1. Captain Beefheart's music blended elements of blues, free jazz, rock, and avant-garde composition with idiosyncratic rhythms, absurdist wordplay, and Vliet's gravelly singing voice with a wide vocal range.
40 Facts About Captain Beefheart
1. 2.
Captain Beefheart began performing in his Captain Beefheart persona in 1964, when he joined the original Magic Band line-up.
3.
Captain Beefheart eventually formed a new Magic Band with a group of younger musicians and regained critical approval through three final albums: Shiny Beast, Doc at the Radar Station and Ice Cream for Crow.
4.
Captain Beefheart's subjects reflected his "obsession" with animals, particularly dinosaurs, fish, African mammals and lemurs.
5.
Captain Beefheart said that his parents discouraged his interest in sculpture, due to their perception of artists as "queer".
6.
Captain Beefheart remained interested in art; several of his paintings, were later used as covers for his albums.
7.
Captain Beefheart developed his taste and interest in music, listening to the Delta blues of Son House and Robert Johnson, jazz artists such as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk and Cecil Taylor, and the Chicago blues of Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters.
8.
Captain Beefheart's girlfriend lived in the house, his grandmother lived in the house, and his aunt and his uncle lived across the street.
9.
Captain Beefheart grew comfortable with public performance and, after learning to play the harmonica, began playing at dances and small clubs in Southern California.
10.
Captain Beefheart considered the lyric "I'd love to turn you on" from "A Day in the Life" to be ridiculous and conceited.
11.
Captain Beefheart later claimed he had seen a girl in the audience turn into a fish, with bubbles coming from her mouth.
12.
Captain Beefheart was conceptualizing new band names, including 25th Century Quaker and Blue Thumb.
13.
Captain Beefheart punched him in the face and threatened to throw him out a window.
14.
Captain Beefheart admits complicity in similarly attacking his bandmates during Beefheart's "talks" aimed at them.
15.
Captain Beefheart replaced French with drummer Jeff Burchell, a roadie with no drumming experience whom Captain Beefheart called "Fake Drumbo".
16.
Captain Beefheart was getting more into that part of who he was instead of this blues singer.
17.
An early promotional music video was made of its title song, and a bizarre television commercial included excerpts from "Woe-Is-uh-Me-Bop", silent footage of masked Magic Band members using kitchen utensils as musical instruments, and Captain Beefheart kicking over a bowl of what appears to be porridge onto a dividing stripe in the middle of a road.
18.
Clear Spot's production credit of Ted Templeman made AllMusic's Ned Raggett consider "why in the world [it] wasn't more of a commercial success", and that while fans "of the fully all-out side of Captain Beefheart might find the end result not fully up to snuff as a result, but those less concerned with pushing back all borders all the time will enjoy his unexpected blend of everything tempered with a new accessibility".
19.
Captain Beefheart recruited singer and keyboardist Michael Smotherman, bassist Paul Uhrig, drummer Ty Grimes, saxophonist Del Simmons, and guitarists Dean Smith and Robert 'Fuzzy' Fuscaldo.
20.
Captain Beefheart later disowned both albums, calling them "horrible and vulgar", asking that they not be considered part of his musical output and urging fans who bought them to "take copies back for a refund".
21.
Captain Beefheart provided vocals for "Willie the Pimp" on Zappa's otherwise instrumental album Hot Rats.
22.
Captain Beefheart is the vocalist on "The Torture Never Stops " on Zappa's You Can't Do That on Stage Anymore, Vol.
23.
In 1977, Captain Beefheart appeared on the Tubes' album Now, playing saxophone on the song "Cathy's Clone".
24.
Captain Beefheart was interviewed on Granada regional television, standing in front of his bold black and white canvases.
25.
Captain Beefheart was further inspired when Julian Schnabel, who admired the artwork on his album covers, asked to buy a drawing from him.
26.
Captain Beefheart exhibited only few of his paintings because he immediately destroyed any that did not satisfy him.
27.
Captain Beefheart lived near Trinidad, California, with his wife Janet.
28.
Captain Beefheart is credited for naming Tepper's 2010 album A Singer Named Shotgun Throat.
29.
Captain Beefheart was a pioneer of art rock and experimental rock.
30.
Captain Beefheart's music has been cited as an influence on punk rock, post-punk and new wave music, and he has been classified as a proto-punk musician.
31.
Captain Beefheart's management referred to him as "potentially the greatest white blues singer of all time", while a combination of managers, musicians, fans and critics felt that he should have either sung more clearly and softly, made more commercial music or played "blues songs that people could understand and dance to".
32.
Captain Beefheart adapted to, and pushed the boundaries of, genres throughout his career.
33.
Van Vliet has been the subject of two documentaries, the BBC's 1997 The Artist Formerly Known as Captain Beefheart, narrated by John Peel, and the 2006 independent production Captain Beefheart: Under Review.
34.
Captain Beefheart later declared Trout Mask Replica to be the greatest album ever made.
35.
Captain Beefheart considered the appeal of the Magic Band as outcasts who were even "too weird for the hippies".
36.
Captain Beefheart is considered to have "greatly influenced" new wave artists, such as David Byrne of Talking Heads, Blondie, Devo, the Bongos, and the B-52s.
37.
The LCD Soundsystem song "Losing My Edge" has a verse in which James Murphy says, "I was there when Captain Beefheart started up his first band".
38.
Joan Osborne covered Captain Beefheart's " Eyes Are a Blue Million Miles", which appears on Early Recordings.
39.
Captain Beefheart's parents had all of his albums; she said that listening to them made her "feel ill".
40.
Captain Beefheart cited him as one of her greatest influences since.