OBIT
Don Van Vliet, 'Captain Beefheart,' Dies at 69
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/18/arts/music/18beefheart.html
By BEN RATLIFF
Published: December 17, 2010
Don Van Vliet, an artist of protean creativity who was known as
Captain Beefheart during his days as an influential rock musician and
who later led a reclusive life as a painter, died Friday. He was 69
and lived in Trinidad, Calif.
The cause was complications of multiple sclerosis, said Gordon
VeneKlasen, a partner at the Michael Werner gallery in New York,
where Mr. Van Vliet had shown his art, many of them abstract,
colorful oils, since 1985. The gallery said he died in a hospital in
Northern California.
Captain Beefheart's music career stretched from 1966 to 1982, and
from straight rhythm and blues by way of the early Rolling Stones to
music that sounded like a strange uncle of post-punk. He is probably
best known for "Trout Mask Replica," a double album from 1969 with
his Magic Band.
A bolt-from-the-blue collection of precise, careening, surrealist
songs with clashing meters, brightly imagistic poetry and raw blues
shouting, "Trout Mask Replica" had particular resonance with the punk
and new wave generation to come a decade later, influencing bands
like Devo, the Residents, Pere Ubu and the Fall.
Mr. Van Vliet's life story is caked with half-believable tales, some
of which he himself spread in Dadaist, elliptical interviews. He
claimed he had never read a book and had never been to school, and
answered questions with riddles. "We see the moon, don't we?" he
asked in a 1969 interview. "So it's our eye. Animals see us, don't
they? So we're their animals."
The facts, or those most often stated, are that he was born on Jan.
15, 1941, in Glendale, Calif., as Don Vliet. (He added the "Van" in
1965.) His father, Glen, drove a bakery truck.
Don demonstrated artistic talent before the age of 10, especially in
sculpture, and at 13 was offered a scholarship to study sculpture in
Europe, but his parents forbade him. Concurrently, they moved to the
Mojave Desert town of Lancaster, where one of Don's high school
friends was Frank Zappa.
His adopted vocal style came partly from Howlin' Wolf: a deep,
rough-riding moan turned up into swooped falsettos at the end of
lines, pinched and bellowing and sounding as if it caused pain.
"When it comes to capturing the feeling of archaic, Delta-style
blues," Robert Palmer of The New York Times wrote in 1982, "he is the
only white performer who really gets it right."
He enrolled at Antelope Valley Junior College to study art in 1959
but dropped out after one semester. By the early 1960s he had started
spending time in Cucamonga, Calif., in Zappa's studio. The two men
worked on what was perhaps the first rock opera (still unperformed
and unpublished), "I Was a Teenage Maltshop," and built sets and
wrote some of the script for a film to be titled "Captain Beefheart
vs. the Grunt People."
The origins of Mr. Van Vliet's stage name are unclear, but he told
interviewers later in life that he used it because he had "a beef in
my heart against this society."
By 1965 a quintet called Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band (the
"his" was later changed to "the") was born. By the end of the year
the band was playing at teenage fairs and car-club dances around
Lancaster and signed by A&M Records to record two singles.
The guitarist Ry Cooder, then a young blues fanatic whose skill was
much admired by Mr. Van Vliet, served as pro forma musical director
for the next record, "Safe as Milk" (1967), which showed the band
working on something different: a rhythmically jerky style, with
stuttering melodies. The next album, "Strictly Personal" (1968), went
even further in the direction of rhythmic originality.
But it was "Trout Mask Replica" that earned Mr. Van Vliet his biggest
mark. And it was the making of that album that provided some of the
most durable myths about Mr. Van Vliet as an imperious, uncompromising artist.
The musicians lived together in a house in Woodland Hills, in the San
Fernando Valley; what money there was for food and rent was supplied
by Mr. Van Vliet's mother, Sue, and the parents of Bill Harkleroad,
the band's guitarist (whom Mr. Van Vliet renamed Zoot Horn Rollo).
One persistent myth has it that Mr. Van Vliet, who had no formal
ability at any instrument, sat at the piano, turned on tapes and
spontaneously composed most of the record in a single marathon
eight-and-a-half-hour session.
What really happened, according to later accounts, was that his
drummer, John French (whose stage name was Drumbo), transcribed and
arranged music as Mr. Van Vliet whistled, sang or played it on the
piano, and the band learned the wobbly, intricately arranged songs
through Mr. French's transcriptions.
"Trout Mask" offers solo vocal turns that sound like sea shanties;
intricately ordered pieces with two guitars playing dissonant lines;
and conversations with Zappa, the record's producer. But its most
recognizable feature is its staccato, perpetually disorienting melodic lines.
Band members' accounts have described Mr. Van Vliet as tyrannical.
(Both Mr. French and Mr. Harkleroad have written memoirs with dark
details about this period.)
Mr. Van Vliet's eccentricity and his skepticism about the music
industry had much to do with why his music remained mostly a cult
obsession. His band was offered a slot at the Monterey International
Pop Music Festival in 1967, but Mr. Cooder had quit a week before,
and Mr. Van Vliet was too spooked to perform. In the following years,
when the band was at its creative peak, it played relatively few concerts.
The Magic Band's first records after "Trout Mask Replica," starting
with "Lick My Decals Off, Baby," had a more mature sound, but by
"Clear Spot," in 1973, the band had turned toward blues-rock. It
later made a few ill-conceived concessions to commercialism, and in
1974 the band quit en masse after the critically panned
"Unconditionally Guaranteed."
After a long falling-out, Mr. Van Vliet reunited with his old friend
Zappa to tour and make the album "Bongo Fury" in 1975, then assembled
a new band to record "Bat Chain Puller," which was never released
because of contractual tie-ups. Parts of it were rerecorded in 1978
for an album released by Warner Brothers, "Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller)."
When his business affairs cleared in the early 1980s, Mr. Van Vliet
made two albums for Virgin, "Doc at the Radar Station" and "Ice Cream
for Crow," with a crew of musicians who had idolized him while
growing up. The albums were enthusiastically received.
But "Ice Cream for Crow" was his last record; in 1982 he quit music
to focus on his painting and moved to Trinidad, near the Oregon
border, with his wife, Jan, who is his only survivor.
In the exhibition catalog to a show at the San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art, the museum director, John Lane, wrote of Mr. Van Vliet's
work, "His paintings most frequently indeterminate landscapes
populated by forms of abstracted animals are intended to effect
psychological, spiritual and magical force."
Some of the images were a continuation of his songwriting concerns,
especially those involving animals. A lot of his work dwells on the
beauty of animals, on animals acting like humans and even on humans
turning into animals. In "Wild Life," he sang, "I'm gonna go up on
the mountain and look for bears," and in "Grow Fins," an
extraordinary blues from the album "The Spotlight Kid" (1972), he
threatened a girlfriend that if she didn't love him better he would
turn into a sea creature.
Mr. Van Vliet had rarely been seen since the early 1990s and seldom
at his gallery openings.
"I don't like getting out when I could be painting," he told The
Associated Press in 1991. "And when I'm painting, I don't want
anybody else around."
.
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