Safe As Milk

There’s this Frank Zappa album called Hot Rats. On it there’s a song called Willie the Pimp . Don Van Vliet (as Captain Beefheart) sings that song. It was recorded in 1969. A year later Captain Beefheart (and His Magic Band) released the now legendary masterpiece, Trout Mask Replica, produced by Zappa for his Straight label. Langdon Winner, writing in Rolling Stone at the time, hailed Trout Mask Replica as "the most important and most astonishing work of art ever to appear as a phonograph record". This story is about lore, myth, allegory, or, in simple terms, legend: the legend of Don Van Vliet. Legend has it that Van Vliet wrote the album’s twenty-eight songs in eight and a half hours on a piano, then spent the next year teaching them to his Magic Band.

Winner wrote, somewhat prophetically, that, "although it is a masterpiece, it will probably be many years before American audiences catch up to the things that happen on this totally amazing record". Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, is another to hail Trout Mask Replica as the "greatest" album he’s ever heard. "I played Trout Mask for my blues-loving friends", he says, "and we’d sit around saying, Wow, if this is how great pop music is in 1969, just think what it will be like in 1984! Of course we didn’t realise this was the best album of 1984".
Yet the album was a commercial disaster at the time of its release.

Rock journalist, Lillian Roxon, put it most succinctly, stating that Trout Mask Replica "was one of the most critically acclaimed financial disasters in the history of recording". Undeterred, Van Vliet, as Beefheart, recorded a further ten albums, including the 1975 Bongo Fury with Frank Zappa, before finally retiring as a musician in 1982. He told the New Musical Express, "I’m definitely finished with the rock star scene - although I never thought of myself as a rock star for a minute. Many people tried to turn me into one but I fooled ‘em".

These days he’s fooling them again. His new art form is paint on canvas, he’s successful, and, to prove it, a mini-retrospective exhibition of forty of his works, titled Stand Up To Be Discontinued , recently toured a number of museums in Europe, including the Bielefelder Kunstverein in Germany, and the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery in England. Curated by Andreas Beaugrand, Director of the Bielefelder Kunstverein, the exhibition included many paintings from private collections which were on public display for the first time.

According to David Breuer of the Brighton Museum, Van Vliet "is now one of the most collected of living artists, having carved a growing reputation as one of the finest contemporary expressionist artists". The Brighton exhibition also featured photographs of Van Vliet by the film-maker, Anton Corbijn, now a close friend of Van Vliet’s. Corbijn is one of a number of collectors who own several Van Vliets, and remains in regular contact with his friend. He has also just completed a short film, Some Yo Yo Stuff: Don Van Vliet - an observation of his observations.

"Don Van Vliet is an elusive artist, both geographically and intellectually", says Corbijn. "The short film piece I have done on Don doesn’t tell you where he lives or give away too much about the "whys", but it does draw you closer to him and his world, without ever invading or losing a certain mystery or respect. I was really nervous when I asked him", Corbijn admits, "because I didn’t want to abuse the friendship, but he said he’d been waiting for me to ask! There’s so much power in him, and it doesn’t get around, despite the fact that he’s a successful painter now, and with a great gallery. He’s living a lot more comfortably off his paintings than he did off his music. But his music is still so influential with young bands, and people want to see what he’s up to."

Don Van Vliet launched his professional career as an artist just three years after calling it quits as a musician, with a one - person exhibition at the Michael Werner Gallery, Cologne, in 1985. He was forty-four. Werner had taken on Van Vliet following high recommendations from fellow artists , Julian Schnabel and A.R. Penck. Penck found Van Vliet’s work, "images of the demonic animality", oscillating "between classical seriousness and a detached ironic view of the ego’s dependence upon instincts" to be "very American, very Western and very modern". He even wrote a poem about the "captain", Fur Don Van Vliet :

There are so many demons
The captain paints a painting
The painting is very good
He is a good painter
The demons are getting clearer
They are dying
The captain smokes a cigar

Since 1985 the cigar-smoking captain has mounted some fifteen one-person exhibitions in Europe and the USA, including London’s prestigious Waddington Galleries and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Yet Captain Beefheart fans will have been aware of the art of Don Van Vliet since around 1970, when it first appeared on the back cover of Lick My Decals Off, Baby, the follow-up album to Trout Mask Replica. The following year, the back cover of The Spotlight Kid featured Van Vliet’s neo-expressionistic caricatures of members of his Magic Band. And in 1972, Rolling Stone reproduced a line-drawing of Van Vliet’s in its "Letters to the Editor" column.

It is interesting to note that even around this time Van Vliet considered himself first a painter, then a writer, and lastly a musician. "Most people don’t know this, but I was painting throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s - I never showed my work then because I didn’t feel like it", he says. However, David Breuer recalls a Van Vliet exhibition in Liverpool in 1972, "15 very large canvasses, and they all sold". In his own estimate, by that year, Van Vliet says he had in reserve 15,000 poems, 40 plays, 10 novels, 600 paintings, and dozens of albums of the length and quality of Trout Mask Replica.

Bill Brown, an Australian who found himself in the right place at the right time, worked briefly as Tour Manager for Captain Beefheart in 1975. He remembers Van Vliet as a "prolific writer". "In cafes, motel rooms and the like, he’d be writing on napkins, little pieces of paper, that sort of thing. He kept a portfolio of poems, drawings, little ideas for paintings". Brown describes Van Vliet as an "inspired person", "tangential", with "bright blue eyes" and an "intense gaze". His most vivid memory of Van Vliet is as a "gonzo poet", yet he expresses no surprise that Van Vliet is now a successful painter.

Dave DiMartino, former editor of Cream magazine also remembers first meeting Van Vliet around that time. The occasion was an interview for the magazine. "He asked if I’d mind him drawing", DiMartino recalls. "He just took his pad and drew things left and right. He asked me if there was anything I wanted him to draw. He drew me about 4 or 5 pictures with a No. 2 pencil, and wrote some poetry on each of them. I was thrilled beyond belief. These were works by Captain Beefheart. So I saved them. Now, on the basis of his art, I sit here and say, wow, I’m glad I have these. There is probably some value to be had in this, at least in terms of a rock music fan. Now I’m sitting here thinking, my goodness, 50 or 100 years from now, these drawings will have some meaning I know nothing about. To me they have more to do with a couple of guys sitting around a table, drinking some beer, talking about rock n’ roll".

By 1978, Van Vliet’s art had become an key element of Captain Beefheart albums, moving from back to front cover, with one writer even suggesting that "some pictures of the period are reproduced on the covers of the records almost as if to illustrate the content". The front cover of Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) , for example, featured Green Tom, one of Van Vliet’s most evocative figurative works, suggestive of the voodoo-like, Mardi Gras gaity to be experienced by listening to the vinyl inside. The album cover had become his own private art gallery. In 1978, when asked by an interviewer forZigZag Magazine (the title of which was taken from a Captain Beefheart song, ZigZag Wanderer) whether he was still painting, Van Vliet’s response was to simply hand the interviewer an invitation to an exhibition opening.

Don Van Vliet began life as an artist as a child prodigy, sculpting zoo animals out of wet soap, and actually made regular television appearances doing just that, while Portuguese sculptor, Augustonio Rodriguez, looked on. At age thirteen he won a scholarship to study art in Europe, but was stopped by his parents from taking it up. "My parents told me all artists were queers. They moved me to the desert, first to Mojave and then to Lancaster". It was here that he met Zappa.

In 1959 he enrolled as an art major at the Antelope Valley Junior College, but quit soon after in disgust. He went to work, first as a commercial artist, and then as a manager of a local shoe shop chain. "I built that chain into a growing, thriving concern", he recalls. "Then as a kind of art statement I quit right in the middle of the Christmas rush leaving the whole thing in chaos".

Legend has it that Van Vliet invented the name Captain Beefheart to honour his uncle Alan, an exhibitionist, who, every time he went to the toilet knowing his girlfriend was nearby, would leave the door open while urinating, caress his member and mutter, "What a beauty this is, it’s like a big, fine beef heart". In 1963 Van Vliet together with Frank Zappa wrote a film script and accompanying sound-track titled Captain Beefheart Meets the Grunt People. The film never eventuated, but, as Jessica Rutherford, Director of the Royal Pavilion, Brighton, points out, "the name and persona of Captain Beefheart was adopted by Don Van Vliet to launch an extraordinarily fertile and innovative assault on popular music preconceptions of the 1960s and ‘70s".
By 1965, Van Vliet as Beefheart had recorded the timeless Safe As Milk album.
According to Jessica Rutherford, Safe As Milk, along with Trout Mask Replica and Lick My Decals Off, Baby , "stand as landmarks of psychedelic extremism and, in retrospect, can be seen as musical counterpoints to the American abstract expressionist tradition of the previous generation." And she is not the only person to thrust the cross of Pollock et al., on to Van Vliet’s shoulders. Fred Hoffman, in whose Santa Monica gallery Van Vliet exhibited in 1990, wrote in his introduction to the exhibition catalogue:
"Reference to the Abstract Expressionist Era is neither casual nor
gratuitous. On the contrary, it is made deliberately, with the full
knowledge that it is a heavy burden for an emerging artist to bare the
cross of such highly revered figures as Pollock, DeKooning, Tobey.....
Nonetheless, Van Vliet’s paintings and drawings warrant the
association because of their shared artistic intentions and subsequent
approaches to picture making."

Van Vliet himself names only one Abstract Expressionist as an influence, that being Franz Kline. "I like the way Franz Kline handles space", says Van Vliet. "It’s pretty easy to breathe in the space he creates". This influence becomes obvious when comparing Van Vliet’s later works, such as Gorillacrowor Boneless Spirit to his earlier figurative works which owe much more allegiance to German expressionism. Yet, as with his music, Van Vliet the painter conforms to no style or school. "He hasn’t ever really made a compromise in the presentation of his art, and that’s what appeals to his fans, both as a musician and a fine artist", says David Breuer.
"Art history plays quite a big part in his art, the same way as with his music. Although it was entirely new, different and startling for its time, you could still hear a lot of the influences that towards making it, notably blues, R&B and free jazz. It’s what he did with those influences that made it new. The same applies to his art. There is a definite historic perspective, which is the Abstract Expressionism of the ‘40s and ‘50s. Krasner, Pollock, and particularly Franz Kline are big subliminal influences on the way Van Vliet presents his art. In a sense his art could be said to be rather old -fashioned in the sense that it is definitely sticking oil on canvas."

Karsten Ohrt, Director of the Kunsthallen Brandts Klaedefabrik, which hosted the Van Vliet exhibition in Odense, Denmark, also acknowledges the influence of Kline, as well as Nolde and DeKooning, but is quick to point out that "there is a whole cult thing about Van Vliet and Beefheart. As an art historian, when I look at these paintings, I can feel that it is a musician that has done these paintings. They are filled with movement, with rhythm. The way he works with his brush on the canvas is filled with rhythm. It’s obvious that this is a gifted musician you are looking at."

Ohrt finds Van Vliet’s way of working with canvas "very unorthodox".
"He uses open canvasses. He has great spaces of white paint. There is the great contrast between the filled and the empty. He paints his canvasses white and then puts his figures into that white, so as the white stands in sharp contrast to the colours."

Van Vliet himself says that "I don’t paint according to any hard-and-fast rules. I just explode. What I try to do is turn myself inside out on canvas, to freeze the moment so that the person seeing it can observe what I froze. Vegetation inspires me, but I like the desert too". He describes his paintings as "making the sounds of shadows breathing on themselves. I don’t listen to music when I’m painting. It’s completely quiet, and there’s only the music that’s playing in my head. There’s always music in my head, I can’t turn it off. Maybe I wouldn’t want to turn it off."

Yet it was a very resentful and disillusioned Van Vliet who, as Captain Beefheart, quit the music business in disgust in 1982. At that point it seemed that the music had been turned off. "For my whole life they’ve repeated to me that I was a genius. They said the same about my sculptures, slapping me on the back. But in the meantime they’ve also taught the public that my music is too difficult to listen to". For Karsten Ohrt, the blue-black female figure inCrepe and Black Lamps (1985) represents Don Van Vliet’s view of the world of rock. "Her face is heavily lined and distorted like a mask concealing dark powers. Her entire being conveys a mixture of uncontrolled hatred and paralysed dread."

Perhaps heeding his own advice that "it’s not worth melting into the bullshit to find out what the bull ate", Van Vliet now lives a reclusive life in the small Northern Californian town of Trinidad, where he is happy to deal with his "comet" career as a painter. Described by one writer as a "West Coast hermit", he does not welcome intrusion. "The art world is providing a better life for me than music did", says Van Vliet. "It helps not having to deal with fans, and I’m much better off now. I’m just up here painting every day and getting beaten up by my cats. Painting is a colour straitjacket, and I look forward to putting it on in the morning. I prefer painting to music because I can spend a whole day on a canvas and then cancel it. Painting over has a nice feeling. It’s all just from the paintbrush to the canvas. And the paint doesn’t say anything. It just allows me to make mistakes."

But the question remains, if he hadn’t been Captain Beefheart, would he be this successful as a painter. Van Vliet himself answered this question in 1969, long before it was even being posed. Disillusioned with the response to Trout Mask Replica, he told one writer that he was thinking of giving up rock n’ roll to go into another field. "He told me that he was at least as good an abstract painter as De Kooning", recalls rock journalist, Miles.

Fred Hoffman acknowledges that his 1990 exhibition of Van Vliet’s work was well attended, probably split 50-50 between fans of Van Vliet’s art and his music. "I’m also interested in him as a musician, but I wasn’t really coming from the perspective of the phenomenon of this crossover. That wasn’t my intention in doing the show, although I knew it would bring out an audience. I had a genuine interest in his art."

Michael Werner admits that Van Vliet’s former persona creates quite a problem. "Many people know his name as a musician. It’s very hard to make a career as a painter, and that’s a big obstacle". Yet Werner seems to have little trouble in selling Van Vliet’s work for anywhere up to $US 35,000. And those who do buy, interestingly buy more than one. Anton Corbijn owns a number of pictures, as does Julian Schnabel. Matt Groening owns quite a few pictures, as do the Saatchis. "Very few of the music lovers buy his paintings because most of them don’t have the money", says Werner, who thinks most of the people buying his paintings look upon Van Vliet as a "young artist". "I think this is the right way of putting it", Werner adds, " a young artist needs a ten-year time frame to start a career."

David Breuer agrees with Werner but believes that, without the Beefheart pedigree, it would be more difficult to promote Van Vliet the artist. "Don Van Vliet as a practising artist has only been working for just over a decade, and, in that sense, he’s a new young artist. That would make it harder to get an audience for difficult contemporary abstract expressionist art by a young artist. His art is difficult in the same way that his music could be said to be difficult. It’s entirely the presentation of a personal and interior artistic vision. It’s essentially the product of one man’s imagination."

David Heale is an ardent Beefheart fan, who, on first viewing Van Vliet’s exhibition at London’s Waddington Galleries in 1986, expressed "disappointment" because "everything seemed so slight". However a subsequent viewing changed his mind. "That which at first looked naive gave way to the wild and sometimes menacing nature of the subject matter", he wrote. "Even sparse scenes were given a hard edge by the uncompromising way in which they were actually painted. paint freely applied, frenzied brush marks complimented by soft washes of colour. the effect could be as sensuous as it could be brutal."
Langdon Winner wrote that "in the world of Captain Beefheart the extraordinary is the rule. Stories about his life and art have taken on the character of legend". Nothing’s changed, except the name. He was born Don Vliet and added the "Van", some say, in homage to his other great influence, Vincent Van Gogh. "I’ve seen Van Gogh’s that were no bigger than baby-size, and they were just outrageous", says Van Vliet. David Breuer enjoys this "immediate, emotional and intuitive response."

Yet the legend is in danger. There are persistent rumours that the Captain is not well. Those who have heard his home-recorded recitation of poetry on the CD included in the Stand Up To Be Discontinued exhibition catalogue have walked away shocked. His voice is weak, hesitant. "Everyone who listens to the CD will be heartbroken by the sound of his voice", admits David Breuer. "It’s certainly true that, even if he wanted to make music again, I don’t think he’d be in a position physically to do so."

Diedrich Diederichsen, in his catalogue essay, Captain Beefheart , muses over such a comeback. "The return of such great and unfulfilled figures of the 1960s such as Velvet Underground and Iggy Pop, shows that its possible - even in rock music conditions - to come back to a project decades after it was begun and complete it. A new Magic Band would be a joy to us all". Yet we know that the Captain has gone. Don Van Vliet is the project for completion, the subject of art, not rock, magazines, his art a joy for us all. As he once told a Danish journalist, "it makes me itch to think of myself as Captain Beefheart, I don’t even have a paddle."