In December 2025 Gerry Fialka interviewed bass player extraordinaire Greg Cohen for his podcast I’m Probably Wrong About Everything. Greg has played bass for a bewildering and diverse number of musicians over the years.
During the interview he told this great story about how he came to be introduced to Don :
Seven years younger than me is my little sister Jeannie who followed after my mom. She looked like a little Eskimo when she was born, full head of hair, black hair and from the very earliest age she was creative. From like the beginning. And she would sit by my mom and absorb all that painting and drawing and what have you but she started to do something different and I know you like these stories so I’m gonna dart into this story … I’m gonna tell you a story about Don ,,,
So I think the year was 1969 or so and somebody had told me that Captain Beefheart lived around the corner from where my parents had then moved in the San Fernando Valley, Woodland Hills. And they actually said, this is the house where Captain Beefheart lives. And so I looked up at this house on the hill.
It looked like the archetypal, you know, like Addam’s family or spook house or something. It just looked creepy. And it looked like the kind of place you didn’t go up there if you wanted to come back down that hill alive.
And so, but nevertheless, both my brother and I were fascinated by the thought that here right in our own neighborhood lives this artist that we both were enamored of at the time, Captain Beefheart. Don was his real name. And so we thought, how could we get to know Captain Beefheart? How are we gonna break the ice in this situation? Well, my little sister Jeannie was then in the Brownies, which is the earliest incarnation or division of the Girl Scouts.
And they do these drives where they have to sell these cookies. Another thing that a lot of haters get down on these days, they don’t need Girl Scout cookies. They’re loaded with seed oils and blah, blah, blah.
But I think it’s great that people buy Girl Scout cookies because it’s just something good. Anyway, she had this uniform, this Brown uniform with this bandana, with all the badges that she had earned for tying knots and making a candle or whatever kind of silly things they would get badges for.
And she had to sell all these cookies. So Danny, my brother and I, we said, all right, Jeannie, we’re gonna teach you a song. It’s called the Blimp.
It’s by this musician that lives in this house right over here. And if you can recite this poem from top to bottom, I bet you he’ll buy a lot of cookies from you. So she learned the Blimp upside down and backwards.
She knew it perfectly. And she had no fear at that time. She was like maybe seven or something.
So she goes up these creaking winding stairs that were all broken up the anthills of Golondrina and goes to the front door painted red of Don and Jan’s house, knocks on the door. And Don answers the door and sees this Brownie in uniform holding two bags of cookies that just breaks into a full recitation of the Blimp off of his recently released record. And his jaw drops to the floor and he’s, Jan, Jan, come quick, come quick, Jan.
And it was like he was gonna have a coronary. He was so out of his head. It was like whatever kind of crazy weird shit that he could think of, this one upped him.
He could never imagine a Brownie breaking into the Blimp and then wanting to sell them Girl Scout cookies. So obviously they bought all of the cookies that Jeannie had and invited her in and she’s looking around all this crazy art, like bread sculptings and a sandbag ashtray nailed to the wall with a pile of sand on the floor. And she says, I’m an artist too.
And Beefheart says, you are. And so that was the beginning of the friendship. And then he asks her, well, how did you actually come across my song and how did you do this? I mean, what happened? And she said, well, my brothers are weird musicians and they taught me the song and told me to come here.
And then, so he said, well, bring your brothers over. And that was the beginning of our friendship that lasted for many years with Don and Jan and all the Magic Band at that time. And you got to hang with them because that was a beautiful story.
And you so well articulated because I could picture it because I’ve seen that, I’ve gone to that house and you can see pictures of the Woodland Hills house where Trout Mask Replica was made. And there’s huge stories about that. Langdon Winters article in Rolling Stone is monumental in describing all this.
Well, it was the clubhouse for the, right down the street from there is a beautiful golf course, old style for the Valley, old style golf course. And this was the clubhouse built in the 20s for the elite of that country club. And it had fallen to ruin and then gone through some hands and eventually, they got a hold of it. I know, I think if you go there now, the people who own it are really proud because Beefheart fans always show up and go, is this the house? And they go, yeah.
It wasn’t like I was there the day that Don and Jan moved out of that house. And they found another house across the main road on the other side of Golondrina. So they were renting this new place and they had to get out of that old house.
And the young couple that was moving in knew nothing about who he was or, you know, so he’s, you know, trying to get rid of all this stuff. He gave me Antenna Jimmy Semen’s clarinet and all these things that they had to get rid of.
But he had taken all of the knotty pine cabinet doors off the kitchen cabinets and he had painted on them with black paint. So the lady of the house, the lady who was moving in, she said, where are the cabinet doors? And Don said, lady, if you want those, you have to talk to the curator of the Smithsonian.
She was speechless. She had no response to that at all.
Thanks to Gerry Fialka for allowing us to post this transcript of Greg’s story. For the entertaining full three hour interview which includes stories about Ornette Coleman, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson and John Zorn amongst others check it out here :