatly influenced" New Wave artists, such as David Byrne of Talking Heads, Blondie, Devo and The B-52s.

Tom Waits' shift in artistic direction, starting with 1983's Swordfishtrombones, was, Waits claims, a result of his wife Kathleen Brennan introducing him to Van Vliet's music. "Once you've heard Beefheart," said Waits, "it's hard to wash him out of your clothes. It stains, like coffee or blood." Guitarist John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers cited Van Vliet as a prominent influence on the band's 1991 album Blood Sugar Sex Magik as well as his debut solo album Niandra Lades and Usually Just a T-Shirt (1994) and stated that during his drug-induced absence, after leaving the Red Hot Chili Peppers, he "would paint and listen to Trout Mask Replica." Black Francis of the Pixies would cite Beefheart's The Spotlight Kid as one of the albums he listened to predominately when first writing songs for the band. Kurt Cobain of Nirvana would also acknowledge Van Vliet's influence, mentioning him among his notoriously eclectic range. The White Stripes in 2000 released a 7'' tribute single, Party of Special Things to Do, containing covers of that Beefheart song plus "China Pig" and "Ashtray Heart". The Kills included a cover of "Dropout Boogie" on their debut Black Rooster EP (2002). The Black Keys in 2008 released a free cover of Beefheart's "I'm Glad" from Safe as Milk. Beck includes "Safe as Milk" and "Ella Guru" in a playlist of songs as part of his website's Planned Obsolescence series of mashups of songs by the musicians that have influenced him. Franz Ferdinand cited Beefheart's Doc At The Radar Station as a strong influence on their second LP, You Could Have It So Much Better. Placebo briefly named themselves Ashtray Heart, after the track on Doc at the Radar Station; the band's album Battle for the Sun contains a track called "Ashtray Heart". Joan Osborne covered Beefheart's "(His) Eyes are a Blue Million Miles", which appears on Early Recordings. She cites Van Vliet as one of her influences. PJ Harvey and John Parish would discuss Beefheart's influence in an interview together. Harvey's first experience of Beefheart's music was as a child, as her parents had all of his albums in their record collection, which when she listened to made her "feel ill". Harvey was reintroduced to Beefheart's music by Parish, who lent her a cassette copy of Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) at the age of 16. She has cited him as one of her greatest influences since. Parish would describe Beefheart's music as a "combination of raw blues and abstract jazz. There was humour in there, but you could tell that it wasn't [intended as] a joke. I felt that there was a depth to what he did that very few other rock artists have managed [to achieve]."

Discography

Main article: Captain Beefheart discography

Safe as Milk (1967) Strictly Personal (1968) Trout Mask Replica (1969) Lick My Decals Off, Baby (1970) Mirror Man (1971) The Spotlight Kid (1972)

Clear Spot (1972) Unconditionally Guaranteed (1974) Bluejeans & Moonbeams (1974) Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) (1978) Doc at the Radar Station (1980) Ice Cream for Crow (1982)

Further reading

• Barnes, Mike (2000). Captain Beefheart. Quartet Books. ISBN 1-84449-412-8.
• Courtier, Kevin (2007). Trout Mask Replica. New York: Continuum. ISBN 0-8264-2781-2
• Delville, Michel & Norris, Andrew (2005). Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Secret History of Maximalism. Cambrdige: Salt Publishing. ISBN 1-84471-059-9.
• French, John (2010). Beefheart: Through the Eyes of Magic. ISBN 0-9561212-1-7
• Harkleroad, Bill (1998). Lunar Notes: Zoot Horn Rollo's Captain Beefheart Experience. Interlink Publishing. ISBN 0-946719-21-7.
• Miles, Barry (2004). Frank Zappa. Atlantic Books. ISBN 1-84354-091-6
• Bamberger, W.C. (1999). Riding Some Kind Of Unusual Skull Sleigh: On The Arts Of Don Van Vliet. ISBN 978-0-917453-35-9
• Beaugrand, Andreas and various (1994). Stand Up to Be Discontinued. (Paperback) ISBN 3-9801320-2-1.
• Van Vliet, Don (Captain Beefheart) (1987). Skeleton Breath, Scorpion Blush. (All poems in English, preface in German and English). Bern-Berlin: Gachnang & Springer. ISBN 978-3-906127-15-6
• Azerrad, Michael (2001). Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991. Little Brown. ISBN 0-316-78753-1

External links

• Beefheart.com - The Captain Beefheart Radar Station
• Captain Beefheart at Rolling Stone
• Captain Beefheart at Allmusic
• Don Van Vliet at the Michael Werner Gallery
• Some Yo Yo Stuff by Anton Corbijn