Artist: Captain Beefheart
Genre(s):
Rock
Blues
ROck: Alternative
Discography:
Blue Jeans and Moonbeams
Year: 1987
Tracks: 9
Ice Cream for Crow
Year: 1982
Tracks: 12
Doc at the Radar Station
Year: 1980
Tracks: 12
Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller)
Year: 1978
Tracks: 12
Unconditionally Guaranteed
Year: 1974
Tracks: 10
The Spotlight Kid
Year: 1972
Tracks: 10
Clear Spot
Year: 1972
Tracks: 12
Mirror Man
Year: 1970
Tracks: 4
Trout Mask Replica
Year: 1969
Tracks: 28
Safe as Milk
Year: 1967
Tracks: 19
Born Don Vliet, Captain Beefheart was one of forward-looking music's true innovators. The owner of a singular four-and-one-half octave vocal range, he employed idiosyncratic rhythms, absurdist lyrics and an unhallowed coalition of free wind, Delta blues, latter-day classical music and rock & roll to make a singular dead body of exercise virtually unrivalled in its daring and fluid creativeness. While he never came even remotely close to mainstream success, Beefheart's impact was incalculable, and his fingerprints were all o'er tinder, fresh wave and post-rock.
Don Vliet was born January 15, 1941 in Glendale, California (he changed his call to Van Vliet in the early '60s). At the age of quaternion, his art brought him to the attention of Portuguese sculptor Augustinio Rodriguez, and Vliet was declared a nipper prodigy. In 1954, he was offered a scholarship to study in Europe; his parents declined the marriage proposal, withal, and the home instead stirred to the Mojave Desert, where the adolescent was befriended by a offspring Frank Zappa. In time Vliet taught himself sax and mouth organ, and united a geminate of local R&B groups, the Omens and the Blackouts.
Afterwards a semester at college, he and Zappa moved to Cucamonga, California, where they planned to shoot a film, Maitre d' Beefheart Meets the Grunt People. As the project remained in limbo, Zappa in the end affected to Los Angeles, where he founded the Mothers of Invention; Van Vliet by and by returned to the Mojave area, adoptive the Beefheart name and formed the outset lineup of his financial support group the Magic Band with guitarists Alex St. Clair and Doug Moon, bassist Jerry Handley and drummer Paul Blakely in 1964.
In their original avatar, the Magic Band were a blues-rock outfit wHO became staples of the teen-dance circuit; they quickly signed to A&M Records, where the success of the single "Diddy Wah Diddy" earned them the chance to record a uncut album. Comprised of Van Vliet compositions like "Sauteing Pan," "Electricity" and "Zag Zag Wanderer," judge president Jerry Moss spurned the completed record as "also negative," and a crushed Beefheart went into seclusion. After replacement Moon and Blakely with guitarist Antennae Jimmy Semens (natural Jeff Cotton) and drummer John "Drumbo" French, the mathematical group (fleshed extinct by guitar player Ry Cooder) recut the songs in 1967 as Safe as Milk.
After producer Bob Krasnow radically remixed 1968's hallucinatory Purely Personal without Beefheart's approval, he again retired. At the same time, however, Zappa formed his own , Straight Records, and he shortly approached Van Vliet with the promise of complete originative ascendence; a apportion was stricken and after writing 28 songs in a nine-hour craze, Beefheart formed the definitive card of the Magic Band -- made up of Semens, Drumbo, guitar player Zoot Horn Rollo (natural Bill Harkleroad), bassist Rockette Morton (Bull's eye Boston) and bass clarinetist the Mascara Snake (Victor Fleming) -- to record the germinal 1969 double album Trout Mask Replica.
Next seventies likewise outlandish Lick My Decals Off, Baby, Beefheart adoptive an about commercial effectual for the 1972 releases The Spotlight Kid and Clear Spot. Shortly thenceforth, the Magic Band bust off to shape Mallard, and Beefheart was dropped by his label, Reprise. After a two-year layoff, he released a geminate of pop-blues albums, Unconditionally Guaranteed and Bluejeans and Moonbeams, with a new, ephemeral Magic Band; next another fallow period, 1978's Glistening Beast (Bat Chain Puller) marked a render to the eccentricities of his finest work.
After 1982's Methamphetamine Cream for Crow, Van Vliet once again retired from music, this time for dear; he returned to the defect, took up residence in a trailer and focused on picture. In 1985, he mounted the first gear major display of his knead, done in an lift, archaic style redolent of Francis Bacon. Like his medicine, his art won panoptic applaud, and some of his paintings sold for as much as $25,000. In the 1990s Van Vliet dropped completely from sight when he fell prey to multiple sclerosis; however, releases like 1999's five-disc Grow Fins box fix and the two-disc anthology The Dust Blows Forward maintained his bulge.
