Is this the earliest surviving Captain Beefheart poster?

The hand-painted graphic work on poster paper (12"x18") was made to advertise a Captain Beefheart concert at San Fernando Valley State College in May 1965. Victor Hayden, the artist responsible, was later to join The Magic Band as The Mascara Snake.

Pamela Des Barres says that she removed the poster from the wall of Cleveland High School and has recently found it in her attic. It is now for sale at eBay.

Posted by derek@beefheart.com at 11:09 AM  - 5 comments - post a comment

Don is 66 today and so we would like to wish him felicitations, congratulations and commendations for many happy and healthy returns.

All of us here at beefheart.com would like to express our thanks to Don for his great art which will never be forgotten as long as there's a fly's eye to see it with. Our smiles are most certainly stuck.

If you need a soundtrack for your evening, there can be only one choice - break out the urine coloured lights and sing along to "Happy Birthday."

Posted by Graham Johnston at 8:31 PM  - 3 comments - post a comment

I've received a note from Mike Bugbee who provided us with his excellent eye-witness account of Don and Jan's wedding a few years ago. He's got a book coming out soon (unrelated to the wedding) and

Michael Bugbee is the author of a soon-to-be-published novel, Notes from Hotel Misterioso, from Mline Books.

The official publication date is April 1, 2007, but beginning in January 2007 prepublication copies are available through www.mlinebooks.com, $14.95 U.S. or $17.95 Canadian plus shipping.

Inquiries to: info@mlinebooks.com.

If you haven't read Mike's wedding account yet, you really should - it is one of my very favourite items here on beefheart.com and offers a unique and touching insight into Don's life and marriage. If you have read it then you will probably want to check out his book too.

Posted by Graham Johnston at 8:20 PM  - 4 comments - post a comment

Herb Bermann, the legendary poet who wrote most of Captain Beefheart's Safe As Milk lyrics (and some more) appears on a new DVD recently recorded at a poetry reading at Beyond Baroque.

Good-Bye to the Rodeo Grounds is a sort of momento of one of the last artist communities in Los Angeles, evicted to make way for a state park. In his interview for this website Herb talked about this, and of course about his involvement with Captain Beefheart.

The DVD is available from Custom Flix or Amazon. There are several excerpts from it at YouTube, including an 8 minute sequence of Herb Bermann reading his poem Colophon.

This news item was originally published on January 11th. It is now updated.

Posted by derek@beefheart.com at 10:16 AM  - 1 comments - post a comment

Nigel Godrich, producer of Radiohead, Travis and Beck, among others, has become nostalgic for music videos as he remembers them. Curiously enough, his memory of music videos doesn't seem to include the idea that music videos were always given away for free.

So it is that if you would like to watch Nigel's latest wheeze, From The Basement, an internet only music video source, you'll have to pay for it. National Public Radio carries a story about this project.

In From The Basement #1, Thom Yorke previews the new Radiohead album, The White Stripes perform Party Of Special Things To Do one more time, and there's an improvised collaboration between Four Tet's Kieran Hebden and drummer Steve Reid. Filming is by director Sophie Muller.

An earlier recording of The White Stripes performing Party Of Special Things To Do has still not been removed from YouTube.

Posted by derek@beefheart.com at 10:13 AM  - 0 comments - post a comment

Author Kevin Courrier is currently completing a book about Trout Mask Replica which should be published later this year.

The book will investigate some possible sources for the ideas which were realised in the making of the album. According to Continuum, the publisher, these include Walt Whitman, Gregory Corso, Charley Patton, Howlin' Wolf, Ornette Coleman and Richard Berry and the Coasters.

Continuum's website says that this book will illustrate, "how Trout Mask Replica, far from being an arcane specimen of the avant-garde, was instead a defiantly original declaration of the American imagination."

Kevin's Courrier's previous books were about Randy Newman and Frank Zappa. Publication date for this book, titled Trout Mask Replica, is expected to be May 1st.

Posted by derek@beefheart.com at 10:43 PM  - 4 comments - post a comment

There's a Captain Beefheart Tribute event happening in Sydney, Australia on January 28th when local movers and shakers The Captain's Package, MC Jay Katz, Rica Tetas and last, but not with least words in their name, A Squid Eating Dough In A Polyethelene Bag Is Fast And Bulbous appear on stage at The Annandale Hotel.

Posted by derek@beefheart.com at 10:41 AM  - 1 comments - post a comment

"Captain Beefheart is the shingle that gave me shingles," complains Don Van Vliet in Lars Movin's gentle evocation of Don's life and circumstances since he became a full-time painter. "It makes me itch to think of myself as Captain Beefheart. I don’t even have a boat!"

I don't even have a boat - calling the Captain is a charming misty travelogue of the road leading to the place where Don Van Vliet has found himself as a painter, and the shoreline - land, sea and sky - which Don inhabits and describes.

Waves lap, seabirds dry their wings, fishing boats bob and seals bask as Don describes his neighbours, the redwoods, and the time he saw thirty six whales from his window. Don chooses to live in this secluded place, away from people, and explains, "I find isolation better, because of the fact that I can paint … Essentially, I just like to paint."

In 1991 Lars Movin recorded a telephone interview with Don Van Vliet, publishing a transcript in the fifth number of Copyright, a now defunct magazine. It is an edited tape of this interview which provides the soundtrack to Lars' film, or video notebook as he calls it, which was shot close to Don's home in July 2005 and premiered in Copenhagen in May 2006.

"Can you imagine that, having somebody look for you?" asks Don, as he tells the story of how the last time he went out he'd met some music fans hunting for their hero . That was five years previously. The memory of how these deadheads had approached him at the Coop and asked him if he'd seen Jerry obviously still appalled him.

Don's voice as he recalls the deadhead episode, "Have you seen Jerry?" is so sneering and disdainful of both obsessive fans and of Jerry Garcia, that he repeats the phrase for the full majesty of the effect. When eventually the words "Grateful Dead" are uttered, the film cuts to the floating corpse of a bird in the sea.

Although Don speaks in this film with careful articulation there is little evidence of the later change in his voice which became so noticeable in the Stand Up To Be Discontinued CD or in the Anton Corbijn film Some Yo Yo Stuff.

Don's remark about having shingles (a pun on the word meaning sign and the medical condition) was a joke he'd been making since at least 1980 when it was reported in Rolling Stone. His follow-up lines, which the film's title is taken from, seem to be more recent.

At under 16 minutes this video notebook is both short and sweet. Humourous touches abound, both in the original interview and in the editing of the visual material. I don't even have a boat - calling the Captain will be of great interest to Captain Beefheart afficianados everywhere.

Another showing of I don't even have a boat - calling the Captain is being held as part of a programme of Lars Movin's video notebooks at The Danish Film Institute in Copenhagen on January 10th. A transcript of the film soundtrack is available at Lars Movin's website.

Posted by derek@beefheart.com at 9:53 AM  - 4 comments - post a comment

The Red Hot Chili Peppers closed the last concert of their 2006 tour by playing the Captain Beefheart composition Peon as final encore. John Frusciante took the guitar part and Flea played bass. A video of their efforts is available at YouTube.

Rolling Stone recently noted that John Frusciante is owner of some original Don Van Vliet paintings. Flea frequently name-checks and quotes Captain Beefheart, sometimes in the most unlikely of contexts such as his NBA blog.

This is not the first time Flea and Frusciante have attempted to play this tune. On 15th October 2002 Flea wrote, "John and I can play "peon' by Captain Beefheart all the way through now. It is a very complicated piece of music. We are still a little awkward in parts but soon we will rock it live. Captain Beefheart! Man, that band worked so hard to play those incredible compositions. Everyone should pay more attention to it. Trout Mask Replica! Lick My Decals Off! Classic records, such an important part of the evolution of music."

A recording of John and Flea playing Peon at LA's Knitting Factory in 2004 also circulates.

Posted by derek@beefheart.com at 1:58 PM  - 5 comments - post a comment

Jeopardy

Jaws dropped across a nation on December 11th when the B-word was used on American prime-time television. Captain Beefheart had become famous for a moment and fans rushed to write to internet discussion groups with the unlikely news. The cause of the excitement? A $1200 question in the game show Jeopardy, "Captain Beefheart is said to have a range of 4.5 of these."

If you don't know the answer, go to the Jeopardy Archive here and point your mouse at the appropriate square in Double Jeopardy! Round The Big O.

More video

Bob wrote in from Boulder to mention that he'd spotted former Magic Band and Red Hot Chili Pepper drummer Cliff Martinez talking about his time with Beefheart and Beefheart's unique approach to sounds and music. This is part of the extra material on the double Criterion Region 1 dvd set of Steven Soderbergh's film Traffic for which Cliff Martinez scored the music. Bob points out that the only version of the dvd which he knows to contain this extra material is this one from Amazon. The version I found did not have it. There are short articles about Cliff Martinez here and here.

Hard Workin' Man

'Hard Workin' Man: The Jack Nitzsche Story Volume 2' is a CD released last year by Ace Records which contains the Captain Beefheart track Hard Workin' Man. Ace Records are being rather coy about which version of the song is included in the compliation. Does it contain the F-word, or doesn't it? Please let us know.

Update 4th January 2007 - Ace Records sent the answer in a mail today, "Our one is the regular version, without swearing."

Yet more video

I've been ploughing through the 'beefheart' tags at YouTube and have put together this short list of video which does not feature Captain Beefheart but which has some relationship to his music. I hope you enjoy it. Feel free to add your own favourites in the comments section below.

Cadwalader slides, Lewis Taylor sings Ella Guru, John Power plugs his "Beefheart bass", an old fart plays, Pablo's Bike sounds like a car, a drum 'n brass When I See Mommy, I Feel Like A Mummy from Seventh Chapter in Australia - they also perform Ice Rose, Suction Prints and Dropout Boogie which by no coincidence were previously performed by Meridian Arts Ensemble who provided the arrangements. Lastly, thanks again to GrizzlyBlues who captured some moments from the very last Magic Band concert last year. He's recently added what seems to be his own version of Upon the My-O-My to his YouTube page.

A trip to the zoo

The young Don Vliet was a frequent visitor to Griffith Park Zoo, a place where he honed his sculpting skills in front of television cameras. Pierre Antaya has found an old copy of Popular Mechanics from 1939, just a couple of years before Don was born, which gives a guided tour of Griffith Park Zoo at dinner time. Beefheart was on the menu.

Posted by derek@beefheart.com at 1:56 PM  - 5 comments - post a comment