Don Van Vliet, the child sculptor, is dead.
The artist formerly known as Captain Beefheart passed away on Friday due to complications from multiple sclerosis. He was about a month shy of his 70th birthday.
From the mid-1960s to the early-’80s, Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band revolutionized rock music in ways that forever altered the possibilities for the form, influencing movements from the No-Wave to the New Wave, punk to avant-garde. But it was as an artist that Van Vliet both began and ended his life, from sculpting dinosaurs at age 3 to gradually developing renown as an abstract painter over the last two decades after retiring from music. At age 9, Van Vliet won a sculpting competition in L.A., and, by his account, was awarded a scholarship to study art in Europe at 13, which he never accepted. By the mid-1980s, his paintings began garnering solo exhibitions at galleries like Michael Werner in New York and the Bill Lowe Gallery in Atlanta.
When my friends and I first discovered Beefheart’s music in the early-’80s, especially albums like “Trout Mask Replica” and “Doc at the Radar Station,” it was immediately clear to us that it embodied the same raucousness of the garage rock and punk bands we liked. It sounded like people playing the Delta blues who were trying to break their instruments. But there were also multiple rhythms happening at the same time. There was an inherent atonal tension that threatened to implode the songs before they reached their end. And though Beefheart’s five-octave voice roared just like one of his heroes, Howling Wolf, the lyrics he was singing were much different than what Howling Wolf, or anyone else, for that matter, had ever sung before.
The songs had titles like “25th Century Quaker,” “Lick My Decals Off, Baby” and “My Head Is My Only Home Unless It Rains.” The lyrics often employed enough non sequitors to drive a beat poet mad, and tackled topics from favorite candy bars to why God never had a doll to play with as a child — “’Cause everybody made him a boy/And God didn’t think to ask his preference” — solidifying to our great humor that this was truly music from, in his words, “the other side of the fence.” Beefheart sang every word with the utmost conviction.
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His music had a modern temper, but it also echoed with myth. It was innocent and it was primitive. It was sometimes maniacally joyful. But we never thought it artful — we liked it because it sounded anti-art.
Van Vliet was born in Glendale, Calif. When he was 13, his family moved to Lancaster, Calif., where, at Antelope Valley High School, he met fellow classmate Frank Zappa and developed both a friendship and a rivalry that would be pivotal to his career. The two spent many hours listening to R&B records in Van Vliet’s room and occasionally playing music together that would eventually be released on the Zappa album, “The Lost Episodes.” Allegedly, Zappa also invented the moniker “Captain Beefheart,” based on an uncle of Van Vliet’s who had a penchant for exposing himself.
“Safe As Milk,” the debut album of Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, was released in 1967. It was as close to a straight blues album as the band would ever produce, yet the odd syncopations and structures in songs like “Electricity” and “Abba Zaba” foretold the divergent path the band would soon take.
By “Trout Mask Replica” in 1969, a double album produced by Zappa, the band had completely mashed the traditional blues form with free jazz rhythms and neo-classical experimentalism. As strange as some of the music on the album is, it’s hard to believe L.S.D. wasn’t another of its contributing influences. Beefheart’s method was to rehearse the band through grueling sessions for months on end until the members could continuously play music that sounded as if it had been spliced together with tape snippets, a purposeful orchestration of all the glitches and odd juxtapositions of a random pastiche.
Core members of the Magic Band, such as drummer John French, guitarist Bill Harkleroad and bassist Mark Boston, have commented on the mental and physical abuse Van Vliet could rain down on them, specifically during the recording of this album, which is documented in the 2010 book by French, “Beefheart: Through the Eyes of Magic.” The uncompromising character of the rehearsals comes through in the album. It is easily the most challenging music of Beefheart and the Magic Band’s career.
The 1970s served as a crucible for the band attaining a measure of commercial success. The stress of this goal proved to be too much, and the final core members of the Magic Band stopped performing with Beefheart in 1974. Even when intentionally trying to sell out for a radio hit and make some money, Beefheart would pen lyrics like, “The camel wore a nightie/ At the party of special things to do,” the first lines of the first song from the anemic album, “Bluejeans and Moonbeams.”
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Despite the occasional missteps of the ‘70s, “Lick My Decals Off, Baby,” (1970) “Clear Spot” (1972), “Bongo Fury” (1975) — the riotous live album with Zappa — and “Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller)” (1978) contain some of the strongest material that Beefheart had ever produced. This last album signaled the emergence of a new Magic Band made up of young players like Eric Drew Feldman, Jeff Moris Tepper and Robert Williams who were familiar with Beefheart’s body of work. They re-injected the music with the tension necessary for it to thrive. The two albums that followed, “Doc at the Radar Station” in 1980 and “Ice Cream for Crow” in 1982, completed a trio of albums that cemented Beefheart’s return to the untamed music of his past. They also turned out to be his farewell to music.
Disgusted by the rock industry and in failing health from his multiple sclerosis, Beefheart became Van Vliet again, the painter. He disappeared from public and spent most of the remainder of his life painting at his home in Trinidad, Calif.
Critical reviews of Beefheart and the Magic Band’s work underscore its artistic vision and originality. That is likely how Beefheart wanted it to be understood. And when I go back and listen to the music now, I’m still surprised by how different it sounds to anything else. I’m thrilled by how the competing rhythms can briefly meet at some point in a song like drunks who stumble into one another in a bar and then careen off in other directions again. I smile at hearing lyrics I’ve memorized years ago.
But more than all of that, I feel a freedom that makes me forget about any boundaries for a moment, about any notions of what it all means, almost as if I were a child again.
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Reverb’s Essential Captain Beefheart and The Magic Band albums by decade:
• The 1960s: “Safe As Milk (1967)
• The 1970s: “Clear Spot” (1972)
• The 1980s: “Doc at the Radar Station” (1980)
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Denver-based writer Sam DeLeo is a published poet, has seen two of his plays produced and is currently finishing his second novel.
