I submitted a much shorter version of this essay to a Farmer’s Almanac Essay Contest.)
The person I most want to meet is the recently deceased Captain Beefheart (alias Donald Von Vilet), one of the all-time great American eccentrics. His music was a clever and subversive mix of delta blues, free jazz and psychedelic rock.
His lyrics were dreamlike and pro ecological and they often only made sense on a subconscious level. I have a T-shirt with one of his most famous song lines on it, “That’s right, the Mascara Snake. Fast and bulbous.” The Mascara Snake was one of his band members. Other notable mambers of his magic band include a young Ry Cooder, Antennae Jimmy Semens, Drumbo, Zoot Horn Rollo and Winged Eel Fingerling.
He created one of the finest experimental albums in rock history, Trout Mask Replica, but few people bought it. Rolling Stone called it the… “worst selling great classic rock album ever.” The cover depicted a big fish wearing a hat similar to the one Beefheart often wore.
I admired his follow-up album. Lick My Decals Off Baby even more. The commercial for it, which actually aired on TV, depicted a hooded man carrying a rotating eggbeater who spills a can of paint with a shot of the album at the end. I am sure it confused 99% of the viewers, but it is one of the most creative, otherworldly, and striking advertisements, I have ever seen.
When Beefheart thought that one of his band members was playing too much like the Beatles, Beefheart allegedly locked him in a closet for several hours and made him listen recordings of the iconic blues singer, Howling Wolf. I think Beefheart felt he had to go to great lengths to deprogram him.
I loved the reaction that Beefheart’s music would get at parties. Whenever I put on one his tracks the room would immediately clear out. I think many listeners could not accept his gravely voice (Tom Waits one of his musical disciples also has a similar voice that is an acquired taste.) One critic once compared Beefheart’s singing to a cow with its foot stuck in a fence.
Although he had no big hits, his musical disciples formed the great legions of punk and new wave bands that recharged popular music in the ‘70s. Many disparate artists such as the Clash, B52s and Public Image Ltd. have sung his praises, and he paved the way for most of the Avant-garde post punk bands.
When Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols was asked to DJ and play his favorite songs on the radio, one of his choices was “The Blimp” by Captain Beefheart (The interesting playlist also included songs by Peter Hammill, Neil Young, Culture, the Can, Augusto Pablo, Lou Reed, John Cale, and Peter Tosh).
Beefheart’s music is infrequently played on the radio because it does not fit into any format (except perhaps college free form radio). He also occasionally did talk shows, and was on with Johnny Carson and David Letterman (this was in the early days when Letterman still had ground breaking artistic oddballs on the show). The Captain seemed to make both of the hosts very uncomfortable, and they did not quite know how to deal with his stream of consciousness banter.
Towards the end of his life, Beefheart gave up doing public music and he became a full time visual artist after the respected painter/film maker, Julian Schnabel (the director of Lou Reed’s Berlin, Basquait, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) purchased one of Beefheart’s paintings. He produced many fine Franz Kline influenced art pieces that actually sold, and he made decent money for the first time in his life.
Beefheart passed on in 2010. Beefheart’s afterlife was the subject of my poem, “A Lawrence Welk Tribute to Captain Beefheart.”
Throughout his whole career, Beefheart was extremely nonconformist and he encouraged his fans to follow their own muses and/or paths. One of his most memorable lines was, “You have to jump out of school to become a different kind of fish.”
