Captain Beefheart

Don Van Vliet, known in musical circles as Captain Beefheart, is one of the most original and important musicians of the twentieth century.
Van Vliet forged a musical language that draws upon various recklessly diverse sources, such as the folklore of fairy tales, the abstract paintings of Jackson Pollock, the free association of surrealism, the symphonies of Charles Ives, children nursery rhymes, Van Gogh, free-jazz, and commercial music. But he used the Delta blues, in its most primitive and roughest expression, as the foundation and scaffolding of his artistic construction.
At the same time, Van Vliet performed a prodigious operation of physical and psychological abuse on those sources, and in particular on the blues, obtaining the musical equivalent of a frightful visual deformation, a sort of demented exaggeration of the artistic dogmas of surrealism, Dadaism and cubism.
In order to realize that crazy deformation, that spatial-temporal warping, that apocalyptic and blasphemous perspective, Van Vliet exploited his outrageous vocal versatility that allowed him to impersonate all kinds of different and extreme characters in a subliminal performance of schizophrenia, often within the same piece, and to visit states of psychic depression and hallucination with all the grace of a charging rhinoceros.
While a great part of rock music was assuming a mythological quality that ultimately reduced itself to shamanism and alchemy in opposition to distressing reality, Van Vliet proceeded in the opposite direction, emphasizing the psychic imbalances caused by that reality, pushing them to the excess of madness, feeding on them like a spiritual cannibal. If the rest of rock music put its heart into music, Van Vliet put his mind into it, but not the rational mind, rather the instinctive and primordial one, the mind torn to pieces by the frustrations and the contradictions of modern society, the mind of the collective subconscious that expresses itself in twitches, growls, roars and howls, like an animal in a cage.
Van Vliet laid a theoretical bridge between the animal that still churns within our genetic inventory and the synthetic man of the year two thousand.
His was a form of hyper-realism grafted to the anxieties and phobias of the atomic age, a hyper-realism that surged in a grotesquely pagan representation of that era.
Van Vliet also differed from the rest of the musical scene in the mundane aspect: Van Vliet who was one of the most colorful characters of 60s rock, later on became one of its most reclusive characters.

Born in Glendale, near Los Angeles, in 1941, Don Van Vliet moved to Lancaster, in the Mojave Desert, in 1954. After showing an inclination for painting and sculpting (his clay puppets were used for eight years in a television program), Van Vliet turned to music, learning to play saxophone and harmonica. He joined the Blackout, a rhythm and blues band. His studies at Antelope Valley College lasted six months. Then Van Vliet moved to the same area of Cucamonga where Frank Zappa, practiced, the two became friends and played in some local bands, sharing meager pay and anonymity. Zappa, exuberant and enterprising beyond compare, and Van Vliet, apathetic and galling beyond measure, coexisted uneasily. Zappa gave to Van Vliet the nickname "Captain Beefheart" for a never realized movie about the Freaks.

Captain Beefheart formed the Magic Band in 1964, in Lancaster. The group debuted live at the Hollywood Teenage Fair of 1965. Within two years their sound went from imitating the Rolling Stones to a rhythm and blues without rhyme or reason, the shabbiest of the era. In their apocryphal style, fantasy and shattering irony counted more than imitation of the original models, in a way not much different from what the Holy Modal Rounders were doing in folk music. Each member was sharpening a style as blasphemous as it was original, in particular the drummer, John French, hired in 1967, at eighteen. But perhaps more representative was Victor Hayden, Van Vliet's cousin, who performed on bass clarinet, without having learned to play it, and called himself "The Mascara Snake". Thanks to Hayden, the Magic Band came into contact with a colorful commune of artist-monks that hosted alternative shows in their Los Angeles monastery.

The Magic Band, like Zappa's Mothers Of Invention and the Fugs, on the East Coast, was one of the first non commercial bands, totally indifferent to fashion and charts. The Magic Band pushed itself beyond that declaration of indifference by playing blues, already not in tune with the Beatles and the Beach Boys, in such an eccentric way as to make Robert Johnson turn in his grave. Of all the bands that launched alternative rock, the Magic Band was the one truly opposite to the music of the regime of surf music, Merseybeat, and teen idols.

Colorful to the end, Van Vliet conferred to every band member a nickname (French was "Drumbo") and a mask, according to a tradition that went back to the Italian Commedia dell'Arte and that had mysteriously surfaced among the Los Angeles Freaks, and that later would be resumed by the Gong of Canterbury and by the Residents of the New Wave.

Diddy Wah Diddy (Bo Diddley's classic) opens the Magic Band's discography, followed by the single Moonchild, written by their producer, David Gates. A song composed by Van Vliet, Here I Am I Always Am remained unreleased. These early recordings of 1966 were later released on The A&M Sessions (Edsel). The ten-song The Lost Episodes, released by Frank Zappa, contains the very first recordings of Captain Beefheart, in particular Lost In A Whirlpool, recorded in 1959.

The first album, Safe As Milk (Buddha) was released in 1967.
Safe As Milk, with a young Ry Cooder on guitar, delivers the sugar-coated version of Beefheart's ideas. Compressed into three-minute song format, the primitive blues of the Magic Band acquires comical connotations, typical of the subculture of the Freaks. The instrumental and vocal impetuosity, barely contained, releases its passions in a caricature of commercial pop music. The record presents itself as a drift of relics that survived some devastating force. Beefheart's wrath is unleashed without mercy on twelve unarmed songs, transforming them into twelve challenges to the sense of common decency.
The occult personality of the leader communicates a Dadaist touch and a hallucinogenic joy that from time to time reminds one of a bluesy Zappa, or alternately, a blues-rock version of the Holy Modal Rounders. Perhaps the most hilarious piece is the supersonic blues Sure Nuff' n Yes I Do, another shouted song where the riff of the traditional Rollin' And Tumblin' sustains a breath-taking cadence. Another apparently comical piece, Electricity, is in fact one of the most reckless harmonic experiments in the career of Van Vliet. As Electricity spins and spits its perverse nursery rhyme, two teetering, grinding blues guitars (Cooder and Alex St. Clair) tear it to pieces, while a languid and grotesque theremin mews in the background, and the rhythm section picks out a hobbling quadrille. French's rhythm, syncopated and muted, is a masterpiece within a masterpiece. The work is structured according to a supernatural order, but leaves the impression of chaotic witticism. That which the Magic Band crushes is not the harmony, but the classic concept of song.
The comic element is indeed the epicenter of the obsessive rhythm and blues Dropout Boogie, where the threatening energy of a sinister syncopated riff couples together a demonic growl and a vaudeville xylophone, and Zig Zag Wanderer, where the blues shouter's heritage is more obvious, backed by a soul chorus. More faithful to tradition are the doo-wop vocalizations in I'm Glad, and the melodramatic sentimentality of Autumn Child. Free paraphrases of rhythm and blues, as well as massive doses of Delta blues are evident in Plastic Factory, and in the biting syncopations of Grown So Ugly.
Some styles and attitudes are more abusively mocked than others. A relentless drive powers Beefheart's vocal histrionics, as he changes personality from one cut to the next, as he shifts from caricature to caricature. The trasformation ends in the lycanthropic tap dance Yellow Brick Road, with xylophone and Broadway-style chorus, and in Abba Zaba, a tropical sabbath, with African tribal dance rhythms, a jazz solo for bass, and Hawaiian slide guitar.
Although in this period the group produced great "freak-music", almost no one noticed. Well received only by the few radicals in his circle, Beefheart felt like a solitary cactus in a desert full of quick sand. He had the folk-rock of the Byrds - followed by San Francisco flower-power - on his tail, while the Mersey Beat was spreading from coast to coast. His tour failed miserably and the record executives bolted.

A live session, recorded in Los Angeles in November 1967 (not in August 1965 as the jacket claims), was released - maimed - years later, on the album Mirror Man (Buddha, 1971), and surfaced in its original version after thirty years on Mirror Man Sessions (Buddha, 1999).
The long jams on the album give a hint of how the Magic Band played live. The music of these jams is a blues regressed to a barbaric stage: on one hand the band plays in a childish way, indulging in false notes and playing out of time; on the other hand the singer lashes out, drools, swears and spews with a hoarse, choked and rusty voice. In reality the band brilliantly revolutionized the western concept of harmony, and the singer paraded a register able to cover seven and a half octaves, anything from Otis Redding to Howling Wolf. The blues simply became a pretext to attack the dogmas of commercial music: whereas commercial music was a polished, baroque castle of harmonies and melodies, the Magic Band proposed the wildest, most primitive music, executed in the most naive manner. Their primordial instincts, captured live, caught the rules marketing off guard. The Beatles' simple-minded choruses were buried under granite mountains of unstable arrangements, under jungles of free noise, under ferocious hurricanes of rhythm.
Mirror Man contains four long compositions. The 19-minute Tarotplane works as an artistic manifesto of Beefheart's creative blues. The great bedlam of guitars and percussion, and the "shenai" wind instrument that Van Vliet blows atonally, shapes an aesthetic of ugliness that could serve as a prelude to a revolutionary non-music, or anti-music, if Beefheart, distant light years from any form of historical or artistic musical consciousness, were not so opposed to intellectual labels. The title paraphrases Robert Johnson's Terraplane Blues, but instead cites Blind Willie Johnson's You're Gonna Need Somebody On Your Bond and Willie Dixon's Wang Dang Doodle. Kandy Korn, devastated by an abominable chorus, contains the humorous germs common to the whole "freak" school of Los Angeles. In practice it is the confession of an art conceived exclusively as game. The same can be said for 25th Century Quaker, a satirical fantasy built on the structure of the extended song, with a coda of pyrotechnic free-blues.
The lyrics of these songs, in the brief parts that are sung, are surrealistic and intentionally idiotic, a call to infantilism and acid trips in service of a musical theater of the absurd. This music is the most faithful expression of the Freak culture, of its marginalization more than its rebellion, of its inexhaustible creativity, of its academic disgust, of its infantile ferocity, of its desecrating vision of the world.
The ending of Mirror Man consists of fifteen minutes of anarchical improvisation, a free-jazz jam for four wrecked blues men, in which the instrument that astonishes the most, in its brilliant genius, is Beefheart's voice. The poison, the spasms, the pain of that voice showcases the most impossible sonic range, a black, visceral vocalization like that of a demented epileptic on the verge of a crisis. This is the soundtrack of a horror movie: screaming vampires, roaring King Kongs, agonizing lepers, delirious shamans, possessed zombies; a parade of hissing, cawing , prattling, mewing, oinking, braying monsters, all coming through the chameleon-like voice of Beefheart, a voice raised in the desert, made of rattle snakes, vultures, cactus, jackals, spiny bushes, barren hills and torrid sun.
Creative blues, naive blues, free blues, are the tags that are associated with this sound, tags that always refer to the blues as the bearing wall of a musical structure: the blues as a secular method of harmonic violence toward western civilization, the blues as a movement of collective liberalization, as a ritual of exaltation, as recapitulation of the most acute suffering (slavery), the blues as endless orgy. The Freaks recognized the wanderers of the Delta, who exorcised their siblings' slavery with their music, as their natural ancestors, and like them sang about the slavery of their people (young people enslaved by the media) and wandered along the edge of society, adding a touch of Bohemia to complete the appropriation.
As for the collaborators, John French behaves like a child who has just discovered a set of drums and is delighted to bang on them in any way possible, without a moment of pause, but also with virtually endless eclecticism and fine jazz intuition, while Alex St. Clair follows at his own pace, imperturbable, skipping along with his warped slide guitar, seldom aware that he belongs in the band, and engaging every so often in infernal duels with the sooty, choked harmonica of the leader. The contribution of both is decisive to the resolution of the horrendous chaos of Mirror Man.

Strictly Personal (Blue Thumb, 1968), recorded six months after Mirror Man with Jeff Cotton ("Antennae Jimmy Semens") replacing Ry Cooder, is ruined by the sound effects added by the producer during the mix, that render unlistenable a great part of the work. Van Vliet ultimately disavowed the album.
Beefheat's rejection notwithstanding, the album ventures beyond every previous experiment: vocal gargles, orchestral swoons, and cannibalistic rhythms are used to distort the blues, iliciting the atmosphere of an infernal happening. The musicians compose a hallucinating mosaic of sounds at the edge of premeditated cacophony, even if in fact every cut follows a well defined line without ever losing control. Often a veil of alterations and distortions, a white noise spread thick, prevents the fruition of the musical gags of Beefheart & Co., although it leaves the listener able to sense its capacity. It is the ultimate act of recording industry sabotage, and the Freaks are the victims. The album contains eight medium-length cuts. Rugged and desperate, it presents itself , without interruptions, as one entity. Despite the production's effort to hide the smuttiness of the sound, the album reveals an impressive number of avant garde solutions. The free experimentation of jazz, in particular, is the true inspiration behind the work. The delirious vocals in Ah Feel Like Ahcid, built on a simple, sleepy instrumental base with echoes of Son House's Death Letter, and Us Trust, with its tribal and demonic grand finale, where the climax is reached with a scream halfway between the call of a muezzin, the howl of a witch and the high note of an opera tenor, and the creative adornments of Gimme Dat Harp Boy, with obscene folk wit, rotten harmonica and obsessive rhythm on the riff of Willie Dixon's Spoonful, confer to Beefheart the stature of singer without equal, in the history of both blues and jazz.
The musical chaos of Safe As Milk, with a dissonant guitar solo finale sustained by galloping drums, and On Tomorrow, the "acid" improvisation on the reprise of Mirror Man and Kandy Korn consecrates the record as a gigantic organic compost heap that drags itself along sputtering from the harmonica and vomiting from the guitar.
The personal homage to Merseybeat, Beatle Bone ' n' Smokin' Stones, with a parody of Strawberry Fields Forever that annoyed John Lennon, is - beside the personal venting of a misunderstood artist - one of the most powerful satires on the presumed deities of the Mount Olympus of rock music: the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. The naive blues in Safe As Milk leaps forward to be transformed in Free Acid Blues, in which psychedelia and improvisation complement each other and justify one another. The route is set toward absolute chaos.

Friend and rival Frank Zappa believed in Captain Beefheart and, using his superior business skills, served as patron on his next release, Trout Mask Replica. Beefheart lived with the Magic Band in a dilapidated house and survived with the help his parents. The group, strengthened by the young guitarist Bill Harkleroad (aka "Zoot Horn Rollo"), by bassist Mark Boston (alias "Rockette Morton") and by Victor Hayden ("The Mascara Snake") at the bass clarinet, lived in isolation. Van Vliet composed the pieces that French, a fundamental collaborator at the time, transcribed to music for rock band. Each musician had complete freedom of interpretation. Van Vliet was also taken by the clarinet, which he used as a harmonica with an extended range. The gestation of the album was long and laborious, but was resolved by an eight-hour session from which Zappa and Van Vliet extracted a double album entitled Trout Mask Replica (Straight, 1969).
That record has an aura of "art-rock" that the previous albums don't have. The savage spontaneity of the warped blues in Mirror Man is transformed here into an artistically conscious program, albeit just as spastic. The humor of Safe As Milk is abandoned in favor of an eccentric but serious humor reminiscent of Erik Satie. The infernal fumes of Strictly Personal evolve into complex and angular harmonies. What comes out is one of the most creative, courageous albums of all time, decades ahead on the rest of rock music.
In many ways this record is the equivalent of the Fantasia in Schumann's career. Adorno wrote that the Fantasia only seems to be the product of a madman, while in reality it is the expression of that madman one second before folly takes over.
The most notable difference from the earlier albums is the duration of the cuts, for the most part very short. Another superficial difference is in the instrumentation, augmented by horns.
The work is so innovative and complex as to be nearly indecipherable. The rhythm section sounds so polyrhythmic that all rhythm is lost. The singing , vaguely interested in music, travels within alien universes. The guitar acts as atonal contracanto. The counterpoint of the ensemble is something halfway between the orchestral chaos of Charles Ives and the audacity of John Cage. The chaotic but rational improvisation is reminiscent of the frenetic geometry of Ornette Coleman, who in turn was influenced by Van Vliet. The heterogeneous meter that Van Vliet produces are to melody what the free poetry of the 1900's are to rhyme. But free-jazz and avant garde music are only alibis, pretexts to freely vent the leader's anarchical compulsions. The album is by all accounts an anthology of chaos in all its musical forms. For as deeply varied as they are from one another, these twenty-eight cuts are many versions of the same scene of devastation. Trout Mask Replica is above all a collage of abstract paintings, each different from the other in color, intensity and contrast, yet they're all homogeneous in their "abstraction".
Most of the songs are miniatures of dense, dark and crackling sounds that present themselves as a white man's rhythm and blues, but are in effect delirious episodes of psychosis. They preserve a shadow of bloodcurdling melody in the unbalanced bacchanal of the instruments, but is like the gasping of the moribund trying to articulate a phrase but only succeeding in putting together a blabbering mess: Ant Man Bee, Frownland, My Human Gets Me Blues, Sweet Sweet Bulbs. Here Beefheart's Dadaism reaches its apex. The lyrics are pure nonsense, abstract sketches that serve only to set the listener on the wrong track.
Very little remains of the grotesque blues of Safe As Milk, except perhaps the rhythmic self-confidence of Sugar' n' Spikes. Zappa's influence is noticeable in the humorous spoken comments between tracks and in the "music for telephone call" in the The Blimp.
Despite the quantity of surrealistic asides, most of the humor is quite tragic: Beefheart is no longer a clowning freak, but an anguished wild animal. Towering above legitimate blues cuts are blues without accompaniment: the spectral delirium of The Dust Blows and the solemn solo of Well. Dali's Car pushes this format to the edge of chamber music, blues, and gospel.
Delta blues inspires three of the great masterpieces of the album: the convulsed riot between rabid dogs in Pena, one of Van Vliet's vocal masterpieces (the second howling voice), the grotesque Dachau Blues, dedicated in Van Vliet's style to the Nazi concentration camps, with a revolting clarinet counterpoint that would make Eric Dolphy's skin crawl, and the slow China Pig, rhythmic breathing accompanied by a single guitar, one of the greatest blues numbers of all time. In the songs most obviously influenced by free-jazz, that is to say those that favor instrumental improvisation, Dolphy's characteristic realm of tender desperation is recognizable, taken to a depressing level of amateurism and sloppiness, in the rambling argument between clarinets in Hair Pie, the swirling dadaism of Neon Meate Dream Of Two Octafish, colored by jazz-style drumming, distorted clarinets and Indian hallucinations, and that boiling magma entitled When Big Joan Sets Up. The most demented and deafening jam, however, is found in Veterans Day Poppy.
Often Beefheart's singing, in its bizarre cosmography, has the function of declarative verse, while guitar improvisations and cocksure rhythms act as primitive background, as is the case in Pachuco Cadaver, a piece that comes in thick and fast and spirited, and in the voodoo exorcism Hobo Chang Ba, performed with bells and moronic singing. Under the column "horror" style ought to be listed two more barbaric assaults on rhythm, two more tributes to caustic irrationality: Ella Guru, with its loud background voices, incoherent syncopations, guttural anthems, tribal beat, steel slide short circuits and hesitant bass riff, and the lycanthropic attack Moonlight On Vermont, a dark and obsessive midnight incubus within a storm of devastating syncopations and voodoo drums This is Van Vliet personal version of hard-rock, his zombie blues, devoted to human sacrifice and occult rituals.
Trout Mask Replica is a monumental experiment in irregularity and an impressive catalog of vocal acrobatics. Raucousness, gargling, heavy breathing, whispering, falsetto, etc. are needed in order to dismantle the art of singing and transform it in a degraded emission of beastly verses. The dominant instrument is the clarinet that pops up everywhere in a "hit and run" guerrilla mode.
The overall meaning of the pandemonium in Trout Mask Replica is not only playfulness, or the negation of a meaning. The allegorical messages of Van Vliet's masterpiece are multiple, hidden by layers of abstractions that allow a cosmic-metaphysical interpretation, despite the author's pretense of illiteracy. These interpretations redirect the listener toward a form of apology for madness, to the primordial stages, and to chaos, counterposed against the monolithic order of technocratic society.
Beefheart uses the Delta blues as a pretext, but dismembers its structure, rhythm, harmony, tonality and melody, and then reassembles the pieces randomly, injecting it with free-jazz and casual improvisation. Beefheart is the first musician to perform an avant garde operation of such capacity without the least intellectual pomposity.
The counterpoint of Beefheart's band aims for maximum entropy. Instruments neither collaborate nor collide: they maximize the amount of information yielded by their simultaneous sounds.

Van Vliet matched that masterpiece with another album of exceptional artistic stature, Lick My Decals Off (Straight, 1970), although this time he was the sole composer. In a way this is his most intellectual work, because the album takes the traditional topics of blues, eroticism, freedom, trains and nostalgia, and sets them in a modern context of city alienation. Percussionist Artie Tripp (aka Ed Marimba), is added as a formidable complement to French, while Cotton is gone to play in Merrell Fankhauser's MU.
The sound is still fragmented in a myriad of surrealistic miniatures, employing celebrations of Dolphyesque clarinets (Japan In A Dish-plan), of convulsed false notes (Ballerin Plain), of street rallies (The Smithsonian Institute Blues), of absurd guitar solos (One Rose That I Mean). The best of his chamber jazz-blues is found in I Love You Big Dummy, with splendid confrontations between the pirouettes of the clarinet and the gargles of the voice, and in Flash Gordon's Ape, a revolting chaos of anti-rhythms, breath dissonances and free declamations. Beefheart reaches surrealistic heights in The Buggy Boogie Woogie, a meditation in muted tones. Ethnic cues peek through in Peon, a Mexican serenade, and from Woe-is-uh-me-bop and Lick My Decals Off, both with Caribbean flavors. A peak of chaos is the high-energy high-entropy Doctor Dark.
Innovative use of clarinet and voice are central to this record. Compared with Trout Mask Replica, there is perhaps less inventiveness, less spontaneity and less chutzpah. The only element to lose out though is the voice; it seems more contained, more hesitant. Percussion and guitar have never had so much space and have never been better showcased. An excess of frenzy and fragmentation harms the overall realization of the project, showing how much Zappa's influence counted on the previous album.
Here the emphasis is more on the lyrics and on the instruments. If, as far as the instrumental part is concerned, Beefheart continues his experimentats in crypto-blues-jazz arrangements, then with his text he tries to present his naive and surrealistic universe as a consequence of, and an alternative to the depersonalized city. His ego emerges like a cherub from the clouds, to deliver us from the alienation of consumerism.

Quoting John "Drumbo" French: "the complexity of the music had as much to do with the fact that Van Vliet didn’t know what he was doing as with anything else".

Incidentally, Beefheart made a video of the title-track, one of the earliest music videos ever.

In 1971, as result of a violent fight, the two geniuses of Los Angeles, Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa, become estranged for good, a great loss for Beefheart's free blues.
Perhaps tired of the audience's indifference, perhaps influenced by a band that was tired of going to bed hungry, or perhaps simply debilitated by many years wild creativity, Captain Beefheart took his first step in the wrong direction with Spotlight Kid (Reprise, 1972). The industry tried to turn him into a star: his voice lost its badness and blackness, and the Magic Band satirical free-blues was transformed into soft and aseptic rhythm and blues. The brilliant cues of infantile regression, the free guitar-centric improvisation in Alice In Blunderland or the shuffled blues There Ain't No Santa Claus, suffer from an eccentric lethargy, as do the progressions in I'm Gonna Boogarize You, or of the railroad boogie Click Clack, or of the slow-motion shuffle Spotlight Kid. The album would have been a masterpiece for a blues man who wanted to pay homage to the roots of the genre, but not for Captain Beefheart. Compared to the rest of his work, Spotlight Kid makes one feel embarrassed for its author. Van Vliet is like the provincial ingenue who has been forcibly suited in tails and catapulted on stage at the opera, but stunned by the limelight all he can manage are few bars of the national anthem.

The Spotlight Kid Outtakes (2009) shows that in those sessions Van Vliet nonetheless wrote many of the pieces that he would use on the following albums.

Clear Spot fares even worse, adding gospel choruses and soul horns, trying to fuse hard-rock with Memphis soul. The Magic Band, in the mean time, took on Ed Marimba (Artie Tripp, percussions), Roy Estrada (Orejon, drums) and Elliot Ingber (Winged Eel Fingerling, guitar), all from Zappa's group, but lost John French.

At the end of the 1973 Beefheart was "captured" and taken to Great Britain, where the beast arose curiosity. The records of the British period, Unconditionally Guaranteed (Mercury, 1974) and Moonbeams And Bluejeans (1974), befit an elderly wild beast behind bars, resting in captivity.

The attempt to make him a circus attraction failed, and Beefheart was sent back home, where he remained inactive for three long years in order to recover from the confusion and the disappointment. During this period the only activity was the reconciliation, in 1975, with Zappa, which yielded Bongo Fury.

Meanwhile Bill Harkleroad and Artie Tripp formed the Mother Mallard and released two albums, later re-released on CD, Mallard/ In A Different Climate (Caroline, 1994).

Due to the usual incomprehension by the music industry, Bat Chain Puller (1976) only saw the light in 2012, but part of the material appeared two years later on Shiny Beast (Warner, 1978). Of the dismantled Magic Band only John French remained; this is another sign of the eternal solitude that grips Van Vliet. At the keyboards was John Thomas, at the trombone Bruce Fowler, at the marimba Artie Tripp, at the guitars Moris Tepper and Denny Walley.
Shiny Beast, boasting the most spectacular sound of his career, raises the hermit hero's stock quite a bit, because even when the roar dies down to lounge entertainment (Candle Mambo), it maintains its revolutionary decorum, and when Beefheart freely vents his frightful vocal ugliness (Bat Chain Puller and Floppy Boat Stomp), he recovers much of the old naive blues. We're talking about a "nonsense blues" defused with care, a blues of the absurd not yet freed of all compromise, a blues that lives a day at a time, without giving precise instructions.

The original material of Bat Chain Puller appeared only much later on Dust Sucker (Milksafe, 2002).

Doc At Radar Station (Virgin, 1980), with Eric Drew Feldman on keyboards, does not achieve those levels but contains first quality material recycled in part from "the lost album" sessions. The problem is that Van Vliet, during one of his capricious and stubborn impulses, wanted to make a record that played like the old records of the blues men, namely with the flattest production possible. That move most likely halved the fascination of an incursion into a world at the edge of blues, funk, jazz and avantgarde: the too brief Flavor Bud Living for single guitar, the free-form recitation of Sue Egypt with hard-rock riffs in the background, the "kammerspiel" Making Love To A Vampire With A Monkey On My Knee in his best lychanthropic tradition, and most of all Brickbats, supported by a dissonant free-jazz jam.
Doc marks the return to anarchy, to extravagant blues, to eccentric riffs, to howling, to satirical melodrama, to horrendous parodies, to criminal rhythms and arbitrary strumming. The classic caroling style, sung in the highest range, of Hot Head, the syncopated sarcasm, sung in the lowest range, of Ashtray Heart, the ribald tone, sung in the most roaring range, of Run Paint Run Run, the monolithic and martial ferocity, sung in the most lychanthropic range, of Sheriff Of Hong Kong, the primordial chaos, sung in the loudest range, of Dirty Blue Gene, are the most brilliant pronouncements. The decisive bite of Safe As Milk and the abstract chaos of Trout Mask Replica are still missing, but now the Captain seems to be planning a new form of song, perhaps in search of a future as entertainer and chansonnier of the absurd. Hot Head and Sheriff above all showcase his art of vocal mutation and primitive arrangement.

Ice Cream For Crow (Virgin, 1982), with Gary Lucas on guitar, reprises the dissonant Delta blues and its litany of abstract nonsense, but this time geared toward a melancholy introversion. The signature features of his earlier work, the havoc caused by the sax, the drumming out of time, the agonizing harmonica, and the amphetamine roar seem to have lost the will to exist.
Beefheart's three basic elements are by now well codified: the ballad out of tune, with guitar interlaced with jolting rhythm, vocal miasma and a rogue harmonica, as in Ice Cream For Crow and Past Sure Is Tense, the two jewels of the album; vulgar gags, as in the Caribbean-tinged Witch Doctor Life and in the horror-blues The Host The Ghost; the minimalist and confused instrumental, as in Semi-multicoloured Caucasian and Evening Bell for single guitar; and the play on free-form background, as in the cool-jazz The Thousand And Tenth Days Of The Human Totem Pole, with one of the ugliest sax soprano solo in the history of music. Lean and emaciated, the sound falls into the abysses of degradation with Skeleton Makes Good, a visionary soliloquy in the most archaic voice in the memory of man, and Cardboard Cutout Sundown, another chamber music snippet. Light Reflected Off The Oceans Of The Moon, left off the album, was released as a single.

Beefheart became less and less motivated to continue his musical career, despite Gary Lucas's attempts to get him to record another album. The last recording sessions, in 1984, was abandoned. Captain Beefheart disappeared forever, like a wild animal chased back into the jungle by civilization.
Van Vliet abandoned rock music once and for all, visibly resented by the hypocritical atmosphere that manages it and by the consumerist mechanisms that regulate it, and went back to painting. By 1985 Van Vliet's work was showing in the most prestigious galleries of Soho. He also published a book of poetry and drawings. He moved back to his native California desert, where he still lives on the proceeds of his paintings.

Ironically, just when Van Vliet gave up, the world begin to notice his music. Captain Beefheart's influence on alternative rock and the new wave of the 80s was matched only by the Velvet Underground.

At last, the critics noticed that blues music had little to do with Van Vliet's music. Don Van Vliet is the rock equivalent of Vincent Van Gogh: to claim that Captain Beefheart is a blues musician would be like claiming that Van Gogh is an impressionist, a taxonomic fact that says nothing about Van Gogh's art, at most indicating in which section of the museum Van Gogh's paintings are hung.

Grow Fins (Revenant) is a five-disc box-set of unreleased material. The Dust Blows Forward (Rhino) is an anthology. Magnetic Hands (Viper, 2002) is a live album.

Prime Quality Beef (OZit Morpheus, 2005) contains live tracks and rarities from the 1970s.

John French, after two albums with Fred Frith, Richard Thompson and Henry Kaiser, released a solo record, O Solo Drumbo (Avant, 1998)

Bill Harkleroad/ Zoot Horn Rollo released the solo album We Saw a Bozo Under the Sea (2001) and the EP The Mask Tracks (2014).

The Magic Band (John "Drumbo" French, Mark "Rockette Morton" Boston, Gary "Mantis" Lucas, and Denny "Feelers Reebo" Walley) reunited (without Beefheart) for Back To The Front (All Tomorrow Parties, 2003), a set of Beefheart's classics.

Don Van Vliet died in december 2010 at 69 of multiple sclerosis.

Victor Hayden died in december 2018.