The Peculiar Joys of Captain Beefheart

I understand anyone who finds Captain Beefheart’s (born Don Van Vliet) music hard to listen to. He’s not reined in by any musical convention. Time signatures? Forget it. He marches to his own drummer, the one that sounds like his kit has hiccups. Chord progressions play almost no role in his songs; his songs are more like intertwined melodies and often land on dissonant notes with all the confidence of the untrained. His lyrics are a wonderland of dream images, ridiculous wordplay and, thank God… they’re hilarious, so it’s not some kind of humorless prog experiment. It’s the well honed looniness of his poetry that escorts you into the deranged amusement park that is the Captain’s mind.

I’m offering “Her Eyes Are A Blue Million Miles” as a gateway to the stuff that’s further out. Listen to it and you might develop a taste for this wizard’s magic. This one’s located about halfway between Beefheart’s most chaotic work and something we might recognize as a one chord blues song. Blues is the closest you can get to describing his voice, which sounds a heck of a lot like the great Howlin’ Wolf’s. Wolf, of course, was not known for subtlety or restraint. He was an alpha dog in Chicago, a town that produced its fair share of authoritative singers. Beefheart picked up on his red hot intensity and crazy commitment to the lyrics and took it somewhere entirely new.

The comedy that comes from a combination of that voice and the surreal lyrics he penned lured me in years ago. Like all good comics, he’s playing it straight. He sounds like a manic street preacher or the Mad Hatter. Whatever you call it, it hit me on a visceral level and I became a fan before I had time to think about it.

Van Vliet was an interesting character, to say the least. He went to high school with Frank Zappa and even played with him in a band. Later he sang on Zappa’s tune Willie The Pimp, a winning performance that probably put a lot of Mothers of Invention fans on to him. Then came Trout Mask Replica, an album like nothing the world had heard before. The fact it was even made is amazing: it’s an experiment in every sense of the word, an attempt to re-invent music that mostly succeeds. But easy listening, it wasn’t. Atonal and chaotic, it screeches and screams and is harsh sounding on the first listen. To this day critics cite it to gain instant credibility.

Captain Beefheart was also a seriously talented visual artist. He spent most of his free time painting, drawing inspiration for his near abstractions from the natural world. He was no dabbler, winding up in later life at the prestigious Mary Boone Gallery. The connection between his music and art is easy to see — he created a scrambled world put back together in the wrong order whether he was holding a microphone or a paintbrush.

It might be easy to write Beefheart off as an interesting eccentric, and he might have agreed. That description is almost always dismissive, but he was more than that. Raindogs and Swordfish Trombones, albums that mark my entry into the Tom Waits fan club, wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for Beefheart. The whole tonal palette, from the warm marimbas to the thumping drums, came directly from Beefheart. As for Waits’ spot-on Howlin’ Wolf impersonation, which became much more pronounced on these records, a little nod to the Captain would not have been uncalled for. Waits, who I adore, once sued (and won) Frito Lays for stealing his persona to sell whatever and won $2.5 million dollars. Just saying.

Your heroes borrow heavily and manage to mix and match influences to come up with something all their own. That makes sense — we all have to learn and why not imitate the best? When these influences aren’t disguised well enough or are too obviously one artist in particular, you’re treading on thin water. In the worst cases it’s fair to cry plagiarism — and to be clear, I am not accusing Tom Waits of that. He’s a true original if there ever was one. Like Beefheart, he was influenced by Wolf and others. Both had their share of success and never went anywhere near the mainstream. For Beefheart, a one-time visitor to our planet, the stream of consciousness was much more interesting.