January 15

Don Glen Vliet's Birthday
 

Don Vliets (aka Don Van Vliet aka Captain Beefheart) legendary music career began when he struck up his lifetime friendship with Frank Zappa when they were both teenagers and collaborated together with Zappa's scripts for 'teenage operettas' such as "Captain Beefheart & The Grunt People" which helped define Don's alternate persona of Captain Beefheart. Don dropped out of junior college in 1959 to work with Frank on film and musical projects. In 1964 Frank formed the Mothers of Invention, and Don formed Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band. Don's legendary album, Trout Mask Replica, combined  jazz, R&B, poetry and garage rock.  In a 1970 Rolling Stone cover story, Don described the process. "Well, I'd never played piano before and I had to figure out the fingering," he said. "I don't spend a lot of time thinking. It just comes through me.". "It is a masterpiece," Rolling Stone  wrote in 1970. "It will probably be many years before American audiences catch up to things that happen on this totally amazing record." Rolling Stone was prescient in it's review. While Trout Mask Replica met with public indifference and failed to chart, it became a cultural landmark with surreal imagery in disturbing tones over music that drew on blues, jazz, and often bizarre elements in one of the most fertile imaginations in popular music history. According to the respected British critic John Peel, Beefheart was “rock music’s only true genius.” Don retired from music after 1982's Ice Cream Cow  failure and became a recluse.  He began a new career as an abstract painter which earned him more acclaim than most of his later albums and a markedly different fan base. When he died in 2010 at age 69,  Don was cited as having provided a major influence over such diverse artists as Tom Waits, PJ Harvey, Little Feat, Woody Allen, David Lynch, and The Simpsons creator, Matt Groening. Matt recalled listening to Trout Mask Replica at the age of 15 and thinking "that it was the worst thing I'd ever heard. I said to myself, they're not even trying! It was just a sloppy cacophony. Then I listened to it a couple more times, because I couldn't believe Frank Zappa could do this to me—and because a double album cost a lot of money. About the third time, I realized they were doing it on purpose; they meant it to sound exactly this way. About the sixth or seventh time, it clicked in, and I thought it was the greatest album I'd ever heard." He later declared Trout Mask Replica to be the greatest album ever made. So what could be a more appropriate way to celebrate Don's birthday that to invite Matt Groening for dinner and serve Braised Beef Heart? We suggest that you also watch the TV documentary Don Van Vliet: Some YoYo Stuff (1994) in which David Lynch appears, and Don discusses his art and tells us that "Ravens I use in my paintings because they clean up the land. Buzzards are nice, too. They also clean up mistakes on the highway done by human beings."

Braised Beef Heart