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A 1993 poetry reading CD was included in the Stand Up To Be Discontinued exhibition book and later reproduced in the Pearls Before Swine book. It included readings of the following poems: Fallin’ Ditch The Tired Plain Skeleton Makes Good Safe Sex Drill Tulip Gill At the time, many found the recording shocking and upsetting. This was the first time Don Van Vliet had been widely heard in public since 1982’s Ice Cream For Crow and the intervening 11 years had clearly not been kind. He sounded far older than his 52 years and rumours of illness seemed to have confirmation. Today, I think theyRead More →

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Published by Cantz Paperback £21.95 1993 ISBN 3-9801320-2-1 Hardback Limited Edition (1500) with CD £32.50 1993 ISBN 3-9801320-3-X Deluxe Slip Cased Limited Edition (120) with original etching £180.00 1994 136 pages with 70 colour plates Contents: Don van Vliet in Bielefeld: Andreas Beaugrand Animals and Black Ladies: Karsten Ohrt Don van Vliet – The Painting: Jessica Rutherford “Stand Up To Be Discontinued”. On Don van Vliet as Painter and Musician: Paolo Bianchi Pearls before Swine. Ice Cream for Crow. On the Relationship between Music and Painting in Captain Beefheart’s Work: Luca Ferrari Captain Beefheart: Diedrich Diedrichsen Don van Vliet: Roberto Ohrt Fur Don van Vliet:Read More →

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Don Van Vliet is probably the only full-time painter who used to be a mythical figure in music. Once Captain Beefheart, he is soon to exhibit in Brighton. Ben Thompson sent him a fax. DON VAN VLIET lives in the small and beautifully named town of Trinidad in Northern California, up by the Oregon border, 135 ft from the ocean. He paints there. He is a painter of note – “Stand Up to Be Discontinued”, the second British exhibition of his work, arrives in Brighton in September to confound anyone who doubts this – but he used to be a painter of notes. Until theRead More →

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Ice Cream for Crow. On the Relationship between Music and Painting in Captain Beefheart’s Work Those who, over the last twenty years, have loved the music of Captain Beefheart cannot forget that he decided to abandon the music scene (it would seem definitively) to devote himself full-time to painting. Specialist rock critics, who were left the sad task of a retrospective tribute to his career, each time have boldly tried to establish correlations bet-ween yesterday’s music and today’s painting, acting in a way that is markedly ‘reparative’ and which, implicitly placing diachronic continuity to his basis, has no logical or cultural justification in the CalifornianRead More →

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In the early 1970s the voice of Don Van Vliet, alias Captain Beefheart, was a signal and a proof that something else is possible -that nothing has to stay the way it is. His music came out of a space in which the power of existing laws was broken. It expanded the framework of the imaginable, for the members of a generation whose own attitudes and ideas embodied a radical aspiration, but who had let their own lives be defined by a set of descriptions and signs over which they had virtually no control. The music of Don Van Vliet revealed how far that generationRead More →

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The terse, succinct, even programmatic formula enunciated by Don Van Vliet alias Captain Beefheart, is both peremptory and cryptic: “Stand up to be discontinued!” When a person makes an utterance, [s]he also gives something of [her/]himself- a fact that makes every statement into a miniature sample of a personality. When a person says something, [s]he usually also wants to make something happen. Don Van Vliet is said to be no lover of straight-line thinking, but a creative conversationalist, who makes unexpected conceptual leaps, and who possesses a wide mental horizon, a wild sense of humor, and a good memory. “Don Van Vliet is happiest talkingRead More →

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In 1990, Kunsthallen Brandts Klaedefabrik organized a large retrospective exhibition Rockens Billeder (Images of Rock), which contained works of European and American artists from the previous three decades. The exhibition included works dealing with the theme of rock music, as well as works by painters who were also practising musicians. One of the most memorable expressive works at the exhibition was the 1986 painting Crepe and Black Lamps by Don van Vliet. The composition of the picture is glaringly asymmetrical, with rolling, light, fluid human figures lining the lefthand side of the canvas and a compact, blue-black female figure with a disproportionally large head standingRead More →

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In our days, music is everywhere: on the radio and on TV, at home and wherever you go, on the stage, at the supermarket and in restaurants. Also, the arts have become more and more an everyday affair: The large exhibitions which attract millions of people speak for themselves. And then there is art at your bank, art in buildings, art in public spaces – art, and even supposed art, is all over. No longer does it seem strange to us to find the influence of modern art in the presentations of music groups, like on video clips, record covers and posters. What is itRead More →

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30 years ago Don van Vliet and his friend Frank Zappa wrote a film script and accompanying sound-track with the title Captain Beefheart Meets the Grunt People. Although aspects of the sound-track were recorded the film never materialised but the name and persona of Captain Beefheart was adopted by Don Van Vliet to launch an extraordinarily fertile and innovative assault on popular music preconceptions of the ‘6os and ‘70s. When the rest of the musical world were harmonising about love and peace, the records Safe as Milk, Trout Mask Replica, and Lick My Decals Off Baby provided a complete departure from all previous notions ofRead More →

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A long time ago, in an artistic dimension somewhere in another galaxy called the 1960s, there emerged an unlikely musical hero, name of Captain Beefheart. At a time when others sang about peace and love – and played it safe with musical arrangements featuring jingly jangly guitars and thumpty-thump drums – there stood Captain Beefheart as a counterpoint. There he stood, surrounded by bottleneck guitars, electronic pianos, trombones, French horns, Chinese gongs, clarinets, harmonicas – any instrument really, that sounded interesting when matched with his growling, 4 1/2-octave voice. But then – after 20 years and a dozen albums like “Doc at the Radar Station,”Read More →

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Recording artist: Don van Vliet, the artist, is now back in touch with Captain Beefheart, the legend. Robert Hanks spots the difference. When he was a boy, back in Glendale, California, in the Forties and Fifties, Don van Vliet wanted to be a sculptor; at the age of 13, he even won a scholarship to study in Europe. But his parents thought that was kind of cissy, and wouldn’t let him. Instead, he went off to become Captain Beefheart, performing upright, manly blues-stroke-dada-stroke-field hollers- stroke-atonal collective improvisation with his Magic Band. Presumably his parents wished they’d left well alone. With the albums Safe as MilkRead More →

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This month Brighton Museum is staging two of the most exciting exhibitions seen in the town for years. Underground London and Stand Up To Be Discontinued bring the photos of Robert Whitaker and the art of Don Van Vliet (Captain Beefheart) to the museum at the same time. You lucky people. BRIGHTON Museum celebrates the work of one of rock’s most extraordinary and enduring artists, Captain Beefheart, from September 2. Alongside the rock memorabilia will be the first ever UK exhibition of his paintings which have established him as one of the finest of contemporary expressionist artists. Jonathan Morris reports DON van Vliet, aka CaptainRead More →

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Captain Beefheart was a music legend; now he’s Don Van Vliet, genius of paint. `You can physically drown in paint, you can mentally drown in music,’ declares Don Van Vliet, pronouncing one of his less obscure aphorisms. Cult rocker turned successful painter (but still better known to the world as Captain Beefheart) Van Vliet can claim intimate knowledge of both mediums. While a devoted public continues to mourn his absence from the music scene, which he abandoned in 1982, Van Vliet’s status as a fine artist has risen steadily over the last decade. These days a canvas by the Captain will set you back betweenRead More →

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The Collected Paintings of Don Van Vliet, the once (and future?) Captian Beefheart A reporter from New York Rocker once asked poet, painter and composer Don Van Vliet – better known to many as the influential enigma of electrified clamor, Captain Beefheart – how he produced his scrawling, free-form saxophone solos. “I just paint through it,” came the Captain’s bristly, elusive reply. The first full-scale reminder of Van Vliet’s existence since his musical retirement in 1982, Stand Up to Be Discontinued (Cantz/136 pages/$40, $60 with special edition CD) further expresses that unkempt synaesthesia. Smeary and blurt-like, these jagged panels of frenzied eye music – seenRead More →