Captain Beefheart
Don Van Vliet (/væn ˈvliːt/; born Don Glen Vliet;[2] January 15, 1941 – December 17, 2010) was an American singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and visual artist best known by the stage name Captain Beefheart. 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, a gravelly voice, and a wide vocal range.[3][4] Known for his enigmatic persona, Beefheart frequently constructed myths about his life and was known to exercise an almost dictatorial control over his supporting musicians.[5] Although he achieved little commercial success,[6] he sustained a cult following as an influence on an array of experimental rock and punk-era artists.
Captain Beefheart
Don Glen Vliet
- Bloodshot Rollin' Red
- Don Van Vliet
January 15, 1941
Glendale, California, U.S.
December 17, 2010 (aged 69)
Arcata, California, U.S.[1]
- Singer-songwriter
- musician
- painter
- poet
- composer
- author
- record producer
- film director
1964–1982
A prodigy sculptor in his childhood,[7][8][9] Van Vliet developed an interest in blues, R&B, and jazz during his teen years in Lancaster, California, and formed "a mutually useful but volatile" friendship with musician Frank Zappa, with whom he sporadically competed and collaborated.[10] He began performing in his Captain Beefheart persona in 1964 and joined the original Magic Band line-up, initiated by Alexis Snouffer, the same year. The group released their debut album Safe as Milk in 1967 on Buddah Records. After being dropped by two consecutive record labels they signed to Zappa's Straight Records, where they released 1969's Trout Mask Replica; the album would later rank 58th in Rolling Stone magazine's 2003 list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.[11] In 1974, frustrated by a lack of commercial success, he pursued a more conventional rock sound, but the ensuing albums were critically panned; this move, combined with not having been paid for a European tour, and years of enduring Beefheart's abusive behavior, led the entire band to quit.[12]
Beefheart eventually formed a new Magic Band with a group of younger musicians and regained critical approval through three final albums: Shiny Beast (1978), Doc at the Radar Station (1980) and Ice Cream for Crow (1982). Van Vliet made few public appearances after his retirement from music in 1982. He pursued a career in art, an interest that originated in his childhood talent for sculpture, and a venture which proved to be his most financially secure. His abstract expressionist paintings and drawings command high prices, and have been exhibited in art galleries and museums across the world.[13][14][15] Van Vliet died in 2010, having had multiple sclerosis for many years.[16]
Biography[edit]
Early life and musical influences, 1941–62[edit]
Van Vliet was born Don Glen Vliet in Glendale, California, on January 15, 1941, to Glen Alonzo Vliet, a service station owner of Dutch ancestry from Kansas, and Willie Sue Vliet (née Warfield), who was from Arkansas.[2] He said that he was descended from Peter van Vliet, a Dutch painter who knew Rembrandt. Van Vliet also said that he was related to adventurer and author Richard Halliburton and cowboy actor Slim Pickens, and he said that he remembered being born.[17][18]
Van Vliet began painting and sculpting at age three.[19] His subjects reflected his "obsession" with animals, particularly dinosaurs, fish, African mammals and lemurs.[20] Considered a child prodigy, at age four he was featured with his animal sculptures on a weekly 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 a local tutor, Agostinho Rodrigues.[21] Local newspaper cuttings of his junior sculpting achievements can be found reproduced in the Splinters book, included in the Riding Some Kind of Unusual Skull Sleigh boxed CD work, released in 2004.[22] The sprawling park, with its zoo and observatory, had a strong influence on young Vliet, as it was a short distance from his home on Waverly Drive. The track "Observatory Crest" on Bluejeans & Moonbeams reflects this continued interest. A portrait photo of school-age Vliet can be seen on the front of the lyric sheet within the first issue of the US release of Trout Mask Replica.
For some time during the 1950s, Van Vliet worked as an apprentice with Rodrigues, who considered him a child prodigy. Van Vliet said that he was a lecturer at the Barnsdall Art Institute in Los Angeles at the age of eleven,[23] although it is likely he simply gave a form of artistic dissertation. Accounts of Van Vliet's precocious achievement in art often include his statement that he sculpted on a weekly television show.[24] He said that his parents discouraged his interest in sculpture, based upon their perception of artists as "queer". According to one of Van Vliet's versions of this story, 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.[25] Van Vliet was deeply disappointed by their denial of this opportunity for him to realize his potential as an artist. He later claimed that the experience made him so bitter that he never listened to music and abandoned his art until he was twenty-three.[26]
Van Vliet's artistic enthusiasm became so fervent, he said that his parents were forced to feed him through the door in the room where he sculpted. When he was thirteen the family moved from the Los Angeles area to the more remote 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 him creatively from then on.[24] Van Vliet remained interested in art; several of his paintings, often reminiscent of Franz Kline[27] were later used as front covers for his music albums. Meanwhile, he developed his taste and interest in music, listening "intensively" to the Delta blues of Son House and Robert Johnson, jazz artists such as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk and Cecil Taylor, and the Chicago blues of Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters.[28][24][29] During his early teenage years, Vliet would sometimes socialize with members of local bands such as the Omens and the Blackouts, although his interests were still focused upon an art career. The Omens' guitarists Alexis Snouffer and Jerry Handley would later become founders of "the Magic Band" and the Blackouts' drummer, Frank Zappa, would later capture Vliet's vocal capabilities on record for the first time.[30][31] This first known recording, when he was simply "Don Vliet", is "Lost In A Whirlpool" – one of Zappa's early "field recordings" made in his college classroom with brother Bobby on guitar. It is featured on Zappa's posthumously released The Lost Episodes (1996).
Musical style[edit]
Rolling Stone wrote that "The crucial problem in [Captain] Beefheart’s career has been that few people have ever been able to accept him for what he is"; a blues and rock musician,[24] his management referred to him as "potentially the greatest white blues singer of all time",[24] while a combination of managers, other musicians, fans and critics felt that he should have either sung more clearly and softly, made more commercial music or played "blues songs that people could understand and dance to".[24] As a teenager, he listened heavily to two genres of music, Mississippi Delta blues, and avant-garde jazz, the latter of which included John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor, which shaped his music style.[24] He adapted to and pushed the boundaries of genre throughout his career.[140] According to Entertainment Weekly, his music "drew on blues, jazz, psychedelia, and a thousand other subgenres".[141] The Independent described his music as a fusion of rhythm and blues and avant-garde jazz.[142] Far Out magazine said that his "combination of jazz, blues and psychedelic rock" defied categorization, and as a result of his difficult to place style, many simply referred to it as avant-garde.[143][144] According to Rolling Stone, "Beefheart’s brand of abrasive blues-rock was truly a novelty to young listeners in 1964".[24] Popular Song in the 20th Century: Styles and Singers and What They Said About America included him among the prominent progressive rock musicians of the 1960s and '70s.[145]
John Parish described Captain Beefheart's music as a "combination of raw blues and abstract jazz. There was humour in there, but you could tell that it wasn't [intended as] a joke. I felt that there was a depth to what he did that very few other rock artists have managed [to achieve]."[146] A Rolling Stone biography described his work as "a sort of modern chamber music for rock band, since he plans every note and teaches the band their parts by ear."[60] The Encyclopædia Britannica describes Beefheart's songs as conveying "deep distrust of modern civilization, a yearning for ecological balance, and the belief that all animals in the wild are far superior to human beings".[147] Barret Hansen, in a review of Captain Beefheart's Strictly Personal album, described the singer as "the only white voice that has come close to capturing what Charley Patton and Son House are all about".[148]
Captain Beefheart was a pioneer of art rock[24] and experimental rock.[24][149] His music has been cited as an influence on punk rock, post-punk and new wave music,[149] and Captain Beefheart himself has sometimes been classified as a proto-punk musician.[150]