THE TEACHINGS OF CAPTAIN BEEFHEART: A WACKY WAY OF KNOWLEDGE

THE TEACHINGS OF CAPTAIN BEEFHEART: A WACKY WAY OF KNOWLEDGE

FEATURES

by

Roy Trakin

“If you’ve got ears, you gotta listen,”— Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart

“I have a beef in my heart against the world,” he says, in response to queries about how he got his unusual name. “The way they treat humanity and animals. It’s the shingle that’s given me shingles after 15 years as Don Van Vliet. My friends don’t call me Captain. I don’t even have a boat. It’s funny how a name like that can stick to you like mashed potatoes. Some of these new kind they have stick to you forever. Poor colon.”

The kindly old gentleman who tells me this looks like he stepped out of a Walker Evans sepia-toned rotogravure, with a deeply creviced, leathery face that recalls a. grizzled prospector in Treasure Of Sierra Madre. His punning, stream-of-consciousness rap is a gravelly talk-sing blues, the line between poetry, music and conversation obliterated along with logic. Those large, flappy ears (“like a bull elephant’s”), the battered fedora, the walrus mustache and the crinkly, sparkling eyes all add up to the well-worn spectacle that is Captain Beefheart, Certified Rock Legend. Cap’s made a rare trip to the city to talk about everything but his latest album, Ice Cream For Crow.

' “It’s not easy to write about me,” he once told an interviewer. “If you’re writing about an artist, you gotta get into paint, too...It’s not fair for you to write about me and not have your say.”

It seems every important rock writer from the past 15 years has had his say about the Cap, making his legend a familiar one. Van Vliet as child prodigy in Southern California, sculpting zoo animals alongside a famous Portugese artist at the age of five, winning a scholarship to study in Europe at 13 only to be moved to the Mojave Desert by his middle-class parents, who warned “all aritsts are queer.” While attending Antelope Valley High School in Lancaster, California, Don befriended another notorious misfit, one Francis Vincent Zappa Jr., a fellow R&B enthusiast who would play a major role in Van Vliet’s destiny as Captain Beefheart.

I have a beef in my heart against the world.

In the early ’60s Don and Zappa hatched up the nanle, one stoned-out night cruising in the desert. The two made plans to form a band called the Soots and to make a movie together. Captain Beefheart Meets The Grunt People. Like so many other collaborative schemes the two concocted, neither idea came to fruition.

To this day, the Captain has nothing but contempt for his successful colleague turned rival. “I wish I had never met him.” he says bluntly. Beefheart still blames Zappa for the promotional campaign his label waged on behalf of Trout Mask Replica and Lick My Decals Off Baby, which portrayed Don and the Magic Band as drug casualties not to be taken seriously .

For all the stories about how weird Beefheart and his music are, though, the 41-year-old is still going strong after two decades in the business. From 1965’s Safe As Milk through the new Ice Cream For Crow, the Cap has recorded 12 albums for 8 different labels. And, despite the occasional, understandable lapses into blatant commerciallty along the way, Beefheart has managed to forge his own unique musical melange, fusing free-aSsociation boho verse, taw hoodoo blooze, gnarly avant-jazz and rigid classical formalism. For all it£ half-baked dissonance, Van Vliet’s musical pedigree is obvious, and his star quality has not gone unnoticed throughout the years. A variety of biz-types have lusted after the Cap’s commercial potential—from current Elektra/Asylum head Bob Krasnow (who managed him and produced Safe As Milk and Strictly Personal, his first two LPs), Richard Perry (who co-produced Safe As Milk with Krasnow), Ted Templeman (who arranged the horns on, and produced, Clear Spot) and Russ Titleman to musicians like Ry Cooder, Rpy Estrada, Terry Bozzio, Art Tripp III and, of course, Zappa.

From the very beginning, the ever-ingenuous Beefheart has been prodded in various directions by different managers, even while he’s clung to his artistic independence. At first, many saw him as the Great White R&B Hope, but whenever his roots in Delta blues are brought up, the Cap vehemently denies the parallel.

“No, no way,” he shakes his head. “I wouldn’t try to copy a camel. Yer talking ’bout Howling Wolf? Shit no. But you know that. He’s really good, man, but he’s not anywhere near what I do. I dig what he does and I can sure as hell enjoy it without thinking I could do it, too. Those English boys do that. Without much taste, either, I might add.”

But listen to Safe As Milk or even the later Spotlight Kid or Clear Spot, and you’ll hear the Cap’n’s famous four-and-a-half octave wolfman’s howl as the quintessential swamprock, evoking traditionalists like Son House and Robert Johnson yet avoiding slavish imitation by dragging it into the future. It was always Beefneart’s theory that we could only appropriate that fertile third-world tradition by putting our own peculiar spin to it—twisting, fragmenting, distorting and turning R&B inside out. Which brings us to the two seminal Beefheart masterpieces that do just that—the two-album Trout Mask Replica and Lick My Decals Off Baby.

After a horrendous experience making his first two LPs with then-manager Krasnow (who supposedly re-mixed Strictly Personal behind Don’s back with psychedelic effects), Beefheart was rescued by his old pal Zappa, who inked him to his own fledgling Straight/Bizarre company, a Warner Bros, custom label which boasted such other “oddities” as the girl-group G.T.O’s, Alice Cooper and certified nut Wild Man Fischer. Beefheart was given full control to make a record for the first time, and preceeded to come up with music that sounded so foreign, it had to be attributed to extra-curricular inspiration. So, the splintered, amelodic (but tightly structured) mayhem of Trout Mask Replica became the Ultimate Acid Trip. The brilliant Magic Band, with marvelous, technically adept musicians like guitarist Bill (Zoot Horn Rollo) Harkleroad, bassist Mark (Rockette Morton) Boston, guitarist Jeff (Antennae Jimmy Semens) Cotton and drummer John (Drumbo) French blaying Beefheart’s intricately worked-out rhythms, was dismissed as a bunch of acid-crazed hippies. Zappa’s exploitative ad strategy only added to the misunderstanding.

While Trout Mask Replica, released at the height of the LSD era in ’69, represented a radical break from Don’s past work, it is the following year’s Lick My Decals Off Baby which is the clearest illustration of Beefheart’s unique approach. It deals with the traditional concerns of the bluesman— sex, freedom, locomotives and longing— filtered through a highly moral, yet modernistic sense of alienation. The music chugs and pumps along like a dilapidated engine that never stops huffing and puffing. As the Captain has often put it, “This is music for real women made by real men.” It’s noise made listenable and ultimately attractive. The bleating marimbas, the squawking sax (played by Beefheart himself), the off-beat drumming, the Captain’s wailing harp and his roller .coaster roar all mesh into a kinetic pattern with multiple layers of instrumental activity. It is an aural collage that, when it finally clicks in, is irresistible. Until it does, though, it will sound like chaos.

Try to pin Beefheart down on the literal meaning of his work, and you keep butting up against a blank wall. “It’s just poetry,” says the published author about his lyrics. “It’s a non-objective abstract.” Beefheart’s world is wondrous, though. His words are sculpted in torrents of quicksilver images, many of them nonsensical nursery rhymes, some achieving the pure child-like vision that is Don’s special gift.

“I think that everyone’s perfect when they’re a baby and I just never grew up,” he once said. “I’m not saying that I’m perfect, because I did grow up. But I’m still a baby.” Another time, he said, “I may get hardening of the arteries, but I’ll never get hardening of the eyes.” Beefheart’s interest in the natural order and animals runs throughout his work, a belief in the equality of all creatures that finds its echo in his musical primitivism.

Everyone’s perfect when they’re a baby and I Just never grew up.

“I’m a lot smarter than that,” he insists, disavowing yet another attempt at categorization. “I write poetry and music, sculpt and paint. That’s all.”

Another favorite self-effacing (or is it really self-promoting?) Beefheart aphorism has to do with shitting tie-dye, which seems to mean the Cap even considers his excrement art, or is it the other way around? At any rate, Don has often equated the act of creation with the act of excretion. It’s his version of cave art, a belief that, as Dr. Langdon Winner once put it, “all truth (for Don) comes from playing rather than from planning.” Beefheart’s just telling us to ignore the chains of structure and form in order to tap our true being. Or, on the other hand, he’s only toying with his feces...

“You go from a beggar to a baby,” he tells me. “Why should anyone grow up? What would you grow up to be, a fire engine?”

Captain Beefheart has lived in the Mojave Desert for over a decade in a trailer with his wife, Jan. This self-imposed isolation hasn’t prevented him from hearing about his influence on such new bands as Devo, Talking Heads, James Chance, B-52’s, Public Image, Snakefinger and others. His last three albums have acknowledged this fact, rather ruefully at times, as on the vituperative “Ashtray Heart.”

“I don’t listen to it, man,” he told a reporter about his pervasive effect on modern music. “I really don’t listen to anything. I mean, they’re just tracing over my own excrement. I don’t have to look at that. They’re tying down to that old mama heartbeat, though, which is what I’ve always tried to get rid of.”

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But Beefheart is not totally without certain people he admires. He’s always praised painters like Jackson Pollock, Van Gogh and American expressionist Franz Kline. He often talks about his pre-Beef -heart days, saying “Van Vliet was a tremendous painter who could never finish anything,” referring to a belief he was a Dutch artist in a previous life.

The Good Captain, though, continues to release records. The Spotlight Kid and Clear Spot were uneven projects which tried to add conventional funky horn charts and female gospel singers to Beefheart’s rant ’n’ rave, while Unconditionally Guaranteed and Bluejeans And Moonbeams were ill-advised attempts to turn the Captain into a standard soul balladeer.

Over his last three records, though— Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller), Doc At The Radar Station and Ice Cream For Crow—Beefheart has once again been a voice in the wilderness, thanks to a dedicated band of disciples who match the Captain’s commitment with its own. Unlike the original Magic Band, these relative newcomers have grown up on Beefheart’s musical theory—it is not a foreign, revolutionary break from the past for them, but a logical development of their own interests and tastes. These students include slide guitarist Jeff Morris Tepper, synthesizer player Eric Drew Feldman, drummer Cliff R. Martinez, bassist Richard Snyder and guitarist/manager Gary Lucas. Instead of wasting energy teaching musicians his philosophy and trying to earn their trust, Beefheart has been freed to concentrate on what he does best—write, compose and sing.

“I had to work my ass off with those first bands,” he admits. “It was a new music then. That’s why I had to tell them every damn note. That’s why I never work with a big group. I like to tell my musicians what I really want. If they want to do it, great. If not, they can leave. That’s why I’m in pain so much. I know exactly what I want them to do. And I’ve been lucky in that'regard. The guys I have now are real good. My old bands suffered from the old Frankenstein’s monster syndrome. I created them and then they wanted a life of their own.”

Beefheart describes the various parts to his band by whistling, singing or playing keyboards onto a tape, leaving it up to them to transcribe for their particular instruments. Gary Lucas confirms the approach, which he likens to throwing a deck of cards in the air, taking a photograph of them while suspended, and then trying to duplicate the haphazard arrangement. The Cap’s music, which seems at first so anarchic, is really the result of a highly disciplined, complex formula. The sound and fury does indeed signify...

But what? Underneath all the layers of myth and legend, who is Captain Beefheart? A genius or an idiot savant? A de-

lightful eccentric or a cantankerous old codger? A primitive natural or a calculating crazy? A bitter misogynist or a hopeless romantic? A divine inspiration or a crass exploiter? A fool or a wise man or both?

People have been predicting stardom for Beefheart for over 20 years now, but he remains a cult figure, dogged by either blind adulation or stubborn ignorance. Despite his reputation, though, Beefheart has composed any number of surprisingly accessible tunes, from Safe As Milk’s unlikely Smokey Robinson tribute, “I’m Glad” to the lovely acoustic meditations of Doc At The Radar Station. Why hasn’t the Captain been more successful? Does he lack a sense of how to organize his finances?

“I know how to make money. I could have been a millionaire many times,” he tells me, and you know he believes it, too. “It’s so easy to do that. But I don’t think I have any choice.”

According to Beefheart, he can’t help doing what he does, but ask him about fate, and he makes another u-turn.

“I’ve always been disgusted with no choices,” he insists. “I want to breathe with all my holes open. Anything that closes off possibilities is dangerous. Criswell predicts? No thank you...”

Can anyone learn how to create?

“You can teach someone to move colors around,” Don says, “but I don’t think art' can be taught. I know there are a lot of people making money by saying it can, but it’s just not so. The only reason Gary [Lucas] can learn a piece of my music is because he knows how to play in the first place.”

On his new effort, Ice Cream For Crow, Beefheart seems to have abandoned the struggle to convert the mainstream masses to his way of seeing and hearing things. The sound is harsh, uncompromising, thorny and dry as a cactus rose. His once magnificent voice is now a hoarse but stillpowerful, croak. Guitars scratch and claw with the ravaging force of Nature while Beefheart harangues the blue moon in the wonderful video for the LP’s title track. The clip, photographed by the same guy who did Texas Chainsaw Massacre, is now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

The Captain’s anger appears less directed at other people and more at the very order of things. The man who worshipped nature is now complaining about a “cardboard cutout sundown.” Captain Beefheart doesn’t live in the desert by choice. And don’t think he’s reconciled to it yet, either.

Our conversation ended, we must drag Beefheart back to his Manhattan hotel. We insist on walking him up to his room. People tend to worry about the Captain as if he were incapable of taking care of himself.

“I’m well aware of what’s going on around me,” he says, pulling away. “Although, one can get hurt. Who am I to think I can’t get hurt? I’m glad I can get hurt. I mean, I would hate to be numb to the idea of human pain.”

Flashback in time to what could well be Don Van Vliet’s Rosebud. It is the first day of kindergarten and his mother is walking him to school The pair come to an intersec-

tion where young Don’s mom distractedly starts to cross, narrowly missing being hit by a speeding car when pulled out of the way by her son. “It was then that I thought to myself, ‘And she’s taking me to school..remembers Beefheart.

It was the last time Don Van Vliet let anyone tell him what to do. He’s set foot in few classrooms since then. He is truly a self-taught man.

“I had to do everything I had to do,” he says. “In fact, I have to go pee-pee right now.”

And the Cap wandered off to piss in the wind, which was only natural...