THE CAPTAIN

from UNPUBLISHED usa mid september? 1969 'STRAIGHT RECORDS' PRESS INFORMATION
by unknown writer
is august? 1969 interview

notes:
* this undated and uncredited interview probably was meant to be press info from 'straight records' but never was published as such
* shortened and edited version published as captain beefheart in an early january 1970 BIO from usa REPRISE RECORDS
* almost in full published as the captain in a summer 1970 3P BIOGRAFIE from holland BOVEMA
* large part published as captain beefheart in (updated) 31 march 1972 BIO from holland NEGRAM gramofoonplatenmij

part 1 - THIS is PART 2

*

my parents didn't want me to go. they told me all artists were queer. to discourage me, they moved with me to lancaster, california, in the desert. that's where i met frank zappa, in high school there.

about then i got interested in music. mostly the blues singers. they sounded very human to me. i picked up a harmonica and learned how to play it. it was a very natural instrument: breathing ín, and óut.

then i turned on to the saxophone. i joined a group called 'the blackouts'; i about said it was a colored group, but then everybody is colored or you wouldn't be able to see them.... they ended up firing me because i was a bit too freakish for them. they were playing rhythm 'n' blues and i was starting to experiment a little.

van vliet and zappa were high school chums, both vitally interested in music. but zappa liked rock 'n' roll and rhythm 'n' blues, and beefheart liked traditional blues and the latest progressive jazz. the captain continued with his sculpting in high school and, against his parents' wish, enrolled at antelope valley college as an art major. it was no success.

they wanted me to go back and start from scratch, to do meaningless things. they wanted me to draw squares and cut out things, and i was beyond that. it was the same old thing about forms again. they're everywhere, in every field. i didn't think there was a forward or a back, but just where you were at. they wanted squares and i wanted to draw circles. so i left college.

after dropping out, don van vliet and zappa made up a new name for the would-be-sculptor: captain beefheart.

don't ask me why or how....

the two talked about starting a band called 'the soots', but never went through with it.

i couldn't play music, and i don't believe in time: four/four, etcetera. fránk believed in time. we were great friends, but we couldn't get it together. so i started my own group and he started 'the mothers of invention' (although in both cases 'joined' is more according to truth - teejo).

beefheart had the basic idea for the kind of music he wanted in his head then, but the musicians he was playing with would have no part of it. they stuck to blues-rock and were good enough to catch the ear of a record company scout who decided to sign them.

it was a disaster. jerry moss at a&m (alpert & moss records - t.t) told me the material i wanted to do, my music, was negative. i tried their way; we cut bo diddley's 'diddy wah diddy' and a few other songs, then i couldn't take it anymore and left. i went back to the desert.

i said if other people in the group wanted to do that kind of stuff, i would try it, but i couldn't take it. those other guys in the group - one is now a printer with the los angeles times, one has a paper route, one's an electronics technician, and one went back to college and is playing in a marching band.

the captain and his band did reunite to go over to kama sutra records and beefheart stepped right into the same net.

they thought my music was too advanced. so i compromised again. we did 'safe as milk' (the title comes from van vliet's dislike of milk, which he puts down with an encyclopedic statistical knowledge of milk's radio-active strontium 90 count. he never tires of telling visitors how dangerous the fluid is), and 'strictly personal'; both good blues albums but not what i wanted to do. i just didn't think anybody could improve on somebody like muddy waters or howlin' wolf (two blues legends - t.t.). why not do something new, something of your own? we had a parting of the ways.

on a tour of europe, the magic band rebelled at beefheart's constant preaching about the kind of music they should be doing and they walked out on him. don van vliet returned to the mojave desert and started a new pick-up band of non-musicians. they were artist (painting) friends from his sculpting days (hey, i never knew thát! - teejo) and they bowed to his 'new way of music'.

they aren't musicians in the normal sense of the word, they are ártists. they admired what i wanted to do. i had to start with that kind of people. i couldn't get real musicians to play my stuff.

  'straight records' press glossy from that time
(an edited 'reprise' version was added to the later bio's)

the new band consisted of a cousin of beefheart, the mascara snake (aka victor haydon - t.t.), on bass clarinet, zoot horn rollo (aka bill harkleroad) on glass finger guitar and flute, antennae jimmy semens on steel appendage guitar (whatever that is), rockette morton (aka mark boston) on bass and drumbo on, right, drums.

they are an uncommunicative group, which prefers their real names remain unknown (what about don not allowing them to speak to the press? - teejo). by this time the captain was playing harp, sax, flute, clarinet, guitar and a little drums.

the band continued to kick around lancaster, since no label would touch them. then about a year and a half ago, beefheart ran into old pal frank zappa.

frank and i hadn't seen each other for years. i met him again at a colonel sanders chicken place. i saw him eating fried chicken and said: 'how are you, frank?'. he was going strong with 'the mothers' and was about to start his 'straight records' business. we came into talking and frank decided he wanted me on his new label. i don't think there's another record company that would let me be as free. nobody else would have agreed to make 'trout mask replica'....

now beefheart is trying to mold his band into his new music, attempting to instill them with his freedom of thought and to keep them from becoming 'musicians'. he still writes and arranges all the band's music, but he's aiming at bringing himself and them to the conditions where they can go without any form at all.

we're working to the point where everybody can contribute whatever he wants. i try to use telepathy on them to tell them what i have in mind. we have to know each other. i'm trying to keep the group together, like all living in this house, next to each other but not dependent upon each other. right now i feel it's fairly pure. i want them to feel they can contribute without getting slapped back. that happens, you know. i let them run amok if they want. if it feels good, it'll be good.

we want to reach that point where there will be no forms. i don't know what totally formless music will sound like. i have often wondered. maybe like some sort of peaceful perfume.

don van vliet has little use for other rock musicians. he doesn't care what their music is like, but he does care what the message is.

other people's music is théir business. i think performers are responsible for their music and sometimes they defile that responsibility.

what about 'the beatles' (pioneering pop band from england - t.t.)? they tell kids to go out and do it on the road! and they glorify drugs! (the cap gets indignant) and what about - what's that group, yeah: mc5 ('revolting' band from the usa - t.t.) - telling the kids to 'kick the jams out, baby'. what the hell kind of thing is that to tell kids? some little girl hears that and runs out into the streets of detroit or chicago and gets her head beat in. that group has blood on its hands.

those musicians wield so much power with the kids. they can be great forces for good or for evil.

he is just mildly critical of other bands. he figures they haven't seen the light and cannot be truly creative. beefheart thinks hís music is different because neither he nor his bandmates use drugs:.

drugs are nasty and can cripple creative people, i think that's why my music is different. a lot of bands do [take drugs] and so their music all sounds the same. drugs cause a lot of untrust between people, and people in a band have to trust one another.

what kind of music does he like?

i like frank zappa, he is doing nice things. (zappa keeps out of beefheart's music, but zappa is the perfect catalyst to beefheart's freakiness.) but frank and i aren't in the same vein. he writes all his music. he can't become a child, because he's dealing with business, his record company, many things like that.

i also have a great feeling for thelonious monk, ornette coleman, albert aylers and coltrane (all jazz musicians - t.t.). also some blues, nó rock 'n' roll. everybody nowadays gets so sentimental over that good old funky rock 'n' roll, but not me. that's appeasement music. the controlling sound of the 'motown (a record company - t.t.) formula'. it's not right.

i think my music is the sound of the future. people are sick of feeling bad when they play. how can you play and work at the same time?.... i haven't worked in five years: i pláy. when i'm playing, i'm lost. we once played more than two hours overtime in england. somebody had to come up and shake me, we just didn't know. we had lost all track of time, all track of rules.

later in the evening, jim sherwood of 'the mothers of invention' dropped in. sherwood and beefheart and the magic band grabbed their instruments and began an impromptu gig. i left them like that, all the lights in the house out, amplifiers turned on high, beefheart with eyes closed blowing into his harmonica. the music drifted from the lonely house on the hill, amid the dense foliage; wafting crazily through the trees and over the raccoons and the ants from the other side of the looking glass.