Captain Beefheart
Don Van Vliet, known by his stage name Captain Beefheart, was an American singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and visual artist. Conducting a rotating ensemble known as the Magic Band, he recorded 13 studio albums between 1967 and 1982. His music blended elements of blues, free jazz, rock, and avant-garde composition with idiosyncratic rhythms, absurdist wordplay, and Vliet’s gravelly singing voice with a wide vocal range.
Known as an enigmatic persona, Beefheart frequently constructed myths about his life and was known to exercise extreme, dictatorial control over his supporting musicians. Although he achieved little commercial success, he sustained a cult following as an influence on an array of experimental rock and punk-era artists.
He began performing in his Captain Beefheart persona in 1964, when he joined the original Magic Band line-up. The group's 1969 album Trout Mask Replica would rank 58th in Rolling Stone magazine's 2003 list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.
Beefheart eventually formed a new Magic Band with a group of younger musicians and regained critical approval through three final albums: Shiny Beast, Doc at the Radar Station and Ice Cream for Crow. In 1982, he retired from music and pursued a career in art. His abstract expressionist paintings and drawings command high prices, and have been exhibited in art galleries and museums across the world.
Early life
Van Vliet was born Don Glen Vliet in Glendale, California, on January 15, 1941, to Glen Alonzo Vliet, a service station owner from Kansas, and Willie Sue Vliet, who was from Arkansas. Van Vliet said that he was descended from adventurer and author Richard Halliburton and related to actor Slim Pickens, and that he remembered being born.Vliet began painting and sculpting at age three. His subjects reflected his "obsession" with animals, particularly dinosaurs, fish, African mammals and lemurs. Considered a child prodigy, at age four he was featured with his animal sculptures on a Los Angeles television program. At the age of nine, he won a children's sculpting competition organized for the Los Angeles Zoo in Griffith Park by local tutor and sculptor, Agostinho Rodrigues.
During the 1950s, Vliet worked as an apprentice with Rodrigues, who considered him a prodigy. Van Vliet said that he was a lecturer at the Barnsdall Art Institute in Los Angeles at the age of eleven, although it is likely he simply gave a form of artistic dissertation. He said that his parents discouraged his interest in sculpture, due to their perception of artists as "queer". According to Van Vliet, they declined several scholarship offers, including one from the local Knudsen Creamery to travel to Europe with six years' paid tuition to study marble sculpture. Their denial of this opportunity made him so bitter that he abandoned his art until he was twenty-three.
When he was 13, the family moved to the farming town of Lancaster, in the Mojave Desert, where there was a growing aerospace industry supported by nearby Edwards Air Force Base. It was an environment that would greatly influence Vliet creatively. He remained interested in art; several of his paintings were later used as covers for his albums. He developed his taste and interest in music, listening 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. Vliet socialized with members of local bands such as The Omens and The Blackouts. The Omens' guitarists, Alexis Snouffer and Jerry Handley, who would later found The Magic Band; The Blackouts' drummer was Frank Zappa. Van Vliet collaborated with Zappa on his scripts for "teenage operettas", one of which was "Captain Beefheart & the Grunt People". The earliest known recording of both Beefheart and Zappa is "Lost in a Whirlpool", recorded c. 1958–59 and included in the 1996 posthumous Zappa album The Lost Episodes.
Van Vliet claimed that "half a day of kindergarten" was the extent of his formal education, but his graduation picture appears in the Antelope Valley High School yearbook. His disavowals of education may have been related to his dyslexia which, though never officially diagnosed, was obvious to Magic Band members John French and Denny Walley, who observed his difficulty reading cue-cards, and his frequent need to be read to.
As Zappa recalled of those years, "He spent most of his time at home. His girlfriend lived in the house, 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 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." Zappa later wrote the tune "Why Doesn't Someone Give Him a Pepsi?"
Career
After Zappa began regular occupation at Paul Buff's PAL Studio in Cucamonga, he and Van Vliet began collaborating as The Soots. By the time Zappa had turned the venue into Studio Z, they had completed the songs "Cheryl's Canon", "Metal Man Has Hornet's Wings" and a Howlin' Wolf-styled rendition of Little Richard's "Slippin' and Slidin'".The name 'Captain Beefheart' may have come from Vliet's uncle Alan, who had a habit of exposing himself to Don's girlfriend. He would urinate with the bathroom door open and, if she walked by, exclaim that his penis looked like a big beef heart.
Van Vliet enrolled at Antelope Valley College as an art major, but left after one year. He worked as a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman, and 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, he moved to Rancho Cucamonga, California to reconnect with Zappa. Van Vliet was quite shy but was eventually able to imitate the deep voice of Howlin' Wolf with his wide vocal range. He grew comfortable with public performance and, after learning to play the harmonica, began playing at dances and small clubs in Southern California.
Initial recordings, 1962–69
In early 1965, Snouffer 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. Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band signed to A&M Records and, in 1966, released two singles: a version of Bo Diddley's "Diddy Wah Diddy" that became a regional hit in Los Angeles, and "Moonchild". That year, the band began to play larger West Coast venues such as the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco.''Safe as Milk''
After fulfilling their deal for two singles, the band presented demos to A&M for what would become the album Safe as Milk. A&M's Jerry Moss reportedly described this new direction as "too negative" and dropped the band from the label. Much of the demo recording was accomplished at Art Laboe's Original Sound Studio, then with Gary Marker at Sunset Sound on 8-track. By the end of 1966, they were signed to Buddah Records and much of the demo work was transferred to 4-track, at the behest of Bob Krasnow and Richard Perry in the RCA Studio in Hollywood, where the recording was finalized. By now, Doug Moon had left the band and his tracks were taken up by Ry Cooder, who had been brought into the band after much pressure from Van Vliet.Drummer John French had joined the group and it would be his patience that was required to transcribe Van Vliet's ideas into musical form for the other group members. Upon French's departure, this role was taken over by Bill Harkleroad for Lick My Decals Off, Baby.
Many of the lyrics on the Safe as Milk album were written by Van Vliet in collaboration with the writer Herb Bermann, who befriended Van Vliet after seeing him perform at a bar in Lancaster in 1966. The song "Electricity" was a poem written by Bermann, who gave Van Vliet permission to adapt it to music. Unlike the album's mostly blues rock sound, songs such as "Electricity" illustrated the band's unconventional instrumentation and Van Vliet's unusual vocals.
Much of the Safe as Milk material was honed and arranged by Cooder. The band began recording in spring 1967 and the album was released in September 1967. Richie Unterberger of Allmusic called it "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".
John Lennon displayed two of the album's promotional "baby bumper stickers" in the sunroom at his home. The Beatles planned to sign Beefheart to their experimental Zapple label, plans that were scrapped after Allen Klein took over the Beatles management.
Van Vliet was often critical of the Beatles. He considered the lyric "I'd love to turn you on" from "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", with the sardonic refrain of "strawberry fields, all the winged eels slither on the heels of today's children, strawberry fields forever". Vliet spoke badly of Lennon after getting no response when he sent a telegram of support to him and wife Yoko Ono during their 1969 "Bed-in".
To support the Safe as Milk release, the group was scheduled to play at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. Vliet was having severe panic attacks and was convinced that he was having a heart attack, a fear exacerbated by his heavy LSD use and the fact that his father had died of heart failure a few years earlier. At a vital warm-up performance at the Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival shortly before the Monterey Festival, the band began to play "Electricity" and Van Vliet froze, straightened his tie, then walked off the stage and landed on manager Bob Krasnow. He later said he had seen a girl in the audience turn into a fish, with bubbles coming from her mouth. This aborted any opportunity of breakthrough success at Monterey, as Cooder decided he could no longer work with Van Vliet and quit. There was no time for the band to find a replacement. Cooder's spot was eventually filled by Gerry McGee, who had played with the Monkees. According to French, the band did two gigs with McGee, one at The Peppermint Twist near Long Beach, the other at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, August 7, 1967, as the opening act for The Yardbirds.