I’ve been lax — again — in this department, commemorating the lives and careers of significant figures who have passed away.
Never got ’round to jotting down the slightest thing about the mighty Solomon Burke, the righteous King of Rock ‘n’ Soul, who died suddenly Oct. 10 at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport. He was 70.
Heard about Eyedea a week after that, when it was announced at Rock the Bells, but it was sometime later that we learned that death of 28-year-old Micheal Larsen, one-half of the hip-hop duo Eyedea & Abilities, was attributed to opiate toxicity.
Three days after that, Ari Up, frontwoman for England’s groundbreaking female punk band the Slits (creators of the 1979 classic Cut), died of cancer at 48. And five days after she left us, reggae titan Gregory Isaacs, the Cool Ruler, lost his battle to lung cancer at 59.
And now the mysterious, idiosyncratic, reclusive, strangely brilliant Don Van Vliet, better known to his cult of admirers as Captain Beefheart, is gone, from multiple sclerosis, roughly a month before he would have been 70.
I am not the person to turn to for meaningful chatter on this subject. His music has always fascinated and challenged — and unnerved — me, but I’d sooner be able to lecture a course in trigonometry than cogently explain just what in the hell Captain Beefheart’s fractured genius was all about.
To me, Van Vliet’s often impenetrable music is an inexplicable synthesis of the visceral and the cerebral — it gives off indescribable sensations that nonetheless leave you restlessly pondering what you just heard. And how do you adequately explain that to someone who has never heard Trout Mask Replica or Lick My Decals Off, Baby? Frankly, you don’t.
I don’t think most rock writers are qualified to, including yours truly. At this wee hour, when most music sites have checked out for the weekend, Rolling Stone’s assessment is the most thorough job. But for inspiration, I pulled out The Dust Blows Forward, from 1999, a two-disc, 45-track distillation of Beefheart and his nearly two decades of work with the Magic Band before his retirement from music in 1982. (At which point his painting took over and continued until his death; the announcement was made by New York’s Michael Werner Gallery, which represented his work.)
Barry Alfonso’s exhausting liner notes for that useful Rhino/Warner Archives retrospective includes this description, which is as apt and accurate as I bet you can find:
“There never has been a creature quite like him. … Defying easy reference points, his music was at once primal and complex, otherworldly and earthy, beguilingly absurd and unnervingly violent. Critics,” he notes, “at various times found links with Delta blues, free jazz and modern classical composers like Igor Stravinsky and Charles Ives; as a lyricist, his pun-laden, dazzlingly visual verse was compared with the works of the Dadaist and Surrealist poets.”
“Today,” Alfonso convincingly argues, “Captain Beefheart’s music remains remarkably timeless.” Legendary BBC radio personality John Peel put it better: “I heard echoes of his music in some of the records I listened to last week,” he once said, “and I’ll hear more echoes in records that I listen to this week.”
Indeed, for music so brain-rattling, Van Vliet’s effect has been quietly pervasive, seeping into the landscape without most people noticing.
Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, has acknowledged a debt more than a few times. He first heard Trout Mask Replica at 15, two years after the landmark recording came out to critical huzzahs and next to no sales in 1969. “It was the worst thing I’d ever heard,” he thought at the time. “I said to myself, they’re not even trying! It was just a sloppy cacophony. Then I listened to it a couple more times, because I couldn’t believe Frank Zappa could do this to me — and because a double album cost a lot of money.
“About the third time, I realized they were doing it on purpose; they meant it to sound exactly this way. About the sixth or seventh time, it clicked in, and I thought it was the greatest album I’d ever heard.”
He saluted Beefheart’s impact on him by reuniting the Magic Band in 2003 at the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in and around the Queen Mary in Long Beach, which Groening curated. Along with one of that group’s peers, Iggy and the Stooges, the rest of the roster that the cartoonist assembled vividly reflected Van Vliet’s influence as well: Modest Mouse, Built to Spill, Spoon, the Mars Volta, Deerhoof, Sonic Youth, a D. Boon-less Minutemen.
There are many more who fell under his spell. Most famously, soon-to-be-inducted Hall of Famer Tom Waits discovered Van Vliet’s warped world sometime in the early ’80s, probably about the time he was cutting the One from the Heart soundtrack with Crystal Gayle, when his wife and creative partner Kathleen Brennan introduced him to key albums. “Once you’ve heard Beefheart,” he later said, “it’s hard to wash him out of your clothes. It stains, like coffee or blood.” Waits’ music, beginning with 1983′s indelible Swordfishtrombones, has never been the same, his hoarse holler often a dead ringer for Van Vliet’s.
The list of those inspired by his unbound creativity is long and still growing: Devo, John Lydon (especially with PiL), XTC, Kurt Cobain, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Primus, Pere Ubu, the Fall, PJ Harvey, Black Francis, Jack White, Franz Ferdinand. It’s also kinda hard to imagine the London or NYC punk scenes of the ’70s being as memorably weird and neurotic without Beefheart first having broken all the rules.
His specter hung over modern music even while he was alive; for the better part of 30 years Van Vliet has been a ghost in the machine, like Syd Barrett without the insanity, though far more groundbreaking and accomplished. To think of how many more bands his sound will give rise to. As with other one-of-a-kinds like Frank Zappa (with whom he collaborated) and the Velvet Underground, his work only seems to become more legendary as time goes on — and influential in most unexpected ways.
Photo by Andy Freeberg.
Rest in Peace 2010:
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