Popular Music and Society

ISSN: 0300-7766 (Print) 1740-1712 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpms20

Life in the Fast and Bulbous Lane: Captain

Beefheart (1941–2010)

Dave Sanjek

To cite this article: Dave Sanjek (2012) Life in the Fast and Bulbous Lane: Captain Beefheart
(1941–2010), Popular Music and Society, 35:2, 301-313, DOI: 10.1080/03007766.2011.608961

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2011.608961

Published online: 30 May 2012.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 948

View related articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rpms20
Popular Music and Society
Vol. 35, No. 2, May 2012, pp. 301–313

OBITUARY
Life in the Fast and Bulbous Lane:
Captain Beefheart (1941 – 2010)
Dave Sanjek

Everything they did I had ’em do. I mean I’m a director. I don’t wanna boast or
anything like that, but I am an artist. And the thing is that sometimes artists are
considered horrible after they direct something. Y’see these guys, they fell too far
into my role, and then they didn’t like me after that. (Captain Beefheart, Sounds
Dec. 10, 1977, qtd in Barnes 229)

The announcement on December 17, 2010, that Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart,
had died of complications resulting from multiple sclerosis evoked strong yet conflicting
sentiments. The inevitable sadness over his demise collided with a corresponding
reminder that he had in fact been absent by choice for nearly thirty years from the sphere
of commercial recordings. If mortality definitively extinguished his earthly existence,
then Van Vliet deliberately silenced himself musically long ago. His last release, Ice Cream
for Crow, appeared in 1982, when he relinquished his Captain Beefheart persona and re-
adopted his original identity. One can only surmise the array of reasons that led to his
abandonment of composition. Chief among them could well have been his conviction
that he had more or less succeeded in subduing the inflexible syncopation that he believed
rendered most music routine and redundant. Van Vliet deplored what he called the
“Mama Heartbeat,” the domination of “[that] endless me, me, me. Or do-re-mi, whatever
that is” (Cavanagh 36). Arguably, he rendered popular music more elastic and expressive.
The crisscrossing patterns of his compositions routinely kick start a hyperkinetic
exhilaration in their wake. Unfortunately, those skittering sequences of uncontained
animation could not ultimately provide an antidote to the inexorable flatlining of the
pulsation that propels our existence.
If Van Vliet dispensed with music, he substituted painting and drawing in its place,
although he had long been dedicated to the visual arts, even before he first performed
a single note or sang a single word. His loyal audience was well acquainted with this
dual agenda, as the packaging of the Magic Band recordings frequently featured
examples of his output. Critical pronouncements on his paintings routinely compare
their techniques to those of the Abstract Expressionists, and that descriptive
shorthand possesses its fair share of accuracy, in reference not only to the canvases but,
oddly enough, the musical compositions as well. Should one assign some ulterior

ISSN 0300-7766 (print)/ISSN 1740-1712 (online) q 2012 Taylor & Francis

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2011.608961
302 D. Sanjek
motive to this school of visual expression, it would not consist of any translatable
content other than the disposition of brush strokes and barrages of color surrounded
by the circumference of the canvas. Likewise, whatever meaning might be attached to
Van Vliet’s songs or instrumentals can be deciphered only by attending to the very
beats, chords, and words that occur in the space of an individual track. He expelled
those elements through microphones onto the surface of recording tape with the same
audacity and enthusiasm that he extracted ingredients from tubes of pigment and
launched them onto a canvas.
The final video of his career, produced as an advertisement for Ice Cream for Crow
and synchronized to the title track, incorporated several of these canvases. Their
presence leads one to imagine Van Vliet meant the film to provide a valedictory
address to his existence as a composer along with an acknowledgment of his re-
commitment to the primacy of paint and pencils. He shot it in the High Mojave
Desert, the site of his adolescence and residence for the remainder of his life.
Interspersed throughout its images of the last iteration of the Magic Band are
cutaways to wind-driven tumbleweeds, their surfaces inundated with sheets of
crumpled paper. Their inclusion leads one to imagine Van Vliet meant not only to
draw attention to the transitory nature of his quest for a musical identity but also to
allay the anxieties of certain members of his audience. Like that agitated vegetation,
we are meant to infer, careers come and go, and the surfaces on which we record
messages themselves occupy only a fleeting presence on the scene. Extraordinary as
Van Vliet’s music can be, it never attracted any more than a minority of its potential
audience, despite the occasional attempts on his part, and the record companies to
which he was signed, to streamline its oddities for the commercial mainstream. His
catalogue ultimately epitomizes that sphere of production that Robert Christgau
famously dubbed “semi-popular music”: “music that is appreciated—I use the term
advisedly—for having all the earmarks of popular music, except the popularity”
(129). The fact remains that, when Trout Mask Replica, his 1969 masterpiece, was
inducted into the National Recordings Registry of the Library of Congress in 2010 to
honor its cultural, historic, and aesthetic significance, the vast majority of the
American public had more than likely never before heard of it, and most of them
might never want to hear it again were they initiated into its contents.
Throughout his career, as much as Van Vliet routinely chipped away at the
assumptions of the average listener, he simultaneously challenged the descriptive
resources of his aficionados. They often struggled to find appropriate language to
convey his idiosyncratic agenda. Some of their efforts can be as evocative as their
subject. Ben Thompson memorably described his voice as having “so much grain you
could make a loaf out of it” (98), and Langdon Winner sarcastically inquired of it,
“Why would anyone sing in the voice people usually reserve for telling trespassers to
get the hell off their property?” (59). Winner went on to dub Van Vliet an “American
primitive surrealist” and to speak of the instrumentation he favored as “a grating, off-
centre guitar line that sounds like a sawmill given a log too heavy to cut and
slowly grinding itself to pieces” (60). Undoubtedly, Van Vliet was a larger-than-life
 Popular Music and Society 303

individual, someone for whom mythic status seemed not so much appropriate as
inevitable. Thompson boasts that “his life resists all attempts at demystification” (99).
This kind of hyperbole amounts to a virtual matter of reflex when the subject was said
to have gone for a year and a half without sleep; possessed three-and-a-half inch ears;
was able to know phones would ring before the signal sounded; once sold a vacuum
cleaner to Aldous Huxley; and submitted a bill to his record label for the damage to a
studio’s surrounding oaks and cedars because he believed the recording process in
which he and the Magic Band had participated upset their equilibrium (99).
When commenting on Captain Beefheart, writers seem to have found themselves in
a situation regarding Beefheart comparable to that of the reporter, played by Edmund
O’Brien, in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (1962) who asserts at
the conclusion, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” A number of
them have done so, sometimes thoughtlessly, when they fail to inquire how even
an individual as intentionally odd as Van Vliet nonetheless might possess some
normative characteristics. As a matter of fact, the temporal arc of his recording career
displays a narrative construction common to many artists. It plots an ascent from
invention to innovation, followed by consolidation; then, a retrenchment if not a
retreat occurs, only to lead to a reaffirmation of first principles before his farewell
from the scene. His initial works—the singles contained on the Legendary A&M
Sessions (1984, recorded in 1966) and the albums Safe As Milk (1967), Strictly Personal
(1968), and Mirror Man (1971)—lay out the ingredients of his agenda, although the
recipe felt at times somewhat half-baked, certainly when compared to his magnum
opus, Trout Mask Replica, distributed by a major label, Warner Bros. There, he
disposes of virtually any potential straitjacket, and goes for broke in a manner that
leads one to assume he was not accounting for his prospects in any form of common
currency. Kevin Courrier aptly estimates his virtual abandonment of convenience, if
not even comfort, in his music when he writes, “The fleeting let’s-try-it-on
inventiveness of the compositions, in fact, comes across with a shocking ebullience”
(16). Van Vliet went on to consolidate that achievement in his following two recordings,
Lick My Decals Off, Baby (1970) and The Spotlight Kid (1972), only to seem to accede to
his label’s hopes of some payoff for their investment with the more market-friendly
repertoire found on Clear Spot (1972). The single from those sessions, “Too Much
Time,” could be thought of as a kind of litmus test for Beefheart addicts: absolutists
believe it dilutes his Dadaist sensibilities, while others in the inner circle commend it as
a transformation of the conventional into something simultaneously lilting and loony.
Whatever the motivations, the album failed to convince customers. Beefheart lost
his auspicious Warner Bros. affiliation, after which he hoped to jump-start his agenda
by downsizing expectations and dumbing down his aspirations on two releases:
Bluejeans & Moonbeams and Unconditionally Guaranteed (1974). They were by and
large as transparent a travesty as if Picasso were commissioned to create wallpaper for
Walmart. Beefheart subsequently sought refuge in a subordinate position as a featured
vocalist with his childhood friend and perennial competitor, Frank Zappa, which
definitely succeeded in proving the implausibility of two artistically inclined alpha
304 D. Sanjek
males occupying the same stage at the same time. Finally, Beefheart reaffirmed the
core of his concepts about music on three final recordings that not only build upon
but also lighten without lessening the complexity of his earlier work: Shiny Beast (Bat
Chain Puller) (1978), Doc at the Radar Station (1980) and Ice Cream for Crow (1982).
He seems ultimately to take leave of music with his wit and wisdom intact, committed
to tampering with tradition yet convinced that you can accomplish those ends with
a smile on your face.
Concurrent with this narrative arc comes a persistent habit on the part of
commentators of attributing heroic qualities to Van Vliet, certainly at the very least
addressing him as though he epitomized the sui generis genius. The fact that his music
sounds like so little else one might hear supports, for some people, the assumption
that he created it out of whole cloth or that he absorbed his influences so thoroughly
as to obliterate any evidence of their existence. Such views illustrate less about the
material than they do about the listeners and their predilection for wishing to elevate
individuals over ensembles and to prioritize the a priori over any kind of collective
process. Any number of writers point to Van Vliet’s lack of formal musical knowledge,
as well as his virtually categorical refusal to acquire that information, as proof of his
intuitive genius. Quite the contrary, these circumstances undeniably reinforced his
need for outside assistance in bringing those often inchoate ideas into existence and
determining the means by which a group of musicians could commit them to
practice. Van Vliet did a great deal, again and again, to reinforce this perspective and
relegate his accompanists not simply to the back seat but out of the vehicle altogether.
He achieved that objective by such gestures as copyrighting his material in his name
alone, refusing to allow writers to speak to members of the Magic Band, giving some
of them pseudonyms that, however amusing and memorable they might be, dissolve
their actual identities, and other equally divisive, and in some cases unacceptable,
gestures. There are any number of complexities to Don Van Vliet’s career and his craft,
but certainly chief among them is the peculiar simultaneity of coercion and creativity:
a sense that a repertoire that celebrates and encourages liberation from convention
came into existence through some conventionally aggressive and egotistical means.
Kevin Courrier alludes to this dilemma in his extended examination of Trout Mask
Replica when he comments upon how the recording amounts to “a full expression of
one American artist’s quest for total freedom” and also “an expression of the tyranny
of freedom” (21). To modify that statement slightly, the recording undeniably
illustrates how one can create an artifact that both inspires and embodies freedom
through a tyrannical methodology. Van Vliet’s commitment to his command over
his final product is embodied by the remarks contained in the epigraph with which
I began. He never drew a curtain over his demanding and sometimes virtually
dictatorial leadership of the Magic Band. At the same time, admirers of what that
process produced sometimes seem at the very least to short-shift the circumstances.
Courrier, for example, recognizes the brutality but seems capable of almost casually
excusing the consequent damage.
 Popular Music and Society 305

Beefheart’s quest to find democratic freedom in his art found him becoming
something of an authoritarian to do it. The path to Trout Mask Replica was not
outlined by the quixotic zeal of a group breaking the rules to find themselves. It was
etched by one man’s narrow will to achieve his own artistic liberation. Within that
ambiguous quest, casualties were certain. (Courrier 50)

Mike Barnes, Van Vliet’s chief biographer, reinforces this two-faced approach when he
describes the genesis of the recording as follows:
The true story of Trout Mask was astonishing enough, but although near-starvation had
long been associated with artistic endeavour, fist fights, tyranny and “brainwashing”
sessions weren’t such attractive selling points to the Woodstock generation. All that was
kept under wraps and over time Van Vliet has been instead quoted, or paraphrased, as
saying that the Magic Band worked by telepathy; or that [Mark] Boston had only been
playing bass for six months, and [Bill] Harkleroad the guitar for seven months on
joining, or that he had written all the music in eight and a half hours at the piano with
variously named [John] French or [Victor] Hayden frantically transcribing his fevered
outpourings; or that they regularly rehearsed for twenty hours a day; or that he had not
left the Ensenada Drive house for over three years.
Outside the claustrophobic mental assault course of life at the house, Van Vliet was
generous in his praise of the musicians. But he was also unequivocal in taking credit for
both writing and arranging all the music. And the myth was certainly helped by his
portrayal of the musicians as idiot savant types who had never played before and whom
he had taught from scratch. But in effect he did teach them from scratch. Certainly
none of them would have come up with anything like Trout Mask Replica on their own.
When he was over in London on press duties with Zappa, Van Vliet was asked by Zig
Zag if the group were involved in music before the Magic Band. He made the point:
“They were always involved, but now they’re playing.” And later to Elliott Wald from
Oui he said: “The musicians worked so hard at it. They were born on that Album.”
(Barnes 119–20)

Subsequent to Van Vliet’s retirement, two of the individuals—guitarist Bill (Zoot

Horn Rollo) Harkleroad and drummer John (Drumbo) French—removed a
considerable amount of the gilt from that myth in memoirs that illustrate how much
Van Vliet drew from and depended upon their efforts and, in the process, corroborate
that, if they were, in fact, born on Trout Mask Replica, Van Vliet cannot credit himself
altogether with their genesis. In order adequately and accurately not only to assess Van
Vliet’s career but also to pay close attention to the damage committed in order to
perpetuate his identity as Captain Beefheart, we have to assess the often acutely painful,
even sometimes shocking, evidence these documents contain. Abandoning their
testimony as simply sour grapes or the musical equivalent of some kind of Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern double act demeans their memories and eviscerates the creative
process in which they were participants of the emotional and behavioral complexity it
undeniably possessed.
Chronologically, Harkleroad broke ranks first when in 1998 he published his pained
recollections of participation in the band between 1968 and 1974: Lunar Notes: Zoot
Horn Rollo’s Captain Beefheart Experience. Raised in the desert communities of
California where Van Vliet matured, the guitarist initially interacted with the composer
306 D. Sanjek
as a teenager during jam sessions and was previously acquainted as well with Magic
Band members French and guitarist Jeff Cotton. He joined them soon after completing
high school. Almost immediately, Harkleroad perceived something disconcerting
about the environment, as his friends seemed simultaneously uncomfortable and
excessively animated: “John and Jeff were not the same guys I used to know. They both
had a seriously dire look in their eyes, yet on occasions would slip into a seriously
over-the-top excitement” (23). The dissonant dimension of the experience diffused,
however, in the face of the rewarding complexity of Van Vliet’s compositions. He recalls,
“That was really one of the best parts of being in the band. It legitimized art as opposed
to that whole attitude of, ‘You’re supposed to go to the post office and work and have
three kids’” (26). Quickly, however, the admiration and animation Harkleroad
experienced was transformed into disdain and disorientation. “The whole vibe
consisted of us being enlightened by our overseer,” he remarks, once he recognized
the degree to which he had become a “slavedog,”’ practicing sometimes sixteen or
seventeen hours a day (38, 39). In addition, when the band was not practicing, they were
subjected to belligerent indoctrination sessions led by Van Vliet that felt like little more
than brainwashing. Their wills broken down by lack of sleep, little food and long bouts
of strenuous performance, these young men not long out of high school were compelled
by Van Vliet to think of one another as potential deviants from the cause, as their
overseer divided his ensemble into initiates and apostates.
With Don there was always a “culprit,” there always had to be a person for him to
vent his “beef ” of the moment onto. Don was always picking on whoever he deemed
to be the “bad person” of that particular moment. This always rotated, all of us were
in that position at one time or another. . . . As a result of picking on people, it was
not at all uncommon for us to literally go around beating the shit out of each other!
(Harkleroad 68)

Harkleroad does not dwell upon these abuses, although he does characterize himself as a
“beaten little puppy” who rationalizes his continuation in the ensemble because of the
challenges of the repertoire and the skills to be learned as Van Vliet’s musical amanuensis
(85). He transcribed the separate shards that the bandleader created, assimilated them into
coherent compositions and taught them by ear to his associates. After six years, however,
Harkleroad could no longer tolerate this treatment and quit. He puts in perspective the
length of his endurance with the conviction that Van Vliet was a truly great and abusive
person in equal parts. As for worldly rewards, he received no money for his labors and
admits to underplaying the depth of his degradation: “To this day I don’t think I’ve ever
really represented the situation as bad as it really was. I’ve just told parts of it” (130–31).
If Harkleroad minimizes his pain, John French maximizes the psychological and
professional baggage incurred by placing himself in a subordinate position to
a frequently belligerent taskmaster. What Harkleroad withholds, French unveils.
Beefheart: Through the Eyes of Magic possesses a kind of Tolstoyan amplitude. A hefty
800 plus pages, it interweaves the drummer’s exhaustive recollections along with
information drawn from interviews with various members of the Magic Band as well
 Popular Music and Society 307

as other associates and acquaintances from Van Vliet’s past. The resemblance of
French to the Russian novelist as an interrogator of behavior, however, does not stop
at a simple matter of page length. He exhibits a comparable eagerness to comprehend
convoluted human acts equal to that which impelled Tolstoy to inquire what drives
societies to engage in battle or distinguishes one unhappy family from another. French
concludes Van Vliet’s erratic actions, their obscure motivations and the damage that
arose in their wake to be as ultimately incomprehensible as the bulk of the public find
the composer’s repertoire. At the same time, the substantive difference between that
audience and the drummer comes down to the simple fact that most people avoid
repeated encounters with the Beefheart catalogue whereas French returns with a
dogged persistence not only to perform with the composer but also to attempt to suss
out what makes him tick. He has committed his lifetime both to that repertoire as well
as to the dissection of the personality of its creator.
Beefheart: Through the Eyes of Magic opens with the explosive impact of a close-up in
a Sam Fuller feature film, such as the object struck into the camera lens that begins The
Naked Kiss (1964): John French is jammed into a wall by his bandmates as Van Vliet
angrily interrogates him in the process of “another of his ridiculous witch hunts” (7).
He continues,
A day like this seemed to happen after about five normal days. In fact, most of the
days like this lasted two days, occasionally even three. They were comprised of the
sleepless horror of either being the target or watching the target and knowing you
soon would be next. Huge amounts of tea were consumed to keep us awake and
alert. (French, Beefheart 7)

The paradox at the core of this scenario that French will unpack with the skill of
a therapist and the dedication of a fictional shamus comes down to how encounters
such as these, whose goal “seemed to be to completely strip the individual in question
of all dignity, self-worth and pride,” could coincide with an artistic agenda that would
result in “a quest to finish an album that would later land the position of 33rd in the
top albums ever recorded—at least according to Rolling Stone magazine” (8, 9).
French concludes by assessing that, notwithstanding the harassment, the poverty, the
physical wear and tear, “I knew it was a privilege—albeit certainly wrapped in an
ironic cloak—to be associated with this man” (768). And yet, so varied and
unpredictable could Van Vliet be that, out of the blue, he might act in a manner that
puts the kibosh on any conclusive judgment of his character. In that regard, the last,
altogether typically gnomic things that Van Vliet said to French hold considerable
resonance: “You were always there, man,” repeated three times with his hand on his
heart, and then the ultimate admonition, “I’ll see you around. Watch your topknot,
and keep your eyes on the skyline” (French, Beefheart 748, ”Watch Your Topknot” 35).
Exhaustive as French’s detailing of his experience with Van Vliet may be, it is
possible to subdivide the acrimony into categories. Otherwise, a reader can become as
swamped by the evidence as French often feels overwhelmed by his emotions and
memories. Two bodies of information particularly stand out: first, the refusal on the
308 D. Sanjek
bandleader’s part either to practice standardized musical language or to alleviate his
ignorance in any manner. This led to his dependence upon French, and others
including Harkleroad, to translate his ideas and transfer them to their confederates. If
one were to put the matter in an automotive context, Van Vliet adamantly demanded
to occupy the driver’s seat but steadfastly refused to earn a license. Second, there was
the manner in which Van Vliet maltreated his accompanists psychologically and
eventually physically in a seemingly systematic effort to evacuate them of any sense of
self-worth, even of personality. Part of the rationale for both the length of the book
and the scope of the evidence is to permit French not only to validate his reading of
Van Vliet but also to reinforce its accuracy by means of the corroboration offered to
him by others who were treated in the same manner and suffered the same indignity.
Reading the entirety of the book undeniably involves a considerable commitment of
time and emotion, yet the larger issues it raises about the interpersonal dynamics of
creative collaboration, the sacrifices made for art, and the inequities of fame outweigh
the time and psychic energy involved.
For all his dissection of Van Vliet’s character and seeming shredding of his public
image, French never denies the fact that he possessed a range of undeniable aptitudes,
including but not limited to the musical. However, Van Vliet appeared never to
marshal those abilities in a deliberate manner and, instead, allowed instinct to operate
in the place of the acquisition of a dependable set of skills. At times, French believes,
Van Vliet was not so much engaging in the act of performance as enacting the role of
a performer. He states, “Don’s strongest talent may lay not in his musical abilities as
most would think, but in his theatrical abilities, which he had developed at an early
age . . . .Van Vliet’s theatrical abilities were able to convince others that he was
a genuine blues singer, when, in fact, he was merely playing a composite role of the
heroes of his adolescence. . . . Don was often lost in his own songs” (Beefheart 125).
Putting the time into practicing or endeavouring to learn his own material with
sufficient precision such that he could repeat it from one occasion to another—an
ability he routinely demanded of his accompanists—apparently failed to stimulate
Van Vliet’s imagination. Consequently, it seemed to French, “He wanted to play
music, not work at it” (156). That did not mean he resisted giving the impression of
being in charge; he just did not want to exert the energy actually to carry through on
that position, even if he complained vociferously when others did not facilitate his
desires. As French remarks, “my first impression was that he didn’t seem to want to
actually be in the band but wanted to call the shots, write the lyrics and use the band as
a music writing tool”(157). Van Vliet’s immersion in the process of creation
precluded, for him, any parallel surrender to the needs or procedures of the collective.
Part of the impetus behind his ill treatment of his accompanists consequently arose
from his deliberate lack of a common language that he could share with them.
Whenever he could not translate his ideas into a communal form, Van Vliet would
turn upon the others and attack their very professional competence rather than
recognize the liability of his own failure to acquire certain elementary musical skills.
His commitment to his music remained, start to finish, resolutely self-referential;
 Popular Music and Society 309

adamantly committed to the assumption that other performers were vehicles for his
work, not individuals to be valued for themselves.
This posture can perhaps be most accurately illustrated by Van Vliet’s habit of
explaining how he wanted his accompanists to perform in a manner that refused to be
anything other than metaphorical. Biographer Mike Barnes sympathetically explains
the process as follows: “Van Vliet was becoming more interested in using found sounds
to generate musical ideas and his descriptions of what he wanted were beginning to
sound like a verbalized equivalent of a section of graphic score” (303). For example, the
drummer Cliff Martinez reports receiving the following sets of instructions from Van
Vliet: “Make it like Fred Astaire dangling through a tea cup; like BBs on the plate; babies
flying over the mountains” (Barnes 303). While one can admire the creative sleight of
hand involved in such allusive language, this sequence of suggestions might equally be
regarded as a self-engaged abnegation of the very act of communication, a means of
controlling the terms of the discourse by refusing to adopt phrases that possess any
common meaning. Sometimes band members other than Martinez report this practice
as though it were quaintly avant-garde, yet between the lines one senses the inevitable
frustration that resulted when they did not understand what Van Vliet wanted to hear.
Even if the composer believed his intention was to disrupt the conventional patterns of
communication, French and others speculate whether, in fact, the practice was yet
another means of controlling the situation without having to step outside a rigidly
defined comfort zone. John French’s description of what it was like to be Van Vliet’s
musical amanuensis reinforces this tactic of simultaneously controlling others while
abnegating the role of authority: “Putting together Don’s music was like taking a dozen
jigsaw puzzles and dumping them into the same box, then dividing the scrambled parts
and putting several puzzles together at once. Everything was incomplete and
disorganized. It made the whole effort seem intensely overwhelming” (292).
It would be a mistake to assume that Van Vliet routinely acted in such a passive
manner, for he repeatedly exercised his authority with considerable vigor at least and
overt violence at worst. French and Harkleroad each report on how he often
deliberately adopted the role of despot. Even when an ostensible rationale for his
behavior could not be discerned, Van Vliet did not seem to require a distinct impetus
in order to launch into aggression. French nonetheless uncovers a method, or perhaps
a formula, to his belligerence.
It was a bit of Pavlov, mixed with Synanon, interrogation procedures, sleep
deprivation, and brainwashing techniques all rolled up in a bundle. It was actually
brilliant work on Don’s part. I think his most brilliant work ever—his total control
and manipulation of four young men. This was group encounter in which
negative reinforcement techniques transformed us into obedient minions.
(French, Beefheart 375)

Sometimes these techniques led to a one-on-one attack upon a particular musician,

usually in the form of character assassination. The most indistinguishable factors set
off Van Vliet. So indelible was the impact of his behavior that, years later, members
310 D. Sanjek
of the Magic Band could still flinch at simply hearing a phrase that he would use to
dismiss them. Harkleroad writes:
Recently I got together with John French, he was here visiting and my wife and
I took him out to dinner, and he said a phrase I hadn’t heard for years, it almost
made me quiver. He said “You have a thing”. And when you “had a thing” you were
the culprit. The dirty thing you had done, whatever it was, was undermining the
brilliance of our situation. So we all “had things”, of course. Except one person—
and you can guess who that was (43).

On other occasions, as in the episode that opens French’s narrative, Van Vliet
enlisted the rest of the Magic Band as accomplices and dealt out physical punishment
to the individual who had been labeled an apostate. In the body of his memoir, French
provides an even more detailed and disturbing description of the attack upon him.
Don shouted, “Get him!” On that verbal cue, all four of them started hitting me at
once, mostly in the face. I can only recall this kind of physical attack happening to me
and only this once, but it was absolutely terrifying. . . . I had been scared, but this
time I actually thought I was going to die, and this was more real than anything
before. I remember being cornered in the kitchen and hand after hand hitting and
slapping me on the face and upper body and being kicked. . . . This was the most
frightened I had ever been and I shouted “stop” several times. (French, Beefheart 451)

What proved to be equally if not even more disconcerting to French than the physical
pain inflicted upon him was how Van Vliet switched positions almost immediately. The
very next evening, he was appointed “Don’s ‘special friend’ again,” urged not to leave,
and informed he was crucial to the maintenance of the Magic Band (455). Nothing
about Van Vliet’s behavior on this latter occasion came across as premeditated or
purposefully sanctimonious. To French, “This was a very emotional and heartfelt
moment, and I almost never saw Don appear this sincere in my whole experience with
him” (455). At the same time, the variability of Van Vliet’s behavior does not contradict
his primary aim of being in control at all times. French hypothesizes how the fact that
he was an only child instilled in Van Vliet an innate and inflexible sense of superiority.
Van Vliet reinforced this supposition when he forthrightly informed the drummer,
“You realize, John, that I am a King. . . . John, you know I am” (507). Van Vliet was also
not above being simply and purely petty and vindictive. For all that French did to
actualize the very material contained on Trout Mask Replica, he was denied any credit on
the jacket sleeve of the album. Admittedly, his image appears among the other oddly
dressed individuals in the incorporated photos, yet the list of performers would lead
one to assume that the drumming was performed by a phantom.
Judging how and why Van Vliet abused and dismissed several members of the Magic
Band certainly tests one’s moral or intellectual compass. Superficially, little might be
said to justify and even less to rationalize such belligerence. Even the musicians’ own
ability to put his aggression into perspective comes across as kindness in excess of
circumstance. John French can admit, “What motivated us, I think, was Don’s
obsession to create,” yet the note of qualification does more than allude to the damage
 Popular Music and Society 311

he has spent over 800 pages attempting to comprehend (768). Having read both his and
Harkleroad’s recollections, my experience of the music on which they played can never
again be the same. One is put in mind of the query addressed in T.S. Eliot’s “Gerontion”:
“After such knowledge, what forgiveness?” (40). Nothing would cause me to wish the
recorded legacy of Captain Beefheart out of existence, yet the human cost of that
material cannot be wrenched out of context or summarily remedied. At the same time,
the urge to comprehend the obscurity of the human heart remains, even if the means by
which that effort conducts its inquiry can offer only the most tenuous of explanations.
One possible avenue of illumination can be found in the recent study by the
sociologist Richard Sennett, The Craftsman, which investigates “what the process of
making concrete things reveals to us about ourselves” (8). What kind of intimate
connection might be established between the hand and the head or, in the context of
this discussion, the musical recording and the individual musician by investigating the
way in which things are made and the skills by which they are constructed passed along
from one individual to another? How might that activity be done well and what does the
problem solving contained in an act of creation indicate about the agents behind its
existence? Neither the gaining of skills nor the transmission of those aptitudes, musical
or otherwise, occurs in a vacuum. Some understanding of human behavior and,
perhaps, even human nature (should one admit to the existence of such a
phenomenon) might be secured by an investigation of a particular artifact and its
artificers. The particular context of Sennett’s rich and rewarding examination of these
questions that has a bearing on the activities of the Magic Band and the leadership, or
lack thereof, embodied in the person of Don Van Vliet occurs in his examination of the
workshop environment. This is a space that embodies and therefore allows us to
consider the position in which persons of authority choose to exercise their autonomy
with the aim in mind of producing a discernible product in collaboration with a body of
other, usually younger and less knowledgeable individuals. It dates back through many
centuries of human experience and has included such a wide variety of individuals as to
allow us, for perhaps a single occasion, to bring together Don Van Vliet and Benvenuto
Cellini. Sennett examines how a workshop can instigate the interaction of masters and
journeymen or apprentices. The master mentors his subordinates and can often act as a
kind of surrogate parent, depending on the age of those other individuals. The
relationship between these groups is not necessitated, for, in some cases, those
subordinates were hired with no explicit expectation of their being taught, but, instead,
that they would simply act out a set of requirements. Nonetheless, this environment
potentially can allow for “the absorption into tacit knowledge, unspoken and
uncodified in words, that occurred there and became a matter of habit, the thousand
little moves that add up in sum to a practice” (Sennett 77). When the master does not
allow his or her individuality and distinctiveness to swallow up this environment, the
passing along of tacit knowledge can dominate, facilitating growth on the part of his or
her subordinates, and a supportive community comes into existence.
Sennett presents a vision of how a workshop can most demonstrably permit this
kind of growth. He writes,
312 D. Sanjek
In theory the well-run workshop should balance tacit and explicit knowledge.
Masters should be pestered to explain themselves, to dredge out the assemblage of
clues and moves they have absorbed into silence within—if only they could, or if
only they would. Much of their very authority derives from seeing what others don’t
see, knowing what they don’t know; their authority is made manifest in their
silence. (Sennett 78)

Sennett believes that one of the primary acts that indicate how much masters are willing
to subordinate their authority to the needs of the workshop is how they explain their
skills, how they transmit their expertise. Even though an apprentice learns a great deal
by osmosis, whenever the master demonstrates some skill, a burden exists on the part of
the apprentice to be sure that they figure out, as Sennett states, “what turned the key in
the lock,” so to speak (181). A genuine and potentially transformational transposition
of knowledge is encouraged whenever the master recognizes the vulnerability of
the apprentice, and “[t]his turn to vulnerability is the sign of sympathy the instructor
gives” (186). He adds, “the expert guides by anticipating difficulties for the novice;
sympathy and prehension combine” (186). Whenever masters, however, fail to consider
beforehand how their skills come into being, that partial, and ultimately incom-
prehensible, explanation is defined by Sennett as “dead denotation” (183). This form of
instruction becomes vivid only to someone who has accomplished the task beforehand.
Over-familiarity on the part of the master can only increase the degree of dead
denotation. Therefore, Sennett asserts, “The challenge posed by dead denotation is
precisely to take apart tacit knowledge, which requires bringing to the surface of
consciousness that knowledge which has become so self-evident and habitual that it
seems just natural” (183). Appraising the degree to which this transmission succeeds
necessitates a moral judgment upon the masters, as their willingness or failure to
interpolate in their instructions the degree of vulnerability possessed by a novice
indicates their capacity for extinguishing solipsism and inaugurating sympathy.
Even if neither Harkleroad nor French appears to be aware of Sennett’s study, their
memoirs together reinforce how Van Vliet chose to embody the role of master in
a particularly truncated and ultimately inefficient fashion. His level of sympathy
appears to have been attenuated, and his willingness to take apart and render into
public discourse his inner thoughts and forms of expression virtually negligible.
Consequently, he may well have been frustrated to the extreme by finding himself in
this position, and his objectifications of the Magic Band resulted to some degree from
his sense that they as a group occupied a separate and lamentably incompatible
universe. Van Vliet in the end abnegated his very exercise of authority as a master by
failing to attempt to comprehend what these young men, just barely out of high
school and only embarked upon manhood, knew and did not know. He chose by and
large to manifest his authority through either silence, illustrated by his lack of practice
time spent with his accompanists, or a form of expression so driven by private
references as to be virtually inexplicable. Of course, as even Sennett admits,
a workshop does not guarantee the acquisition of knowledge; sometimes it does not
 Popular Music and Society 313

ever transmit the skills required for a particular activity. Nonetheless, how that process
occurs is rich with ethical implications.
Perhaps, in the end, the assumption that Van Vliet could or even wished to exceed the
least common requirements of the role of master flies in the face of the core of his
personality. Clearly, neither Harkleroad nor French felt, despite considerable inter-
action with him personally and professionally, that they ever cracked the code of the
core of his being. An insurmountable barrier of personal inhibitions and prohibitions
intervened. Maybe they would have been forewarned more explicitly as to that obstacle
had they read certain of Van Vliet’s lyrics as an index of his character. As stated earlier,
one of the core paradoxes of his accomplishments remains how a body of work that
challenges fixation and celebrates open-mindedness should have incorporated such
a profound degree of rigidity in order to come into existence. One cannot therefore
soft-pedal the encomiums in his words to the vitality of physical nature or appreciate
his employment of a broad range of the possible forms of the imagination without
keeping in mind the occasions when his musicians were made to feel less than human.
One way potentially to make sense of this conundrum is to recognize that there are
those kinds of individuals who can bring more oxygen into a room than already exists in
a space, allow those they share that territory with to breathe more fully and experience a
beneficial giddiness. And there are others who suck much of the oxygen out of a given
environment and leave their cohorts gasping for breath and disagreeably light-headed.
Don Van Vliet seems to be both of those kinds of individuals, as he could inspire and
incapacitate his associates at one and the same time.

Works Cited
Barnes, Mike. Captain Beefheart. London: Quartet Books, 2000. Print.
Cavanagh, David. “Captain Beefheart, American Visionary, 1941– 2010.” Uncut 166 (March 2011):
30– 6. Print.
Christgau, Robert. Any Old Way You Choose It: Rock and Other Pop Music, 1967 – 1973. Revd edn.
New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000. Print.
Courrier, Kevin. Trout Mask Replica. New York: Continuum, 2007. Print.
Eliot, T.S. Collected Poems 1909 – 1962. London: Faber, 1980. Print.
French, John. Beefheart: Through the Eyes of Magic. London: Proper Music Publishing, 2010. Print.
———. “Watch Your Topknot and Keep Your Eyes on the Horizon.” Uncut 166 (March 2011): 34 –5.
Print.
Harkleroad, Bill. Lunar Notes: Zoot Horn Rollo’s Captain Beefheart Experience. London: SAF
Publishing, 1998. Print.
Sennett, Richard. The Craftsman. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2008. Print.
Thompson, Ben. Ways of Hearing: A User’s Guide to the Pop Psyche, from Elvis to Eminem. London:
Phoenix, 2001. Print.
Winner, Langdon. “Trout Mask Replica.” Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island. Ed. Greil Marcus.
New York: Knopf, 1979. 58– 70. Print.

Notes on Contributor
Dave Sanjek was a member of the Editorial Board of Popular Music and Society.
He taught at the University of Salford. He died on 30 November 2011.