burnout genius

Ever since I first picked out notes on a Casio keyboard when I was 12, I have had this vision of what I think music is about, based upon my own experiences listening to various genres, bands, performers and songs.

The uniting theme among nearly all of it was the hypnotic quality of music, the way a song can tranquilize your soul or ignite a passionate fire in your mind. Either way, I always felt that it was important to mezmerize people with your words, your rhythms, your sounds...

So it strikes me as odd that Don Van Vliet would do these interviews where he'd talk about making music that broke up the hypnotic patterns.

Don Van Vliet, for those who don't know, is also known as Captain Beefheart, my latest musical obsession.

The Captain is one of those performers who burned out and stopped performing, content to be a recluse, living in the desert in a trailer with his wife, his artwork (Vliet is also an established painter and poet in his own right) and all sorts of desert animals for neighbors.

What fascinates me about Vliet is his logic, the way his mind works. The word "genius" gets tossed around and applied to anybody and anything nowadays, but Vliet actually fits the mold-- he was an accomplished sculptor at the age of five.

But he had a beef in his heart against the world (hence his stage name) because his parents wouldn't allow him to be tutored and schooled in Europe, where he could've become a master sculptor, working in marble.

As sad as that is, I'm glad it happened to him, because otherwise the world would be robbed of his unique contributions to music, art, and literature.


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Vliet's words are carefully chosen, in every interview I've read or watched online, and pardon me for making the connection but it reminds me of Native American speech, or at least stereotypical notions of what English-speaking Native Americans sound like:


INTERVIEWER: Does it bother you that the majority of the rock audience would probably find you very, very difficult to listen to?

VLIET: It pleases me, because of that momma heartbeat, that bom, bom, bom, it’s so boring, it’s so banal. I mean it’s so hypnotic, I don’t want to hypnotise anybody, I just want to play. I mean I want things to change like the patterns and shadows that fall from the sun.

INTERVIEWER: So you want to confront people with your music, rather than try and seduce them with it?

VLIET: Sure, I’m not a vamp - I don’t want to beat you over the head with this momma heartbeat, remind you of your mother… Who wants to be reminded of that life support system - you know, when they support it like that? I do my own music, I don’t need that bom, bom, bom. Who wants to be - that’s so stupid!

INTERVIEWER: So you’re talking about disco, really...

VLIET: All of it! Rock and roll, disco - anything where they think the drummer is an imbecile who sits there and goes bom, bom, bom. I mean who needs that, why do they need that?


In case that wasn't enough to give you an idea of how the Captain's mind works, here's some quotables... and quotable they are!


"I was like an egg rolling through time until I was 24. Then the egg cracked and I popped out."

"Why would [anyone] want to label themselves? I say, 'Lick My Decals Off, Baby!' I'm not interested in making any new mustard or ketchup. I make very good mustard."

"It makes me itch to think of myself as Captain Beefheart....I don't even have a boat."

"Be kind, man - don't be mankind."

"I don't want to sell my music. I'd like to give it away because where I got it, you didn't have to pay for it."


I have this thing for the burnout genius. Whether it's Syd Barrett or Arthur Lee or Roky Erikson or Jim Gordon or Nick Drake, I have an affinity for the crazy underdog rockers who influenced everyone and yet never made any money. I'm not talking about 'tortured artists'-- that's a whole different school of fish, and although I have my moments I can also safely say that I am not tortured, nor are my demons any worse than yours.

Don Van Vliet seems happy most of the time, even when he's angry. And like Arthur Lee of the '60s garage band Love, Vliet has created his own whimsical vocabulary. Their use of everyday language is unorthodox, poetic when it should be communicative. Wordplay figures largely into their legend.

And both men are eccentric legends, to be sure. I recently read an anecdote from Morris Tepper, who keeps in contact with Vliet on a regular basis. Tepper explained that a Beefheart song titled "Ricochet Man" was inspired by Tepper's account of Arthur Lee's gun conviction, the one that landed him in jail under the California Three Strikes Law.

When Tepper told Vliet that Lee got busted for shooting a gun in the air when nobody was around, Vliet said to him, "Man, ricochet, man."

Of course, no one else in the free world was thrilled to hear about that, save for me. And maybe that's why I savor the romantic vision of the burnout genius: I think there's a narcissistic well deep inside of me that draws from those types of waters.


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Vliet claims to not be a drug user. I find it hard to believe, but then again the man is so strange that I DO believe it.

The truth is stranger than fiction, always.

Then again, what can you say about a man who prefers to sing in the studio without headphones on while imitating Howlin' Wolf and flexing his five-to-seven octave range so fiercely that he has shorted out microphones using only his voice?

There are lots of embellishments to the Beefheart legend: he wrote the entire Trout Mask Replica album-- all 28 songs' worth -- on a piano in eight hours; he taught his band how to play their avant-garde parts over the course of a year while living with them in a house in Woodland Hills; he molded the musicians like sculptor's clay, to the point where they were practically brainwashed members of the Cult of Beefheart; he stuck his record label with a bill for a tree surgeon after a nasty rainy season threatened the well-being of some eucalyptus trees on his property; he dropped out of school after half a day of kindergarten...

Some of these myths are perpetruated by the Captain himself, and some of them are just the kind of exaggerations that surround a forceful personality such as Vliet. And let's not forget the late Frank Zappa's part in the whole shebang: the two men went to school together in Antelope Valley, and it was Frank who produced the Trout Mask Replica album which saw the transformation of The Magic Band from a bunch of L.A. bluesmen into a free-jazz/Delta-blues/acid-rock combo.

The bit about the band being brainwashed by Vliet is intriguing, especially since I started this post wondering about his claim (repeated often) that he wasn't trying to hypnotize people with his music, that he was trying to do the opposite.

I find it ironic because I was hypnotized by the album Doc At The Radar Station, the first Beefheart purchase I ever made. As a childhood fan of Dr. Demento, I had heard of Beefheart for years and just wrote him off as another weirdo, but it wasn't until last year that I decided to buy one of his albums. And that one purchase led to another, and another, and another, and now here I am writing about this 20th century noble savage, a man out of time with his present environment if there ever was one...

I was hypnotized because I kept trying to find the skeleton key, the theme or motif that would suddenly render the rest of it accessible. And as I sat there trying to break it all down, I realized what it was about the music of Captain Beefheart that was making me go nuts.

It wasn't hypnotic; it was thought-provoking. I confused it for hypnosis because I was concentrating very intently on what was going on, and contrary to popular belief that's just one of many postulations as to what hypnosis is thought to be: intensified concentration, a singular focus stripped of all distraction.

Then again, what do fruitcakes like me, or Captain Beefheart, or anyone creative for that matter... what do we know anyway?

We're just nutjobs, according to all those 'normal' people out there who work in cubicles and wear suits but cannot even draw a stick figure or hum a melody in their heads...

And I prefer it that way. Only time will tell if I'm a genius on the level of a Don Van Vliet, but what's stopping me from pursuing things in a likewise manner?

Answer: nothing.