By:
On:
In: 1972 Bickershaw Festival, Your stories and tributes
With: 2 Comments

In 1972 I lived in Manchester. Not that far from Bickershaw, so when the festival arrived a group of us decided we would be fools not to go. We arrived on Friday evening and put our tent up outside the concert perimeter and went in. My recollections of the groups who were on Friday night are not vivid. I remember being impressed by Doctor John, as he threw his sparkly dust into the evening sky, but that’s about it. Saturday was much more memorable. As has been well documented it was a little on the damp side and by the time Saturday evening came alongRead More →

By:
On:
In: 1971.06.25 Paramount Theatre Portland, Your stories and tributes
With: 0 Comments

The first time I saw Captain Beefheart was in 1970 [1971 – Graham] at the Paramount Theatre in Portland, Oregon, shortly after the Lick My Decals, Baby album came out. My band-mates and I were sitting front-row, centre, along with our friend Matt Groening, who had introduced us to Beefheart via the Trout Mask Replica LP. First, Ed Marimba came out to a lone microphone that was center-stage, in front of the closed curtains. He was wearing the full-blown evening-suit with tails that he wore on the Decals front-cover. He had a monocle in one eye and was carrying an orchestral slapstick. Without saying aRead More →

By:
On:
In: Your stories and tributes
With: 0 Comments

I’m very pleased to present an excellent musical tribute to the Captain by Bulbous Boy Slim aka Andy Throat. These two tunes were constructed solely from Trout Mask Replica samples (along with a heavy dose of patience) with very pleasing results. Andy is probably very bored at work as you read this, and he would love to hear your comments. Contact him at andy_throat@hotmail.com with your offers of sex, insults or anything in between. Many thanks to Andy for passing these along. Sugar Fart Atomiser by Bulbous Boy Slim (2,458K) Samples from: Old Fart At Play (vocal) Sugar ‘N’ Spikes (everything else) Blimp N Bass byRead More →

By:
On:
In: Art articles, Stand Up To Be Discontinued
With: 0 Comments

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 →

By:
On:
In: Art articles, Stand Up To Be Discontinued
With: 0 Comments

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 →

By:
On:
In: Art articles, Stand Up To Be Discontinued
With: 0 Comments

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 →

By:
On:
In: Art articles, Stand Up To Be Discontinued
With: 0 Comments

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 →

By:
On:
In: Art articles, Stand Up To Be Discontinued
With: 0 Comments

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 →

By:
On:
In: Art articles, New Work 1998, Works On Paper 1999
With: 0 Comments

By Who & By What Is One Enlightened Or Deceived? Is it possible to judge with an uncritical eye as if Captain Beefheart never existed? Don Van Vliet – New Work 11th November – 5th December, 1998 Knoedler & Company In association with Michael Werner Gallery 19 East 70 Street New York, New York 10021 USA Don Van Vliet – Works On Paper 28th January – 26th March 1999 Michael Werner Gallery 21 East 67 New York, New York 10021 USA Captain Beefheart combed out his showbiz mane and became, after 20 plus years on the stage, Don Van Vliet: citizen of the respectable andRead More →

By:
On:
In: Art articles
With: 0 Comments

Don Van Vliet; poet, musician, composer, anti-rockstar, aka the legendary Captain Beefheart, has been off in the wilderness making pictures since the early seventies. Exhibiting his paintings under his own name since the early eighties, his most recent work was shown this winter at Knoedler & Company, in association with the Michael Werner Gallery. What has been said in the past about his work as a musician and poet, namely that it is visionary and apocalyptic, is also true about his work as painter. Poet John Yau writes “In this time [where] it falls to artists, writers, and musicians to reveal the myriad ways inRead More →

By:
On:
In: Art articles, Stand Up To Be Discontinued
With: 0 Comments

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 →

By:
On:
In: Art articles, Stand Up To Be Discontinued
With: 0 Comments

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 →

By:
On:
In: Art articles, Stand Up To Be Discontinued
With: 0 Comments

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 →

By:
On:
In: Art articles, Stand Up To Be Discontinued
With: 0 Comments

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 →

By:
On:
In: Art articles, Stand Up To Be Discontinued
With: 0 Comments

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 →

By:
On:
In: Art articles
With: 0 Comments

It was music, in retrospect, that was particularly befitting of the 1960s, the decade to which it was born. Like the time, it was young and ambitious and overpoweringly energetic. And it was without precedent; absolutely nothing that had come before sounded quite like it. It sent many a music critic running to a dictionary in search of adjectives with which to denounce it. Trivial, nonsensical, primitive and atonal were some of the kinder ones they chose. At the same time, the music saddled Don Van Vliet with an obsessive band of fans who believed that his alter ego, Captain Beefheart, was an oracle whoRead More →