Pointed At The Moon, Looked At The Finger
This piece, written by Luca Ferrari, is the introduction to the book "Pearls Before Swine - Ice Cream For Crows" published by Sonic Books, 1996
Donald (Van) Vliet, better known within the rock world as Captain Beefheart, has disappeared from the music scene since 1982, when his last record Ice Cream For Crow was published. His most dedicated listeners, who have tried to get every possible bit of information on his current life, know for sure that he will not come back to play and that his final decision has taken him back to his original activity as draughtsman. Since the age of five in fact - trained by Portuguese sculptor Augustino Rodriguez - he enjoyed carving animals from soap in his room.
"I'm definitely finished with the rock star scene -although I never thought of my self as a rock star for a minute. Many people tried to turn me into one but I fooled 'em."
News about his artwork comes occasionally from art galleries and museums - short reviews and pieces of interview by critics who inevitably ask him about his musical past. He kindly points out - in that surrealistic language that characterises him - that music has been a sort of fortuitous accident.
"I like painting better than music," he has admitted, "because I can spend an entire day an a canvas, then erase it. Painting over it is really a beautiful sensation."
Inevitably, however, the kind of legends that chiefly nourish the Rock Barnum have flowered over the years around him.
Seducing but unlikely fantasies, engendered by those who prefer to ignore a natural evolution of facts and choose rather to cultivate myths. A comfortable and dangerous myth - typical product of bourgeois imagination - that identifies with "genius and intemperance" what he cannot (or does not want to) understand. A myth that hastily accounts for words and acts through the parameter of natural, genetical eccentricity.
The Captain has obviously never bothered to belie such allegations. Rather, just as other great artists who have well understood the rules of show business, he has let the media speak for him with an approach mostly acritical and apologetic.
Friend and colleague of the great Frank Zappa (deceased in December of 1994), Beefheart has published twelve records among which at least two -Trout Mask Replica and the following Lick My Decals Off Baby - have entered the history of popular music - slamming the door and certainly standing there for a number of years - as manifestos of a research that has changed the making of music and the listening to it.
By destructuring the form of standard urban blues, those works suggest a personal system of sound organisation which is only apparently "free" and incoherent: it results instead from a careful and controlled alternative combination of the same expressive elements of that genre.
Both the public and the critics, in their spasmodic search for the commodities of easy music - that music which is a solid soundtrack to the routine consumerism of absent minded masses - have been obviously ready to neglect such works. Today, sounds are nothing but excuses to escape into leisure, which is less and less free as it is conditioned by cultural fashions relentlessly produced by the record industry. The record industry, on its part, pretends contemporary rock to be still an anarchist and antagonist phenomenon, despite all its billion selling groups that are held in hostage and affect hypocritical revolutions and protests.
"They have told me that I am a genius throughout all my life. They have said the same about my sculptures, too, slapping me on the back, but in the meantime they hove taught the public that it is too difficult to listen to my music."
"If you have ears, you've got to listen," sings the Captain in one of his last records, but the record industry and the majority of the public have never listened to him with attention once he was filed on the "extravaganza" shelf where lay all those who give spice to the Rock Caravan. Thus, as a consequence, pearls have been given to the crows.
Musician, painter, poet, dada and surrealist, as he is described each time that news about him - quite rarely, in fact - appear. More realistically an authentically free and pataphysic spirit, bewitched by blues, that has arrived where it was hard to think in the search for a truly innovative form, has chosen painting as his unique way of expression.
As we can understand it, his life has been a quest for freedom. Hard to capture just as the life of other shining comets of our century: Marcel Duchamp, Rene Magritte, Orson Welles, Thelonious Monk. Such artists have managed, in complete freedom, to extend the forms of perception and understanding, breaching common sense and forcing an uneasy cognitive reframing.
-Luca Ferrari, December1995
