The Beat Patrol

This article on Beefheart comes from the April 1979 issue of Creem magazine…

Don Van Vliet has just spent the last fifteen minutes wandering around the conference room at Warner Brothers’ New York headquarters, investigating the possibilities of undoing the corporate environment. He has painstakingly adjusted and readjusted the dimmer switch until the lighting in the room matches the twilight outside, and he has also managed to pry open one of those standard office building windows, the kind that no one who works in places like this ever even gets near for fear that if they do try and get some fresh air in, some alarm will ring and a team of security guards will haul them away (“Mr. Smith, why would you want to tamper with the scientifically designed heating and cooling system of this structure? I mean, you have a window to look out of, don’t you? Which is better than many other employees here. A window with which to see the building next door, where other people work hard all day for their firm, just as you should for yours. Why do you wish to spoil things, Mr. Smith? Perhaps a talk with the company psychologist . . .”).

The Captain finally sits down, the two of us engage in the ancient Beefheartian ritual of cigarette exchanging – Don’s eyes light up when he sees that I’ve got a pack of Chesterfields and I am ecstatic when a tin of Balkan Sobranies materializes out of his travel bag – but soon he is up again, moving towards a corner of the room where a cardboard cut-out of Shaun Cassidy is standing. Don’s eyes move up and down as he takes in Shaun’s toothy grin, the long scarf, the open necked shirt, the tight slacks. “Can you imagine?” he exclaims. “That kid has more money than all of us. Well, so what? He deserves it. You know what I mean?” And with that, he assumes a John L. Sullivan stance, bobs and weaves a bit, waits for the opening and lands a lightning quick solid right jab to Cassidy’s jaw. “I like this place,” he laughs. “You know what I mean?”

TO BILLY, LOVE OVER GOLD – DON VAN VLIET reads the inscription on the front cover of my copy of The Spotlight Kid, a memento of my first meeting with Captain Beefheart back in early ‘72. I’ve since seen him hand out autographs to admirers and give signed sketches to friends, and that little statement usually accompanies his signature. It is one of many phrases that Beefheart has graced the universe with over the years (“Earth – God’s golf ball, “”I’m not even here; I just stick around for my friends,” and “You can tell by the kindness of a dog how a human should be” are three other favorites), but in lieu of his unique relationship to both the world of music and the music industry itself (I hesitate to use the word “career,” since writing and playing music is just one of many things this man does brilliantly; if pressed, I’d have to say that his career is living and on that account, he’s got roughly ninety-nine percent of the rest of his race beat), it’s most assuredly the one that means the most. It has often been a struggle for him to do what he loves to do, and his refusal to be manipulated by the “accepted” rules and regulations of the music biz (x amount of records recorded during y amount of time; z number of tours per annum; etc.) has probably had a big hand in preventing him from becoming a household word, and has resulted in plenty of strange dealings with a number of record companies. But you wind up coming right back to that little slogan and it explains just about everything you’d need to know about Don Van Vliet.

“Beefheart freaks. I know the kind too well – ‘I just love Captain Beefheart. Wouldn’t want him over at the house, though!’”

The closest that Beefheart came towards trying it their way was towards the middle of the decade. In 1972 he’d given Warner Bros. Clear Spot, an album which, produced by Ted Templeman, was hoped to be the one to bring the Beefheart sound to a bigger than cult-sized audience. It didn’t happen, and after its commercial failure, Beefheart moved over to Mercury. 1974’s Unconditionally Guaranteed sported a cover showing him clutching dollar bills in each hand, with a mock warranty printed underneath the picture. One part stood out for me, though; it said: “Warning: Could be harmful to closed minds.” And so, even though the credits on the back were enough to let me know that something was indeed amiss here, what with producer Andy DiMartino getting not only co-arranging credit with Beefheart for all the songs but also co-credit for the songwriting, I gave the record a chance and was rewarded by an undeniably subdued, but nevertheless often captivating, set of songs. Ballads dominated here for the first time on a Beefheart album and odd time signatures were non-existent. But as I pointed out in my review of the record here in CREEM when it was released, ballads were certainly not without precedent in Beefheart land. Spotlight Kid has had them, as had Clear Spot, and I, for one, found no problem at all holding up songs like “Neon Meat Dream of a Octafish” and “Her Eyes Are a Blue Million Miles” side by side and enjoying the different glow from each of them.

Not much happened with the album, though, and Beefheart’s lone New York appearance that year proved to be one of the most depressing concerts I have ever attended in my life. The Magic Band had broken up shortly before this particular tour had begun and Beefheart, assembling what musicians he could under the circumstances, went through the tour like a man whose feet had been cut out from under him. The band tried hard to accompany Beefheart as best they could, but as he himself will tell you, it takes a lot of “unlearning” to play his music correctly. The audience that night was the kind that, unfortunately, I’d seen too many times at Captain Beefheart shows. Mostly Zappoids, coming doped up to see the ‘bizarre’ Beefheart be weird. They yelled and screamed throughout all the slow songs – and many grew hostile when it became clear that this wasn’t going to be an evening of Dadaist entertainment. I only made it through about half the set and finally I just became so overwhelmed by sadness that I had to leave.

“I own some land in California – as if anyone can own land – up north near the Oregon border; I think it’s a quarter of an acre or a third, I’m not really sure. All I need is a window looking on the ocean.”

A second Mercury album came out in ‘75 and to Beefheart it was the final straw. Entitled Bluejeans and Moonbeams, the record was mostly outtakes from the previous record and rough takes with instruments overdubbed. Beefheart didn’t want it released and it went out without his approval. Beefheart had suddenly disappeared and the company was going to make sure that he honored his contract, one way or another. Where he disappeared to was home in Northern California, where he and his lovely wife Jan simply went on with their life together – painting, writing, reading, loving, breathing.

In 1976, a new Magic Band started to get assembled and, as with the original Magic Band, it got pieced together slowly and without any real kind of search. The right players just started appearing. Jeff Tepper had met Beefheart years before and Beefheart had given him a drawing which Tepper had framed and put up on the wall of his house. The two of them met again and Tepper, a sensitive guitarist, began playing with Beefheart. Richard Redus, the other guitarist, was a visitor at Beefheart’s house during the recording of Trout Mask Replica (“We talked about the beautiful eucalyptus trees in Woodland Hills,” Beefheart recalls) and he joined the fold after a stint with Zappa. Drummer Robert Williams and bassist/keyboard player Eric Feldman formed the rhythm section, and the Magic Band was back in business.

Late in ‘77, the new band went on tour, performing a set of old and new songs. All skepticism that I may have had was wiped out as soon as I heard new songs, like “Floppy Boot Stomp and “Bat Chain Puller,” (or not only was Beefheart in amazing vocal form, considering his lengthy exile, but the band sounded completely attuned to the textural and rhythmic slants and turns of Beefheart’s decidedly singular muse. The Captain seemed more relaxed onstage than I’d ever seen him, and, when he finally took out his horn for “Veteran’s Day Poppy” and let loose that shrill shrieking cry of humanity, I knew all was well with the world. After a few months of negotiations, Beefheart had a new recording deal worked out with good old Warner Brothers.

“I’m totally happy with this album. I just had a blast, and I mean a blast, doing it. Glen Kolotkin, the engineer, is just brilliant. This is the first time you can hear my voice the way it really is. Glen did Stravinsky’s last record. I’ve always used my voice as an instrument but these people never realized that. What a job he did. When I heard ‘Bat Chain Puller’ it just knocked me down. He got my voice the way it is. You know what I mean?”

Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) is an extraordinary achievement, considering both what Beefheart, has been through the last few years and the fact that the new Magic Band was put together basically from scratch. It’s perhaps the most well rounded Beefheart album ever, letting loose all facets of Beefheart’s extraordinary personality. One doesn’t hear much truly sensual music these days, and it’s a joy to hear “Tropical Hot Dog Night,” with its swirling melodies and counter melodies mustering up sweet jungle fever, and “Candle Mambo,” filled with such simple and beautiful imagery (When I’m dancing with my love/The shadows flicker up above/Up above the shadows do the candle mambo”). The album as a whole just soars and frolics, filled with humor and love. And with the addition of trombonist Bruce Fowler, the Magic Band’s sound takes on a whole new dimension. (“Is he too much?” laughs Beefheart. “Slide trombone and two slide guitars is it! You know what I mean?”).

“You know they’ve found a use for cockroaches and it’s pretty good. What it is is that they predict earthquakes by their behavior. Is that hip? I knew they were worth it. They are beautiful things.

If the new wave has been good for anything, it’s been the opening up again of various ways of expressing oneself musically and a break way from the creeping, emotionally deadening blandness 6f mainstream 70’s music. Don Van Vliet was new wave before there was a new wave, and he was playing fusion music before there was fusion music. Captain Beefheart is a person whose life and art are one and the same. Simply put, he is a man who is free. You know what I mean?  

Billy Altman 

This article/interview comes from Sounds magazine, April 14, 1973…
 

I must confess I didn’t expect Captain Beefheart’s reply to “Hello, how are you?” to be that he felt fine but was very angry about the Muhammad Ali fight: “Look what they have done to him man, I mean he won that, and they took it away from him.”

Don Van Vliet and his wife Jan joined us for a lunch a couple of days after he flew in to London for his biggest and potentially most successful tour here. With him is the Magic Band almost unchanged since last year, but with Alex St. Clair (now Alex Pyjama St. Clair) from the Safe as Milk days on guitar as well.

The Captain is a big man physically tall and powerful looking, and imposing in his presence. He’s a man, playing man’s music for women although he says, “of course, other men can enjoy it too.”

He’s an uncompromising artist, a man who has seen or rather just knows what he can and must do in music, writing and painting, and in the way he lives.

In that way he’s strong, but he’s also gentle and in a way he’s an innocent in that he would be horrified or outraged if someone suggested he went against what he felt naturally was right just to make money or something. All this is tempered by a delight in puns and a sense of humour that makes his music and his company among the most rewarding ways I know of spending time.

Natural

People think he’s weird, that he’s either consciously or unconsciously a crazy man or a freak but listen to ham and think about it. Maybe he’s just a natural man traveling in a world where most people have formed themselves into tight clubs to fight against their natural feelings: he’s not a schooled idealist, just a man who’s never believed in anything else.

He once quoted a Beatle’s lyric to me “I’d like to turn you on” and almost spat the words out in disgust. “I was on from the moment I hit air”

Oh c’mon, people say when I try to explain how I feel about the Captain, surely you don’t believe all that stuff? Well, sure ‘nuff and yes I do.

But boxing? “Well, my favourite percussionist is Muhammad Ali.” He said, shuffling ant tapping his feet under his chair. “you know? I think that boxing behind the scenes, as it is with a lot of record companies, is really terrible, but I think the sport is really nice. In Muhammad Ali’s case I think the object is just to get points, not to murder anybody or anything. That’s really nice. He’s done a lot for his people . For people, period.

Knowledge

“You know what they just did to him I mean he won that fight. Of course, he went against the draft and they’ve never forgiven him for that I mean he never wanted to shoot anybody, that he didn’t know. And now they’ve finally got their wish. They have a marine boxer, a war boxer. Disgusting.

He won it. I know he did. I saw it, and a lot of people know that. But the army always wins not really because they defeat their purpose in the first place if they start a war but now they’re trying to get into that section of the media. I mean why isn’t John Lee Hooker number one on muzak? Why isn’t Roland Kirk number one on muzak? Or Lightnin’ Slim?”

At concerts in America, the Captain has been handing out leaflets and talking to people about killing whales. He’s working with an organization that’s trying to get all whaling stopped for ten years. “If they stop it for ten years than I don’t think they’ll continue – they might see how silly it is. How ridiculous man those things have a 14½ pound brain compared to our two or three pounds, I mean we could use all that knowledge.

“All we got to do is stop hunting them and be nice to them for 10 years and I think they might tell us a few things, things they haven’t been able to. I mean even here you eat a lot of whale meat don’t you?”

I said, yeah, they put it in dogfood. “Well, that’s ridiculous man, dogs don’t want to eat whalemeat, dogs can’t go on the ocean.”

He said that there’d only been two attacks by killer whales on man, one of them after some guy in British Colombia rolled a log down on to a female killer whale and paralysed her. Then the guy and a friend went out in a canoe, and the female’s mate attacked.

“He didn’t hurt the guy that didn’t do it, he grabbed the guy’s arm who did do it out of the water, pulled him under and just drowned him. He didn’t disturb the other guy or rock the boat. I think that’s fair, because the guy did it viciously – what a jerk, what an imbecile. I think that was justice”.

I remember at the end of his last tour here, he stood around after the gig slightly puzzled but very pleased. “You know something, ” he said, “I think we’re getting famous.” It’s true, Beefheart and the Magic Band are now known to a lot more people here and in the States than they were a year ago, and that can only be good.

Running parallel with this increasing fame, the records have been getting a lot more direct, much more immediately accessible, and I asked if he’d done that deliberately, made Clear Spot as direct as he could.

“Yeah, as direct as possible – that’s what I was wanting to do all along, with every album, but usually I got waylaid by by the angelfruit cake people, I guess.”

How did he feel now about things like Trout Mask Replica and Lick My Decals Off Baby? I like them a lot, but I’m more comfortable with this one. What can I say? Listen, a lot of people are worried about me going commercial, Y”KNOW, WHAT IS COMMERCIAL? I mean what is commercial” If somebody could tell me what commercial is I could make a lot of money and stop all wars- put money into that, save the animals.

“But the group now is together, and they’re able to control whatever it is they want to control. I mean now they go up and play, they don’t just go up and throw themselves out into ego and things. It’s freer now, they found their water. It was all going toward this kind of music anyway, and now it’s there.” Obviously, he said, that applied to playing on stage, more than to records, because it was almost impossible to capture the music in a studio.

Muzak

I’d only heard the Clear Spot songs on record, but from that I felt that stuff sounded more formal than – say Trout Mask. He looked surprised. “Yeah? I thought the other way around. I thought the other stuff was more formal. Now there’s more interplay, as opposed to people just playing out to someone who can never accept it. A lot of people could never relate back to that sort of music, they were trembling in a lot of cases. ‘Course, muzak has done that to them, it’s made them all on one level.”

“But it’s the same like this time I’m saying “Big eyed beans from Venus, don’t let anything get in between us”. I’ve said the same thing all along really in a lot of different ways.

Blues

“It’s just a shame that the disc jockeys won’t allow things to get out things they don’t understand. It’s usually the disc jockeys that don’t understand things, and if they don’t they sure as hell won’t play it.”

Over lunch he’d been talking about John Lee Hooker and Lightnin’ Slim, and some of his music, especially early stuff, seems to me to be heavily rooted in the spirit, if not the form of the blues. Had he ever thought of himself as a blues singer?

“I’ve been forced to sing the blues, because everything’s so .. I mean all of these houses and all this cement, the world’s mouth has been covered over by cement. But then the world sometimes has an upset stomach, belches and does these earthquakes, or just small cracks, does its original brown earthsmile.

“People get really upset about that, but whadda they expect? We belch but it doesn’t knock things over, the earth belches the same I mean, it has to, it’s a living thing.”

Steve Peacock

Taken from Mojo magazine, Dec. 1993 of the man formerly known as Captain Beefheart. Following that, is a letter that former bandmember John “Drumbo” French wrote to Mojo, in relation to the DiMartino article. Also, guitarist Henry Kaiser claims that DiMartino never interviewed him for this article, but DiMartino has proof that the interview did indeed take place.
Strange…
  

“Yeah, I’m happy. Happy as a clam.” 

He is alive. A recluse. Painting in seclusion up near the Oregon border. There have been weird signals through the ether since he stopped making music 11 years ago, but they were faint, confused, unintelligible. But now Dave DiMartino has finally made contact with the man who used to be Captain Beefheart.

It is entirely fitting that Don Van Vliet, painter of international repute, and one of a handful of truly legendary figures in rock ‘n’ roll, gifted us with a song entitled “The Past Sure Is Tense” on the last album of his career; 1982’s Ice Cream For Crow. While the former Captain Beefheart now lives the life of a recluse, painting in seclusion in a small California town scant miles from the Oregon border, it is with his o past that he now struggles.

“It’s very had because he’s famous,” says Michael Werner, Van Vliet’s art dealer for over a decade, who owns a pair of prestigious art galleries in Cologne and Manhattan “Many people know his name as a musician. It’s very hard to make a career as a painter, and that’s a big obstacle.” Nevertheless, Van Vliet is doing precisely that, rearing such richly descriptive titles as Gray Ape, Cactus Blanch and Parapliers the Willow Dipped, his paintings now sell in the $10,000-$35,000 range, and his drawings for between $500 and $5,000. “I’ve probably sold between 60 and 75 paintings,” Werner estimates. “And many more drawings.”

The man who once declared that a squid eating dough in a polythene bag was “fast ‘n’ bulbous” has had roughly 25 exhibitions of his art shown around the world, and has another commencing November 2 in Germany; scheduled to reach London sometime thereafter. For Van Vliet, who struggled for years in the music business to make the odd dollar – and usually failed – it is a legitimacy which has been a long time coming. But leading the life of a near-hermit, away from the army of journalists who have mythologised the man and his 1969 masterwork, Trout Mask Replica, has also had it drawbacks. Recent attempts to diminish Van Vliet’s musical accomplishments – most conspicuously by guitarist Henry Kaiser – have met little opposition from the man himself.

Whether it was revisionist history or the jarring truth, Kaiser addressed the world thus via the liner notes to his 1991 album on Reckless Records, Hope You Like Our New Direction (which bore a near-perfect rendition of Beefheart’s “Japan In a Dishpan”): “It has become clear to me over the years that the stories Don Van Vliet has delivered to the press about his total responsibility for the creation of this music are very, very far from the truth.”

Kaiser contends that the vastly influential music to be found on Trout Mask Replica and its successors (Lick My Decals Off Baby, The Spotlight Kid and Clear Spot) was in large part the uncredited work of Beefheart’s Magic Band – Zoot Horn Rollo, Drumbo, Rockette Morton, and Ed Marimba. According to Kaiser, earlier musicians such as Jeff Cotton, who appeared on Trout Mask Replica as Antennae Jimmy Semens, also played formative roles in the music.

And all those stories about Don Van Vliet pounding out Trout Mask Replica on the piano in eight-and-a-half hours, then teaching them to his band? “Not true at all,” says Kaiser “It was a nice image, and it sold music really well, but there might have been other ways of doing it that would have resulted in better success for the band. My personal observation is that any time there was the possibility of success, Don would sabotage it. I’m not one to analyse things psychologically; but . . . he’s a tremendously creative person who wrote amazing lyrics, and he got that stuff done with those guys. But take those guys away and you’re left in Bluejeans and Moonbeams land.”

The obvious question: Why does Henry Kaiser even care about all this? “I just enjoy it,” he says. “I’m a fan.” The second obvious question: who doesn’t? Especially when Aztec Camera’s Roddy Frame is inserting lyrics from Beefheart’s “Frownland” into the middle of his slick ’90s pop; when the requisite tribute album (Fast ‘N’ Bulbous, bearing aural testimonials from KVC, Sonic Youth, That Petrol Emotion and more) has come and gone; and when no less a light than Tom Waits essentially begat a new career apeing Van Vliet’s characteristic yawping growl. Or is that growling yawp?

Don Van Vliet, 52, is no longer such a cult figure that his earliest music is unobtainable to the masses; nor, for that matter, is his story such a mystery, Born Don Vliet in Glendale, California, he was indeed a child prodigy with an early devotion to art. He sculpted in clay (a fact confirmed by Werner, who’s seen photographs of the pieces) and, by one account, once punched a single hole in every rose in the hedge of a Beverly Hills garden.

He grew up near Los Angeles in the desert town of Lancaster, where – before dropping out of high school – he befriended fellow student Frank Zappa, the musical figure to whom he’d be linked for the remainder of his career. In 1963 or ‘64, they recorded a few tracks together as The Soots in Zappa’s nearby Cucamonga studio- at least one track from that period, “Metal Man Has Won His Wings,” has surfaced on a bootleg (albeit bearing the inaccurate title “Metal Man Has Hornet’s Wings”).

Taking his stage name from a film idea of his and Zappa’s called Captain Beefheart vs. the Grunt People, Don Vliet would later add the ‘Van’ and form the mutant blues band which first bore the name Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band.

The cast of characters would change – early Magic Band members included Alex Snouffer (billed as Alex St Clair), Doug Moon, Jerry Handley, Paul Blakeley and, for a short while, Ry Cooder – as would the major American labels on which Beefheart sporadically appeared: A&M (two early singles, later collected on a 1984 EP); Buddah (1967’s Safe as Milk and Mirror Man, the latter recorded the same year but released in 1971); Blue Thumb (1968’s Strictly Personal); Straight (Trout Mask Replica, 1969; Lick My Decals Off, Baby; 1970); Reprise (The Spotlight Kid, 1971; Clear Spot, 1972); Mercury (Unconditionally Guaranteed; Bluejeans & Moonbeams, 1974), Warners (Shiny Beast [Bat Chain Puller], 1978); Virgin (1980’s Doc At Radar Station); and, finally; Epic (1982’s Ice Cream For Crow).

If that lengthy chain of comings and goings betrays a lack of proper business direction, the music was by no means directionless. With the exception of the Mercury albums – glossily produced by Andy DiMartino (to whom this writer is, oddly, unrelated) and featuring familiar Magic Band members only on the first – every Beefheart record has grown in stature since its release. And fittingly, one of the best if most unexpected releases of 1992 was Sequel’s collection of Buddah out-takes I May Be Hungry But I Sure Ain’t Weird: The Alternative Captain Beefheart.

Yet looking at Captain Beefheart through this mid-’90s vantage point, when piercing criticisms by Henry Kaiser and even former members of his Magic Band remain mostly unanswered by Van Vliet himself can be unsettling. Absolutely no-one can argue the value of the music released under the man’s name; for that reason alone, further discussion is mostly intellectual exercise.

Still, somewhere in the course of appreciating a John Lennon or a Lou Reed – even a Frank Zappa or an Arthur Lee – one learns that the quality of music an artist produces, no matter how deeply it touches people, is not necessarily commensurate with their quality as a human being.

Say what you will about Kaiser’s motivation for singling out Beefheart so determinedly – for objecting to the accepted, press-generated wisdom that has come to position the man as a near-telepathic genius – there’s some truth to his arguments. “People just believe this calculated mythology which goes on and on because of the low level of journalism that existed when most of the writing about this took place. The fan magazines just endlessly regurgitate what was said in a Rolling Stone article or something. Nobody’s really done any professional investigation of this stuff.”

“The only tough thing about it for me is that people think a lot more of it than I do,” says Bill Harkleroad of his past life as Zoot Horn Rollo, and of the music he once played with Don Van Vliet. Speaking via the telephone from his home in Eugene, Oregon, he is preparing to do one of the three things he now does to earn a living: give a guitar lesson.

“I shouldn’t judge what it gave them, or whatever they enjoyed, by my opinion of what happened. What we’ve done in our past, all of us, doesn’t seem quite so great as when somebody else was around it, and how it affected them. It was too close. I knew the good and the bad of it, and nobody else really knows the bad of it, they just hear the parts that they like, and that’s what they remember.”

Harkleroad left Beefheart to form the short-lived Mallard (with fellow Magic Banders Mark ‘Rockette Morton’ Boston and Art ‘Ed Marimba’ Tripp) immediately after recording 1974’s disappointing bid for commercial acceptance, Unconditionally Guaranteed. For him, it was the end of the increasingly stressful line; “Maybe I finally got old enough and tired enough of the abuse, the lack of credit,” he now recalls dispassionately “I think that’s generally what happened. My view of why I left changes over the years.”

Abuse? “He was a raving jerk, albeit a very creative one,” claims Harkleroad, who goes on to dispute certain royalty arrangements. “I never made a penny – other than per diem and occasional rent, and his mother paid the rent for the first two years.”

Zoot Horn Rollo’s second job these days is as part-time manager of Face The Music, a Eugene record store – “to have benefits and stuff like that,” he explains. In doing his weekly order of product, Harkleroad found himself regularly reordering Beefheart’s catalogue. “That’s what kind of clued me into it,” he says. “Wait a minute – ding.’ If I have to replace Trout Mask Replica every week, it means it’s selling now more than it used to because of the cult trip.”

Aside from playing his fabled ‘glass-finger guitar’, Harkleroad had another role in the Magic Band, he says: musical translator. Following the post-Trout Mask exit of Drumbo, who preceded him in the role, the guitarist would listen to tapes of Beefheart’s various musical ideas -”whistling parts, piano things, his playing guitar, whatever it was,” he recalls – then decipher them in order to make them playable.

“If you listen to it, and if you’ve ever played guitar,” he adds, “you’ll know what I mean by ‘playable’.” Still – and this is an important point – Harkleroad is unwilling to denigrate his former boss’s inherent talent. “Not to take away from his general pool of sound or feel and thought,” he cautions. “He is very creative, and there’s no way he couldn’t have kept it together through so many different players.”

Harkleroad’s third job involves making production music with his guitar and MIDI at home. “Right now I’m working on some sleazy corporate video stuff” he says, only mildly embarrassed. Soft-spoken but articulate, the former Zoot Horn Rollo leaves no doubt that he is financially struggling: “I even sent down a thing when the Red Hot Chilli Peppers were advertising for a guitar player;” he admits. “I thought, sure, I’ll be a millionaire for a tattoo or two.”

“I think that working with him was probably the biggest mistake I ever made in my life,” says the equally soft-spoken John French, known as ‘Drumbo’ only when playing with Captain Beefheart -for it is Van Vliet who holds the exclusive rights to that stage name and all the others he bestowed upon the members of the Magic Band.

“First of all,” he continues, “it put me in the avant-garde category; and I didn’t care for that then. I like Coltrane, I like some of the things that Ornette Coleman did in jazz, but I didn’t want to do that. Because I felt like, if they want to be starving artists, then fine – but I didn’t want to be, I wanted to be a working musician. Doing that kind of put me into a category; and though I believed in it at the time and worked hard, nobody would touch me after that.”

French, living back in Lancaster (where fellow former Magic Band members Alex Snouffer and Doug Moon still reside) holds one major Beefheartian distinction. He has played with Don Van Vliet on four separate Occasions: from 1967-69,1976-71, 1975-76, and in 1980. So, one asks, if he now considers his stint with Beefheart such a big mistake, why did he keep going back? “Nobody would hire me because I was too weird,” he repeats. “It turned out that from being in that band, I had just gotten twisted enough where I felt more at home there than I did in the world – about 51 percent more. Just enough.”

Like Bill Harkleroad, with whom he is still friendly, John French describes Don Van Vliet as a complex and creative person who was distinctly unpleasant. Harkleroad laughs only slightly when asserting Beefheart was “Mansonesque in his abilities to control the situation”, French, meanwhile, mentions ‘brainwashing’ sessions.

He refers to an early ’70s piece Langdon Winner once wrote about Beefheart in Rolling Stone. “At one point in the interview Winner suddenly became Public Enemy Number One, and Don acted like he was somebody from the CIA. We all lived together; and Don treated everybody in the band like that occasionally – he would single one person out and get everybody else on his case. Later on, when I read about Patricia Hearst getting kidnapped, it reminded me – on a much lighter level, of course – of some of the things that Don did with us.”

French still accords Beefheart his due as an artist, especially the era “before he started trying to compete with Frank Zappa and get weird”. The reason he joined Beefheart’s early band, he says, is because it was one of the best blues bands around. “Don was an absolutely fantastic blues singer; and they just did these simple songs and he played the harmonica and it took you into another world. That band was fantastic.

“The thing is, Don is an incredibly complex person, but he’s also a very lazy person. So when he wrote complex music for the first Magic Band he depended heavily on the band to arrange it – to teach it to him, even though he said that he taught his bands every note of the music. He didn’t. That’s a big story”

Again, like Bill Harkleroad, John French is friendly with Henry Kaiser. French and Kaiser have recorded two albums in recent years with Richard Thompson and Fred Frith, though it’s unlikely the quartet will record together again. “We’ve kind of grown apart, and it’s sad. I love all those guys, but it’s been difficult to get people from such different lifestyles just to focus and agree on something. We didn’t really know how to communicate with each other; because we were never around each other, and my life is totally different,” he adds. “I don’t read all the best-sellers like they do.”

Indeed, Captain Beefheart haunts John French even now: “I tried to do my own solo album, but I was told, This is great material, but it would never work for you, because you were Drumbo – you’ve got to write weird stuff and things that sound really on the edge and avant-garde. I was told this by one person in particular; the head of Restless Records – he sent me a long letter; explaining to me that I’d never be successful at anything except emulating Beefheart.”

French, who now stays at home caring for his two-year-old daughter, is struggling to find work. “I’m looking into being a medical transcriber; which has to he one of the most boring jobs around. I just figure it’s something I can do quickly, because I understand medical terminology; And I’m very good at typing.”

“One time he told me that he was driving and he looked into the car next to him and he saw. . . Noodlehead ,” says guitarist Moris Tepper; laughing as he recalls a conversation with his former employer Don Van Vliet.

Tepper (who has since dropped his first name Jeff- “It just felt kind of extraneous,” he says) played slide and ’steel appendage’ guitar in the final version of the Magic Band, beginning with the original unreleased Bat Chain Puller (withheld for legal reasons, then considerably revamped as Shiny Beast) through to Ice Cream For Crow.

“It was at night,” Tepper continues with his story, “and it had a neon-green ring around its neck. He told me so many wonderful stories, but this is one that I’ll share, because I love it. He told me he saw Jesus, and he was about 50 feet tall, walking across the desert. It isn’t that, like, he saw Jesus – but he saw a spirit that was really heavy; really big, and moving really fast. He had a big beard, and he was huge. There’s that kind of stuff, and Don will tell us this guy’s name he was with at the time – and you’ll meet the guy in fucking Alaska, and it’s like, That’s exactly what happened, man. And that happened with almost every weird story I ever heard -there’d be some kind of confirmation through somebody else.”

There are many differences between the members of the early Magic Band and those of later line-ups. First, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in the latter-day band who’ll willingly pick Don Van Vliet apart; most came into the group as admitted Beefheart fanatics, utterly thrilled to be sharing the stage with their idol.

Before meeting Beefheart, Tepper says he used to listen to Trout Mask and attempt to replicate the guitar parts on his four-track tape recorder. After they met, he recalls, “He came over one day and I played him “Dali’s Car” and “Pachuco Cadaver” and “My Human Gets Me Blues.” I just played him all that stuff. He’d just done those two records with DiMartino, where none of the musicians could play, and he thought the only band that would ever play his music was the original Magic Band.”

Secondly; most newer Magic Band members are still actively and successfully enjoying careers in music. New York-based guitarist Gary Lucas, who guested on Doc At the Radar Station and played throughout Ice Cream For Crow; has had significant critical success with his own work on Enemy Records and his group Gods & Monsters; his latest group, the Killer Shrews, teams him with Jon Langford and Tony Maimone, whose other affiliations (Mekons / Three Johns and Pere Ubu) have clearly drawn inspiration from Beefheart.

Tepper, who played with Tom Waits following Beefheart’s musical retirement, now regularly plays in Los Angeles with his group, also called Tepper, along with another aggregation known as Eggtooth. Drummer Cliff Martinez joined the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and has since scored films, including Steven Soderburgh’s acclaimed Sex Lies & Videotape. Keyboardist Eric Drew Feldman collaborated with Snakefinger, recently coproduced the solo debut of Pixie Frank Black and is now working on its follow-up.

Compare and contrast: Zoot Horn Rollo, part-time record store manager; Drumbo, unemployed; Art Tripp, chiropractor in a small California town (“He does television ads, it’s great,” says Harkleroad); Rockette Morton, in Fresno, “playing in some lounge band”, according to French; and Antennae Jimmy Semens? “The last I heard, he was in Hawaii running a janitorial service and playing clubs part-time with his wife,”

And in LA, Moris Tepper is talking about the old Magic Band: “Yeah, I met them,” he says. “Did they offer me any insight? A little bit, Some of the things that Don would express about them became clearer after I’d met them. John French maybe more of a different case, more complex, but you got the impression, Man, Don was really pulling some strings. He always talked about them as if they were Okies, and that they had just seemed like some kind of trailer park types.” But then, attempting to be fair; he adds “I was played like a puppet as well.”

And finally, one way the old and new Magic Bands are not so different after all: Don Van Vliet hasn’t spoken to most of them in years. “Don and I have a cyclical relationship,” says Tepper; somewhat cagily. “Right now it’s in hibernation.” And even Gary Lucas, who virtually managed Beefheart following the Doc At the Radar Station tour through his retirement, hasn’t spoken with the man since 1984.

Would Gary Lucas describe Don Van Vliet as a warm individual? “Yes and no,” he says, considering. “I don’t know. He can be, if you get him in a certain mood, on a one-on-one, he can be the most charming person in the world, very charismatic, magical with his train of thought and conversation. I’ve never met anybody like him. I don’t wanna dis the guy, but I mean, I’m not with him, and I was with him an awfully long time for people who worked with him.”

Did Beefheart hear the Mallard records? “Oh yeah, he was very contemptuous of them,” says Lucas. “But he was contemptuous of anybody who was alive making music, I’ve got to say. Not too many kind words about anybody, until after they died and ceased to be a threat to him.”

Don Van Vliet was bitter about a lot of things – his treatment by the record industry, new wave and punk groups receiving accolades when they’d obviously been influenced by him – but no more bitter; Lucas thinks, than many survivors of the music business. “His whole schtick was, I got a beef in my heart against the world. He’s definitely a rager. And he loved Dylan Thomas, one of his favourite poems was “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.” ” He snorts: “I can never remember Don going gently into the good night. As he put it himself he displaced a lot of water wherever he went.”

Their relationship wound down gradually, Lucas recalls, as the new Magic Band drifted off after Ice Cream For Crow “I was trying to keep it together; and I wanted to do another record. But he kind of put the kibosh on that, even though Virgin had picked up the option to do another record. And then it was just like, let’s concentrate on art. He thought it was really a much better; cleaner kind of business for him to be in. And his wife was also of the opinion that if he was going to paint seriously then he shouldn’t be making records.

“How can I say it? It was amicable, right? But he didn’t want to make music anymore. All he wanted to do was to pursue his career. So I set him up with Julian Schnabel and the Mary Boone Gallery and the Michael Werner Gallery – they were ready to do shows with him – and then I said, Okay, you’ve got the top galleries in the world interested in your work, they want to show your work. And you don’t want to make music, do recordings or tour anymore. I didn’t really get involved with you to become your art pimp. So, like, see you.”

Don Van Vliet’s withdrawal from the music world has left many people hanging, relying on their own memories if they’ve ever encountered him personally, or the memories of others who knew him, whatever their various agendas may be. This writer encountered him many times during his musical career; both as fan and journalist, and found him never less than charming. Still, Henry Kaiser’s earlier words about the “calcu-lated mythology” linger.

In 1974, having seen Beefheart twice previously and due to my sur-name, I spent a memorable night of drinking with the man after his Bluejeans & Moonbeams band had given what was only their fifth perfor-mance. Beefheart took my reporter’s notebook and avidly sketched away, asked peculiarly innocent questions (“You saw that Detroit show? Can you believe Ray Davies said that about me?”), acted as if he were faith-healing his wife Jan’s sore leg, and then (it might have been the drinks) mentioned the nickname of a close friend of mine whom he’d encoun-tered for a brief moment backstage in Miami three years earlier and couldn’t possibly have remembered.

Seven years later; we’d meet again in Detroit, where he’d see his earlier sketches once more and swear to the point of absurdity that of course he remembered me: “I remember everything,” he said, grinning warmly. “If I meet someone I like, I totally remember everything. I remember the whole sequence of events photographically.” He grinned again, then asked to borrow my cigarette lighter. “You look really good,” he concluded. The first encounter had been captivating: the second, in retrospect, was pure showbiz. Others have spent much more time with Don Van Vliet. Precisely how much, of course, is open to interpretation. Today, Henry Kaiser says he spent “a bunch” of time with Van Vliet and the Magic Band back in the early ’70s: “it was 10 or 15 days total, I watched them rehearse, and I watched songs being written.”

But one insider counters that Kaiser “hung around” and tried to ingratiate himself with the band. “He’s like a Stalinist who wants to rewrite history with himself in the Magic Band. He snipes at Don over the years because Don would say he gave him negative vibes.”

When Sequel issued its Alternative Captain Beefheart package in 1992, Kaiser fired off a letter containing 17 factual corrections to its unsuspecting annotator; John Platt. “You have really done this music, its fans and the people who created it a big disservice with your notes,” he wrote. “Better scholarship next time, please.” Henry Kaiser: musician or anal-retentive archivist? “I just think the story that’s in place is the story that’ll go down in history,” he says. “It’s too late now to find out very easily what happened.”

In 1990, Don Van Vliet officially returned to his home turf of Los Angeles. It was a comparatively quiet homecoming, an art exhi-bition at the Fred Hoffman Gallery in Santa Monica. “He’s a very reclusive person, so he was somewhat suspicious of any enterprise dealing with the public,” remembers Hoffman, who has since moved his gallery to the plusher environs of Beverly Hills. “But I think he felt comfortable in the situation, because there was genuine interest in his art. That’s what Michael [Werner] has basically done, shown a genuine interest in his art, and I think I’ve backed that up out here.”

The show was well-attended – probably split 50-50, guesses Hoffman, between fans of Don Van Vliet’s art and fans of his music. “I am also interested in him as a musician,” Hoffman is quick to stress, “but I wasn’t really coming from the perspective of the phenomenon of this crossover. That wasn’t my intention in doing the show although I knew that would bring out an audience. Probably some of the buyers were people who were Beefheart fans – in fact, I know one of the buyers of one of the paintings was somebody from the music industry.”

Who buys Don Van Vliet’s art? Most of the people familiar with the art world echo the clear-cut observation of his dealer, Michael Werner:

“Very few of the music lovers buy his paintings, because most of them don’t have money.” No, Don Van Vliet’s works now sell to people who have probably never heard a Captain Beefheart record; the same people who would naturally assume the title Trout Mask Replica belonged to a new work from this up-and-coming master.

“They just take him as a young artist, and I think this is really putting it in the right way,” says Werner. “They act as if he’s a young artist, because he’s been painting now for 15 years or so, and the first three or four years don’t even count, because he was also making music. It only counts from the time when he painted exclusively – and a young artist needs a 10-year time frame to start a career.”

Still, there are places where the worlds of art and music collide -and people sufficiently sophisticated in both spheres to provide insight into the two sides of Don Van Vliet. Los Angeles writer Kristine MeKenna, a long time friend and fan who has extensively written about the man both as musician and artist, is one of them. Does she see par-allels in the way Van Vliet has approached his painting and his music?

“It’s funny,” she says. “I see a difference because I’ve watched him a couple of times rehearsing his band and teaching them the songs, and I know that the stuff was immaculately and impeccably thought out in his head. Every note was meant to there, there was no improvisation, and the band was simply taught to play these compositions.” His paint-ings? “I get the feeling it’s more like he just enters this arena and wrestles with a force, you know? I think it’s much more of a leap into the void when he paints than when he was composing.”

One of the hazards of living a life of quiet isolation is that stories can go unchecked; rumours take on a valid life of their own if no-one – least of all the subject of those rumours – is willing to refute them. According to recent rumour; Don Van Vliet’s health is failing, some say quite seriously. “He has some kind of cancer;” says Henry Kaiser “People won’t really talk.” Says another source – who heard from a source who heard from a close source – “it could be lung cancer”. Still others whisper discreetly of multiple sclerosis.

Such rumours sound dubious to writer and friend MeKenna, who says Don Van Vliet has just built a brand new studio at his coastal hideaway “I haven’t seen any of his work for a while, but I know he’s been drawing a lot. He tells me he’s still making big paint-ings – and you don’t build a new studio if you’re not planning on doing work of some size.”

And while Don Van Vliet’s paintings are readied for European exhibition this month, the man himself- who, voluntarily or not, has become the central focal point of many other people’s lives – need only walk 135 feet from his house to reach the Pacific Ocean. In 1982, when he penned these lyrics, the world knew him as Captain Beefheart: “See those people that used to be/Throw those tents/You can’t see them now/They’re in past tense/the past sure is tense.”

“It makes me itch to think of myself as Captain Beefheart,” he told a Danish journalist in 1991. I don’t even have a boat.”

Dave DiMartino

Letter from John French to Mojo Magazine

I just read the Beefheart story a week or so ago. DiMartino, the author, was supposed to send me a copy (all writers promise, most never carry out their promises.) Eventually, I stumbled on it by myself through a friend, slide guitarist Scott Colby.

This letter is in apology to Mr. Van Vliet. Over the years there has been a lot of botched journalism, most recently in Mojo, concerning Beefheart and his former Magic Band members. All of us have been misquoted from time to time. Henry Kaiser has been misquoted. This all leads to misunderstandings. As the drummer for Captain Beefheart on several of his earlier albums, I spent more time around him than most of the other band members over a longer period of time. I saw his fiery days as the young aggressive and sometimes cruel bandleader. I saw him as an almost broken man shortly after his band left him (around Unconditionally Guaranteed, 1974-75). I saw him with the Doc at the Radar Station band as the artist mellowed with age and struggling to survive in a rather fickle music world.

Some of my experiences with him did affect me in a negative way. Unfortunately, I had not the good sense to keep this to myself in interviews in the past. This has resulted in some rather bad light being shed upon the Captain’s reputation, as the writers wanted to magnify the bad while somehow never mentioning the good. I also experienced some great times with the man. His sense of humour could be fantastic as he has great insight into mankind and the intricacies of behaviour which is reflected in his art and music.

As for me taking credit for composing some of his music, that is a misunderstanding not easily remedied. I do take credit only for several drum parts on Trout Mask Replica, some of which were revamped for later albums. I think the misunderstanding lies in the fact that I once stated I “wrote down” or transcribed most of Trout Mask Replica in conventional music notation, and then taught it to the band. Perhaps someone misunderstood this to mean I took credit fir “writing” the music. Don could neither read nor write music notation as he had no formal music education. Yet with this handicap, he still managed to communicate several albums worth of material through whistling, singing, and playing parts on guitars, drums, harmonicas, pianos, and any other instrument within reach. Had he been able to write music in the conventional manner, there is no telling what this man might have accomplished musically.

I basically joined what I thought was going to be a blues band in October of 1966. I was not particularly attracted to the avant-garde or Dada-Rock direction that the music took. However, I just tried my best to play the music the best I knew how in spite of what I considered to be a rather non-lucrative direction. However, the later Magic Band members were attracted to the band because of the music. Of course, by this time, the path had been cut and the tracks were laid. They never experienced the extreme hardship of those early albums. The Trout Mask band were trailblazers in a sense, and although I am proud to have played with all the Magic Bands, my best and highest regards go out to Bill Harkleroad (Zoot Horn Rollo), Jeff Cotton (Antennae Jimmy Semens) and Mark Boston (Rockette Morton). I have never seen a group of people work so hard on a musical project in my life before or since that project. It’s only too bad it was so poorly recorded.

Don and the band suffered financially. The blame doesn’t lie on Don for the financial disasters that happened, but on bad management and crooked record companies who never paid one cent of artist’s royalties to the people who worked so hard to make an artist’s work a reality. The albums are still selling, and I have yet to see one check for royalties. Shame on you, record companies! You have no honour!

As for Henry Kaiser, his only fault is in recognising the profound influence of Van Vliet’s music and calling attention to that influence. We have occasionally imitated the Trout Mask style in recordings together, simply because it is fun to play!

Don and Jan, I am truly sorry to you both for any sadness or pain all of this may have caused you, and I wish you a long and prosperous life.

Sincerely,
John “Drumbo” French

This famous article from the May 14, 1970 issue of Rolling Stone is the main source of the Captain’s infamous “legend” to this day – his beefs with Frank Zappa, his strange behavior, his sometimes cruel treatment of bandmembers – but also of the genius that is Captain Beefheart… 

“Uh oh, the phone,” Captain Beefheart mumbled as he placed his tarnished soprano saxophone in its case. “I have to answer the telephone.” It was a very peculiar thing to say. The phone had not rung.
Beefheart walked quickly from his place by the upright piano across the dimly lit living room to where the telephone lay. He waited. After ten seconds of stony silence it finally rang. None of the half dozen or so persons in the room seemed at all surprised by what had just happened. In the world of Captain Beefheart, the extraordinary is the rule.
At age 29, Captain Beefheart, also known as Don Van Vliet, lives in seclusion and near poverty in a small house in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles. Although it appeared on several occasions in the past that he would rise to brilliant stardom as a singer and bandleader, circumstances have always intervened to force him into oblivion. In his six years in the music business he has appeared in public no more than 25 times.
Since virtually no one has ever seen him play, stories about his life and art have taken on the character of legend, that is, of endless tall tales. People who saw him at the Avalon Ballrooom in San Francisco three years ago will now tell you, “I heard that he’s living in Death Valley somewhere.” or “Didn’t he just finally give up?” But there is considerably more to the man than the legend indicates.

The fact is that Don Van Vliet is alive, healthy, and happy, and putting together a new Magic Band to go on tour soon. As his recent album Trout Mask Replica testifies he is one of the most original and gifted creators of music in America today. If all goes well, the next six months should see the re-emergence of Captain Beefheart’s erratic genius into the world and the acceptance of his work by the larger it has always deserved.

The crucial problem in Beefheart’s career has been that few people have ever been able to accept him for what he is. His manager. musicians, fans, and critics listen to his incredible voice, his amazing lyrics, his chaotic harp and soprano saxz, and uniformly decide that Beefheart could be great if he would only (1) sing more clearly and softly (2) go commercial, (3) play blues songs that people could understand and dance to. “Don, you’re potentially the greatest white blues singer of all time.” his managers tell him, thinking that they are paying him a compliment. Record companies eagerly seek the Beefheart voice with its unprecedented four and one half octave range. They realize that the man can produce just about any sound he sets his mind to and that he interprets lyrics as well as any singer in the business. Urging him to abandon the Magic Band and to sing the blues with slick studio musicians, record producers have always been certain that Don Van Vliet was just a hype away from the big money.

But Beefheart stubbornly continues what he’s doing and waits patiently for everyone else to come around. He has steadfastly redused to leave the Magic Band or to abandon the integrity of his art. “I realize,” he says, “that somebody playing free music isn’t as commercial as a hamburger stand. But is it because you can eat a hamburger and hold it in your hand and you can’t do that with music? Is it too free to control?”

Beefheart’s life as a musician began in the town of Lancaster nestled in the desert of Southern California. He had gone to high school there and become the friend of another notorious Lancasterian, Frank Zappa. In his late teens Don Van Vliet listened intensively to two kinds of music – Mississippi Delta blues and the avant-garde jazz of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor. Although he was attracted to music and played briefly with a rhythm and blues group called the Omens, he did not yet consider music his vocation. He enrolled at Antelope Valley Junior College in 1959 as an art major, and soon grew suspicious of books and dropped out. For a brief while he was employed as a commercial artist and as a manager of a chain of shoe stores. “I built that chain into a thriving, growing concern,” he recalls, “Then as a kind of art statement I quit right in the middle of Christmas rush leaving the whole thing in chaos.” In the early Sixties Don Van Vliet moved to Cucamonga to be with Frank Zappa who was composing music and producing motion pictures. It was at about this time that Van Vliet and Zappa hatched up the name Captain Beefheart, “But don’t ask me why or how,” Beefheart comments today. The two made plans to form a rock and roll band called the Soots and to make a movie to be named Captain Beefheart Meets the Grunt People, but nothing ever came of either project. In time Zappa left for Los Angeles and formed the Mothers. Beefheart returned to Lancaster and gathered together a group of “desert musicians.” In 1964 the Magic Band was ready to begin playing teen age dances in its home town.

The one stage appearance of the first Beefheart ensemble was bizarre to the point of frightening. All members of the magic Band were dressed in black leather coats and pants with black high heel boots. The lead guitar player had a patch over one eye and long dangling arms that reached from his shoulders to half way below his knees. At a time that long hair was still a rarity, the Captain sported long dark locks down to his waist. It was simply outrageous.

The band was an immediate sensation in Lancaster and very soon its fame began to spread throughout southern California. Beefheart’s brand of abrasive blues-rock was truly a novelty to young listeners in 1964. Record companies interested in the new sound began to take notice. In mid 1964 Beefheart entered into the first of a long series of disastrous agreements with record producers.

His first release on A&M was a new version of “Diddy Wah Diddy” made popular by Bo Diddley. It featured his own style of frantic harp playing and an incredibly “low down” voice hitting notes at least half an octave lower than the lowest notes ever sung by any other rock performer. The record was a hit in Los Angeles and for a while it appeared that Beefheart was going to be a brilliant success in the music business.

But it was not to be. Beefheart recorded an album of new music and took it to Jerry Moss of A&M (Alpert and Moss). Moss listened to the songs – “Electricity,” “Zig Zag Wanderer,” “Autumn’s Child,” etc. – and declared that they were all “too negative.” He refused to release the album. Beefheart was crushed by this insensitivity and abruptly quit playing. A&M released the remaining single it had in the can. The words to “Frying pan” now seemed strangely prophetic: “Go down town/ You walk around/ A man comes up, says he’s gonna put you down/ You try to succeed to fulfill your need/ Then a car hits you and people watch you bleed/ Out of the frying pan into the fire/ Anything you say they’re gonna call you a liar.”

The record went nowhere and neither did Beefheart. For almost one year he lived in retirement back in Lancaster.

The second break in Beefheart’s career arrived in 1965 when producer Bob Krasnow of Kama Sutra agreed to release the same material that A&M had rejected. Beefheart reassembled the Magic Band and returned to record the twelve cuts of Safe As Milk (Buddah BDS 5001), an album which is still one of the forgotten classics of rock and roll history. Even though the album had been delayed for a year, it was still far ahead of its time. It featured the unmistakable Beefheart style of blues and bottleneck guitar, the first use in popular music of an electronic device called the theremin, [sic] and the first effective synthesis in America of rock and roll and Delta blues.

For the first time also, Beefheart was able to demonstrate the power and range of his voice. On one song, for example, Beefheart’s vocal literally destroyed a $1200 Telefunken microphone. Hank Cicalo, engineer for the sessions, reports that on the song “Electricity” Beefheart’s voice simply wouldn’t track at certain points. Although a number of microphones were employed, none of them could stand the Captain’s wailing “EEEE-Lec-Triccc-ittt-EEEEEEEE” on the last chorus. This, incidentally, can be heard on the record.

With an excellent album under his belt Beefheart felt confident enough to go on the road. In early 1966 he went on a tour of England and Europe where Safe As Milk had attracted considerable attention. When he returned to the States he played gigs at the Whiskey A-Go-Go in Los Angeles and the Family Dog in San Francisco. Well received in the burgeoning psychedelic rock scene, it seemed once again that Beefheart was on the verge of success. The Magic Band was scheduled to play a gig at the Fillmore and to appear at the Monterey Pop Festival, both of which could have been springboards to the top.

Then disaster struck. Beefheart’s lead guitar player suddenly quit the band leaving a gap which could not be filled. The unusual nature of Beefheart’s songs make it necessary for him to spend months teaching each new musician his music. The departure of the lead guitar destroyed Beefheart’s chances in the San Francisco scene. The Monterey Pop Festival went on without him. Those who attended it never knew what they had missed.

From this point in the story, events become even more chaotic and difficult to unravel. Beefheart returned to Los Angeles and tried to put together a new band and a new set of songs. His producer, Bob Krasnow, was to arrange the second Beefheart album on Buddah. According to sources in the Los Angeles record industry, Krasnow deliberately allowed the option on Beefheart’s contract to expire. When this happened he signed Beefheart to a personal contract and then sold the rights to Beefheart’s next album to both Buddah Records and MGM. Tapes of the album were then made at two different studios, apparently at the expense of both companies. When the sessions were finished in the summer of 1968 Beefheart left for a second tour of Europe.

In Beefheart’s absence Bob Krasnow released the album Strictly Personal under his own label, Blue Thumb, without Beefheart’s approval. As lawsuits filled the air, Beefheart himself was left in bewilderment. The record had been electronically altered through a process called phasing which totally obliterated the sound which he had been striving to put down. “That’s the reason that album is as bad as it is,” he sighs when asked about the incident. “I don’t think it was the group’s fault. They really played their ass off — as much as they had to play off.”

But despite the electronic and legalistic hanky panky surrounding its production, Strictly Personal is 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. Beefheart’s singing is again at full power. In songs like “Trust Us” and “Son of Mirror Man — Mere Man” it sounds as if all the joy and pain in the universe have found a single voice. Throughout the album the lyrics demonstrate Beefheart’s ability to juxtapose delightful humor with frightening insights — “Well they rolled around the corner / Turned up seven come eleven / That’s my lucky number, Lord / I feel like I’m in heaven.”

The unfortunate fact about the second album was that few people were able to get into it. Apparently, the combination of Beefheart’s musical progress and Krasnow’s electronic idiocy made the album too much for most listeners to take. Strictly Personal sold poorly and did nothing to advance the band’s popularity.

To this day there exists a strange love/hate relationship between Beefheart and Krasnow over the record. Krasnow claims that Beefheart still owes him $113,000 and that as a result of Beefheart’s disorganized way of handling money, he has been thrown in jail twice. Beefheart, on the other hand, usually cites Krasnow as a charlatan and pirate – the man most responsible for destroying his career. At other times, both men speak of each other with genuine respect, sympathy and affection. “I’d really like to have him back with me,” Krasnow said recently. “He’s actually a good man,” Beefheart will tell you.

Most of the Captain’s relationships with those close to him are of this sort. Everybody’s a despicable villain one day, a marvelous hero the next.

The current focus of Beefheart’s love/hate dialectic accounts for much of his current activity and inactivity. This time the prime protagonist is Frank Zappa.

Zappa has always had a great admiration for his old friend from Lancaster – an admiration often bordering on worship. Like so many of those around Beefheart, Zappa considers the man to be one of the few great geniuses of our time. When the smoke had cleared from the Blue Thumb snafu, Zappa came to Beefheart and told him that he would put out an album on his label, Straight Records. Whatever Beefheart wanted to do was O.K. and there would be no messing around with layers of electronic bullshit. The result was Trout Mask Replica, an album which this writer considers to be the most astounding and most important work of art ever to appear on a phonograph record.

When Beefheart learned of the opportunity to make an album totally without restrictions, he sat down at the piano and in eight and a half hours wrote all twenty-eight songs included on Trout Mask. When I asked him jokingly why it took that long, he replied, “Well, I’d never played the piano before and I had to figure out the fingering.” With a stack of cassettes going full time, Don banged out “Frownland,” “Dachau Blues,” “Veterans’ Day Poppy,” and all of the others complete with words. When he is creating, this is exactly how Don works — fast and furious.

“I don’t spend a lot of time thinking. It just comes through me. I don’t know how else to explain it.” In his box of cassettes there are probably dozens of albums of Trout Mask Replica quality or better. The trouble is that once the compositions are down it takes him a long time to teach them to his musicians. In this case it took almost a year of rehearsal.

Trout Mask Replica is truly beyond comparison in the realm of contemporary music. While it has roots in avant-garde jazz and Delta blues, Beefheart has taken his music far beyond these influences. The distinctive glass finger guitar of Zoot Horn Rollo and steel appendage guitar of Antennae Jimmy Semens continues the style of guitar playing which he has been developing from the start. It is a strange cacophonous sound — fragmented, often irritating, but always natural, penetrating and true. Beefheart himself does not play the guitar, but he does teach each and every note to his players. The same holds true for the drums. Don does not play the drums but has always loved unusual rhythms and writes some of the most delightful drum breaks in all of music.

On Trout Mask Replica Beefheart sings 20 or so of his different voices and blows a wild array of post-Ornette licks through his “breather apparatus” — soprano saxophone, tenor saxophone and musette. When Beefheart inhales before taking a horn solo, all of the oxygen in the room seems to vanish into his lungs. Then he closes his eyes, blows out and lets his fingers dance and leap over the keys. The sound that bursts forth is a perfect compliment to his singing — free, unrefined and full of humor.

Trout Mask is the perfect blend of the lyrics, spirit and conception that had been growing in Don Van Vliet’s mind for a decade. Although it is a masterpiece, it will probably be many years before American audiences catch up to the things that happen on this totally amazing record.

For the first time in his career, Beefheart was entirely satisfied with his album. Zappa had made good his promise to give him the freedom he required and in fact issue the record in a pure and unaltered form. Nevertheless, the Beefheart/Zappa relationship is presently anything but an amicable one. Beefheart claims that Zappa is promoting Trout Mask Replica in a tasteless manner. He does not appreciate being placed on the Bizarre-Straight roster of freaks next to Alice Cooper and the GTO’s. He constantly complains that Straight Records’ promotion campaign is doing him more harm than good.

Straight Records on the other hand claims that Beefheart’s problems are all of his own making. He refuses to go on tour and procrastinates about making a follow-up album. “What can we do?” a Straight P.R. man asked me. “Beefheart is a genius, but a very difficult man to work with. All we can do is try to be as reasonable as possible.” Straight’s brass recall that during the recording of the parts of Trout Mask which were done in Beefheart’s home, Don Van Vliet asked for a tree surgeon to be in residence. The trees around the house, he believed, might become frightened of the noise and fall over. Straight refused to hire the tree surgeon, but later received a bill for $250 for such services. After the sessions were over Beefheart has hired his own tree doctor to give the oaks and cedars in his yard a thorough medical check up — his way of thanking them for not falling down.

In another classic story of this sort, Herb Cohen of Straight recalls that one day he noticed that Beefheart had ordered 20 sets of sleigh bells for a recording session. Cohen pointed out that even if Frank Zappa and the engineer were added to the bell ringing this would account for only 14 sleigh bells — one in each hand of the performers. “What are you going to do with the other six?” he asked. “We’ll overdub them,” Beefheart replied.

The fact of the matter seems to be that precisely the same qualities of mind which make Beefheart such an astounding poet and composer are those which make it difficult for him to relate to Frank Zappa or anyone else in the orthodox music business. Like many notable creative spirits, Beefheart’s personality is not geared to the efficient use of time or resources. For this reason and for the reason that he has often been burned by the industry, Beefheart is very suspicious of those who try to influence the direction his career takes. To see why he has such continual trouble adjusting to the practicalities of his vocation, it will do well for us to look briefly at the incredible story of Beefheart’s life before he became a musician.

Don Van Vliet was born in 1941 in Glendale, California, to normal middle-class parents. He grew up without problems as any child would in Glendale — until the age of five. It was then that he decided that civilized American life was a gigantic fraud. Don noticed that this society had established a destructive tyranny over nature; over all the animals and plants of Earth. He also became aware of the fact that America extended this tyranny over each man and that it was apparently out to include him in “the great take over.” They wanted to teach him proper language, social rules, arithmetic and all of the other noxious techniques required to live in this country. Young Don suddenly rebelled and refused to go along.

Looking back on it now Beefheart recalls one day of enlightenment. “My mother, who I called ‘Sue’ rather than ‘mother’ because that was her real name, was walking me along a path to school — the first day of kindergarten. We came to an intersection and she walked right out into the way of a speeding car. I reached up with both hands and pulled her out of the way. She could have killed us both. It was then that I thought to myself, ‘And she’s taking me to school.’” So Don did not attend school, at least not regularly. Instead he took up sculpting all the birds of the air, fish in the sea and animals on the land. Because he refused to come out for dinner, his parents were obliged to slide his meals under the bedroom door to him. It was Don’s belief that he could re-establish ties to everything natural through the art of sculpture.

Soon he was good enough at what he was doing to attract the attention of professional Los Angeles artists. One day during a visit to the Griffith Park Zoo he met and befriended Augustino Rodriquez, the famous Portuguese sculptor. Together they did a weekly television show in which Don would sculpt the images of nature’s art while Mr. Rodriquez looked on.

Understandably, Don’s parents were concerned about the unusual inclinations of their son. When at age thirteen he won a scholarship to study art in Europe, they took strong steps to discourage him. “My parents told me all artists were queers,” Beefheart recalls. “They moved me to the desert, first to Mojave and later to Lancaster.”

But even though Don’s life as a sculptor had ended, he never gave up the vision of art and nature that he had discovered in life. Neither did he forsake the wonderfully unstructured consciousness with which he had been born. “I think that everybody’s perfect when they’re a baby and I just never grew up. I’m not saying that I’m perfect, because I did grow up. But I’m still a baby.”

Beefheart still believes that in nature all creatures are equals. Man in his perversity forgets this and builds ridiculous hierarchies and artificial systems to set himself apart from his roots. “People are just too far out. Do you know what I mean? Too far out—far away from nature.” He still sets out sugar for the ants, creatures that he considers most similar to man in their mode of life. “If you give them sugar,” Beefheart contends “they won’t have to eat the poison.”

In songs like “Wild Life,” “My Human Gets Me Blues,” and “Ant Man Bee” Beefheart presents with great subtlety the truths which students of ecology are just now beginning to recognize. “Now the bee takes his honey/ Then he sets the flower free/ But in God’s garden only man ‘n the ants/ They won’t let each other be.” It is entirely possible that it is in this area that Beefheart will eventually attract a wide audience. If those who are delving into ecology would listen carefully to Trout Mask Replica, the Another definite carryover from Beefheart’s unusual childhood can be seen in the marvelous quality of his lyrics and poems. Since young Don Van Vliet decided that civilization was a trap, he refused to use civilized English in a linear, logical way and learned the entire language as a vast and amusing game. As a result, virtually everything that he says or writes turns out to be poetry. In a conversation with Beefheart the entire structure of verbal communication explodes. A barrage of puns, rhymes, illogicalities, absurd definitions, and unending word play fills the dialogue with a wonderful confusion.

“You can’t make generalizations,” he said to me during one such conversation.

“Why not?” I replied, taking the bait.

“I wonder if anyone’s ever made General I. Zation?” he continued, this time apparently talking about the sex life of some unknown military hero. “If all the generals came in right now, I bet they’d bring those IZATIONS with them.” Could he be talking about some secret weapon? There was no time to think about it, for in a flash Beefheart had gone on to a discussion of people who were “trying to put Band-Aids on The Flaw.” The Flaw?

I have seen several occasions in which visitors to Beefheart’s home have totally freaked because of this manner of talking. Not many people, after all, feel comfortable listening to the English language collapse before their very ears.

All of this wonderment, of course, comes through very clearly in Beefheart’s lyrics. In “My Human Gets Me Blues,” for example, the Captain sings, “I saw yuh dancin’ in your x-ray gingham dress/ I knew you were under duress/ I knew you under your dress.” One way of getting into songs like this is to understand that Beefheart is primarily fascinated with the sounds of words and their many ambiguities rather than the explicit meaning of terms. He believes that all truth comes from playing rather than from the secret is, however, that they can be communicated only after the listener surrenders his neurotic reliance on words and established forms. “I’m trying to create my own language,” Beefheart observes, “a language without any periods.”

In his discouragement with the music business Beefheart has now turned much of his energy to writing as an outlet for his creative demon. The closets of his house are strewn with thousands upon thousands of poems and at least five unpublished novels. The song “Old Fart at Play” from Trout Mask Replica is a tiny excerpt from a long novel of the same name which Beefheart hopes to publish soon.

The formlessness and intensity of Beefheart’s music have often led people to conclude that he is merely another product of the drug culture. Sadly, much of the promotion material on him in past years has implied that he is the king of the drug heads and hip freaks. Nothing could be further from the truth. Don Van Vliet does not use drugs and does not allow members of the Magic Band to do so either. Like his friend Frank Zappa, Beefheart admonishes everyone to stay away from LSD, speed and marijuana. In my conversation with the man, Beefheart would often smile broadly and tilt his head far back on his neck and say, “You know, I’m not even here. I just stick around for my friends.” Moving his hand up and out from his temple and wiggling his fingers (the Beefheart “Far Out” sign) he would then say, “You not even here either. You know that. Don’t kid yourself. You just stick around for your friends too.”

Like Socrates, Beefheart believes that everyone knows everything he needs to know already. What he tries to do is to make them realize this. Most people, he reports, fight it every inch of the way. They refuse to be free even when they see what it’s like. “They just have too much at stake.”

The absolutely boundless character of Beefheart’s mind has taken him into investigations of extra-sensory perception, clairvoyance and even reincarnation. In addition to his ability to answer the phone before it rings, Beefheart is apparently able to foretell parts of the future. On all of my visits to his house in the San Fernando Valley, Beefheart told me he knew in advance that I was coming. On one occasion he was able to prove it to me by showing that he’d put on “The Florsheim Shoe” and bright red In order to pursue the possibilities of this previous existence, the Captain has recently begun painting again. Like everything else he does, his paintings are simply astounding. During one of our conversations he went to a two foot tall stack of poster paper and pulled out one of his recent works. Holding it under his chin and peering over it at me, Beefheart asked, “Well, what do you see?” I stared into the spots and blobs of yellow, green and red and had to confess that the painting said nothing to me.

At present the Captain stands at a crucial turning point. On the face of it everything seems to be in his favor. His new Magic Band is probably the best he’s ever had and may be one of the best in the country. He has recently added drummer Art Tripp, formerly of the Mothers of Invention, who provides exactly the right blend of rhythmic novelty and imagination to the groups’ sound. Zoot Horn Rollo and Rockette Morton, musicians that Beefheart taught from scratch, have reached musical maturity and are beyond this, Beefheart now has around him a group of associates that he should be able to trust. His new manager, Grant Gibbs, is both honest and thoroughly sensitive to the special needs and foibles of his artist. Previously and unbiased observer of Beefheart’s career, Mr. Gibbs is now trying to untangle the web of contractual knots which the Magic Band had stumbled into over the years. Although Beefheart thinks otherwise, Straight Records is probably giving him as good and forthright a deal as he’d find.

But who knows? Perhaps 1970 will be the year that we finally catch a glimpse of the man behind the Trout Mask. Maybe this will be the year that all of us can experience the amazing wisdom and humor that Captain Beefheart has in his grasp. Clearly though, it’s strictly up to him.  

Langdon Winner