“I don’t like hypnotics. I’m doing a non-hypnotic music to break up the catatonic state. And I think there is one right now. I just want to play. I just want things to change like the patterns and shadows that fall from the sun.” – Captain Beefheart
The first noticeable element of the various eulogies for the late Don Van Vliet is the way that the vast majority of the headlines don’t announce the passing of the man himself, but rather that of Captain Beefheart. And while in many cases it would be ludicrous to conflate a pseudonym with the artist to whom it’s applied, in Van Vliet/Beefheart’s case the distinction carries more weight. The simple act of concocting such a separate identity is at its core a repositioning of the self in relation to the creative process. While in many instances, a stage name is as superficial and disingenuous as the term suggests, Van Vliet’s transformation into Captain Beefheart was a first step down a career path characterized by a sense of revisionism. This revisionism, stripped of the negative connotations which normally cling to the term, recasts the world as a mass of shadows, ephemeral preconceptions so thoroughly entwined that those which might seem the most opposed--light and shade, consonance and dissonance, the guttural and the divine--stand in singular mystery.
His creations may seem strange at first, but what he made was likely the most normal and natural result of his approach. Because ultimately he simply played the blues--or perhaps “played” is the wrong word. He rearranged fragments of the blues like a mosaic whose image is unrecognizable to those who would stare too long at its individual pieces. He wasn’t like Frank Zappa--though the two are often mentioned in the same context--all blustery confrontation and self-righteous indignation. Beefheart’s was a more innocent approach, but rather than possessing an affected or childlike manner, his was the innocence of a lion clamping its jaws on a gazelle’s jugular vein. Captain Beefheart was a fitting pseudonym then, and while he never settled on a decisive explanation of the name, it bore strong overtones of a convoluted animalism. If beef is the bovine recontextualized as food, then a beef-heart seems a re-recontextualization--the process of grafting animal consumptive urges onto the human form. That the word is prefaced by an authoritative and distinctly human designation pushes the whole idea further into the realm of the absurd. But in Beefheartian cosmology, opposites rarely oppose. Ideas of the absurd and the earnest, just like those of nature and artifice, are interdependent, informing and supporting each other.
Captain Beefheart was Don Van Vliet recast as a shamanic figure conjuring Howlin’ Wolf and Albert Ayler, a Gnostic sage wandering in a wilderness of his own creation, misunderstood by other men but conversant with nature at large (“I’m going up on the mountain,” he once sang, “find me a cave and talk to bears”). In bygone eras he likely would have been either canonized or burnt at the stake, but in our own uniquely misguided times, he was rarely depicted outside of a relationship with certain preconceived types: the oddball 60s relic, the desert recluse, the man who threw it all away. Ascribing this reductionism to humanity’s tendency towards not appreciating its assets until they cease to be is an easy conclusion to draw, and not entirely incorrect. But such figures warrant more than retrospective moralizing. As Beefheart himself sang in one of his most often-quoted songs, “the dust blows forward and the dust blows back,” and while it can be difficult to ascribe literal interpretation to his lyrics, there is a simple and essential truth to that line: whether his existence and creative output were understood or appreciated in his time is immaterial. His art and his life act together as an unbroken continuum, inexorably binding past and future into a whole that is as imperfectly formed as any religion or philosophy mankind has devised.