Don Van Vliet dead at 69.

skippybrew

This makes me very sad. Love him or hate him, he was truly an original.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/DN-beefheartobit_17met.ART.State.Edition1.437202e.html

Don Van Vliet: Painter, avant-garde rock pioneer known as Captain Beefheart

12:00 AM CST on Saturday, December 18, 2010

By HOWERY PACK / The Dallas Morning News

Don Van Vliet, the painter and pioneer in avant-garde rock music better known as Captain Beefheart, has died at age 69 of complications from multiple sclerosis.

His death in California was announced Friday by New York's Michael Werner Gallery, which frequently exhibited his paintings.

At times in collaboration with his high school classmate Frank Zappa, Mr. Van Vliet and his group, the Magic Band, combined blues, free jazz and rock 'n' roll in an amalgam that influenced many new wave and punk artists, though he eventually abandoned music for his first love, painting.

Mr. Van Vliet was adept at self-promotion, and he built a partly fallacious legend around himself.

He claimed, for example, that he was not vocally influenced by Howlin' Wolf and other blues greats (clearly false); that he admired Igor Stravinsky and Ornette Coleman (clearly true); that he had a vocal range of 4 ½ octaves or more (debatable); and that he was psychic (your choice).

The only child of a bakery truck driver and a homemaker, Don Vliet (the affected Van came later) was born Jan. 15, 1941, in Los Angeles – an event he asserted he could recall.

Enthralled by art at an early age, he was discovered by a local sculptor, who featured him from age 5 to 8 on his educational TV show.

His family moved to Lancaster, Calif., when he was 13. He developed a love of blues and rhythm and blues, and during high school he taught himself to play harmonica and saxophone.

Mr. Van Vliet briefly attended Antioch Valley College, then took a variety of odd jobs (he claimed to have sold a vacuum cleaner to writer Aldous Huxley).

The first Magic Band was started in 1965, and the following year, it secured a deal to make two singles for A&M but was subsequently dropped by the label. The group's first album, Safe as Milk (on the Buddah label), came in 1967 and featured Ry Cooder on slide guitar and Taj Mahal on washboard.

The best-known of his albums is the love-it-or-hate-it Trout Mask Replica (1969), which landed him on the cover of Rolling Stone and periodically winds up on that magazine's lists of the greatest albums of all time.

Critic Langdon Winner's article in that magazine called Mr. Van Vliet "one of the most original and gifted creators of music in America" and the Zappa-produced double LP "truly beyond comparison in the realm of contemporary music."

This was the start of a fruitful period that later yielded the two LPs that are perhaps his most accessible: The Spotlight Kid and Clear Spot.

Then the magic apparently went out of the Magic Band. Mr. Van Vliet experienced a creative lull in the mid-1970s, before and after the members of the Magic Band deserted him to form their own group.

Mr. Zappa rescued him from this slump by taking him on tour and making a live album, Bongo Fury. Three more Magic Band albums followed between 1978 and 1982 – Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller), Doc at the Radar Station, and Ice Cream for Crow – before Mr. Van Vliet gave up music for painting.

His abstract artworks have been exhibited in galleries and museums around the United States and Europe.

Italian biographer Luca Ferrari quoted Mr. Van Vliet as saying, "I like painting better than music ... because I can spend an entire day on a canvas, then erase it. Painting over it is really a beautiful sensation."

BLACK35

R.I.P