Captain Beefheart

California, 1968. The tyrannical Captain Beefheart keeps his Magic Band for eight months in a house in the San Fernando Valley, LA. The windows are blacked out. One of them is allowed to leave once a week to get food. They spend 12 hours a day rehearsing a new album. If Beefheart thinks one of them isn’t good enough, he puts them ‘in the barrel’, psychologically abusing them until they break down. (Later, he threw his drummer down some stairs after he failed to ‘play a strawberry’.)

By the time the band got into the studio, they knew the material so well they recorded the 80-minute album in four and a half hours. However, when Trout Mask Replica was released, many people were confused. It sounded like a tuneless, out-of-time jam session. However, Beefheart had carefully worked out these arrangements, and this was exactly what he wanted them to sound like.

Trout Mask is what many people will remember Beefheart for, but he also made some much more listenable music. His first album, Safe as Milk, is a very pleasant half-hour of blues rock.

Similarly, his albums The Spotlight Kid and Clear Spot are fantastic, and only a little odd.

His later efforts were even less surreal, and not very good. After releasing Unconditionally Guaranteed, he advised buyers to ‘take copies back for a refund’. Beefheart gave up making music in 1982, as he was hoping to be taken seriously as a painter.

He always had an interest in other types of art, and was sculpting from the age of four. Born Don Glen Vliet in California, 1941, he was a childhood friend of Frank Zappa, who described Beefheart’s childhood thus: “part of the time Don was helping out by taking over [his father’s] bread truck route, driving up to Mojave, and the rest of the time he would just sit at home and listen to rythym and blues records and scream at his mother to get him a Pepsi.”

Before founding the Magic Band in 1964, Beefheart worked as a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. He claimed to have tried to sell one to Aldous Huxley with the line: “Well I assure you sir, this thing sucks.” However, Beefheart made a lot of unlikely claims. For example, he said he taught his band how to play their own instruments, and recorded an album worth of material with Miles Davis.

Beefheart used to sign any contract put in front of him, without reading it. This meant that in the mid 70s, he was in a legal mess, and not allowed to record anything. Zappa helped Beefheart out by taking him on tour. During their shows, Beefheart sang a bit, but would mostly sit on stage drawing in his sketchbook.

By the time of his death last year, Beefheart had become well respected for his paintings. Fans of his music can’t have been at all surprised that his style of painting was very abstract.

What to hear... Trout Mask Replica, Safe as Milk, The Spotlight Kid, Clear Spot

Why... If you can bear to sit through his albums the first few times, you’ll be a lifelong fan