The legend of Captain Beefheart is one of music's most looney tunes tales, of an unbalanced maverick who ran a cult-like regime on his bandmates through out most of his career in the Magic Band. But in 1969 it reached its apex. Not allowing bandmembers to leave the house they were practicing in, only allowing one member to leave once a week to pick-up food supplies. No sleep, lack of food and the constant practicing of the Trout Mask Replica songs slowly drove them insane. In preparation, the band rehearsed Van Vliet's difficult compositions for eight months, isolated living communally in a small rented house in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles. Later recorded between August 1968 – March 1969 and released in June 1969. Don had persuaded them that chicks and sex would interfere with their music, and so they played day and night, day and night. Unfortunately there was no money either and they starved, came down with illnesses, and were found wandering in search of food – one of them in a woman's dress, boots and a helmet, a crazed look in his eyes. Eventually they all left, some to return, but most to find food and recuperate and maybe even find a job with a band that made just a little money.
According to John French and Bill Harkleroad, these sessions often included physical violence. French described the situation as "cultlike", and a visiting friend said that "the environment in that house was positively Manson-esque". Their material circumstances also were dire. With no income other than welfare and contributions from relatives, the band survived on a bare subsistence diet. French recounted living on no more than a small cup of soybeans a day for a month, and at one point, band members were arrested for shoplifting food (whereupon Zappa bailed them out). A visitor described their appearance as "cadaverous" and said that "they all looked in poor health". Band members were restricted from leaving the house and practiced for fourteen or more hours a day. Van Vliet once told drummer John French that he had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and he would see nonexistent conspiracies that explained this behavior. There was also punishment dished out to the band members. To explain The Barrel, we shall lean on a vignette put forth by John French, otherwise known as Drumbo, no prizes for guessing what he played. When he was drafted in, he recalled making a mistake one session and having Vliet fly off the proverbial handle. Vliet commanded Drumbo to “get in the barrel”. Unwittingly he climbed into the old beer cask at the behest of the Captain. Therein, Vliet repeatedly struck the barrel with a stick and berated Drumbo’s performance with a fury akin to the Devil’s father on the sidelines of a football game. Don would even make the band sit around late at night and listen to his girlfriend read Salvador Dali - Diary Of A Genius (1963) & The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris (1967). They would go to bed at 1am and then wake up at 10am and start all over. The band slept on the floor in sleeping bags, except for Don and his girl, who had the master bedroom. Don would get up around 12pm-1pm then go to the piano and work on songs.
Undoubtedly, Don Van Vliet was a larger-than-life individual, both irrational, tyranical and manipulative, someone for whom mythic status seemed not so much appropriate as inevitable. Thompson boasts that “his life resists all attempts at demystification” (99). This kind of hyperbole amounts to a virtual matter of reflex when the subject was said to have gone for a year and a half without sleep; possessed three-and-a-half inch ears; was able to know phones would ring before the signal sounded; once sold a vacuum cleaner to Aldous Huxley; and submitted a bill to his record label for the damage to a studio's surrounding oaks and cedars because he believed the recording process in which he and the Magic Band had participated upset their equilibrium (99). Inspiration wise the Captain was listening to a lot of Ornette Coleman, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Harry Partch, Albert Ayler and the new wave of tape composers such as Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley and Steve Reich, who's song Come Out would be on constant rotation all night while they smoked pot and rolled their eyeballs in circles.
When commenting on Captain Beefheart, writers seem to have found themselves in a situation regarding Beefheart comparable to that of the reporter, played by Edmund O'Brien, in John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (1962) who asserts at the conclusion, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” The true story of Trout Mask was astonishing enough, but although near-starvation had long been associated with artistic endeavour, fist fights, tyranny and “brainwashing” sessions weren't such attractive selling points to the Woodstock generation. All that was kept under wraps and over time Van Vliet has been instead quoted, or paraphrased, as saying that the Magic Band worked by telepathy; or that [Mark] Boston had only been playing bass for six months, and [Bill] Harkleroad the guitar for seven months on joining, or that he had written all the music in eight and a half hours at the piano with variously named [John] French or [Victor] Hayden frantically transcribing his fevered outpourings; or that they regularly rehearsed for twenty hours a day; or that he had not left the Ensenada Drive house for over three years. Outside the claustrophobic mental assault course of life at the house, Van Vliet was generous in his praise of the musicians. But he was also unequivocal in taking credit for both writing and arranging all the music. And the myth was certainly helped by his portrayal of the musicians as idiot savant types who had never played before and whom he had taught from scratch. But in effect he did teach them from scratch. Certainly none of them would have come up with anything like Trout Mask Replica on their own. When he was over in London on press duties with Zappa, Van Vliet was asked by Zig Zag if the group were involved in music before the Magic Band. He made the point: “They were always involved, but now they're playing.” And later to Elliott Wald from Oui he said: “The musicians worked so hard at it. They were born on that Album.” (Barnes Citation119–20).
Chronologically, guitarist Harkleroad broke ranks first when in 1998 he published his pained recollections of participation in the band between 1968 and 1974: Lunar Notes: Zoot Horn Rollo's Captain Beefheart Experience. Raised in the desert communities of California where Van Vliet matured, the guitarist initially interacted with the composer as a teenager during jam sessions and was previously acquainted as well with Magic Band members French and guitarist Jeff Cotton. He joined them soon after completing high school.
Almost immediately, Harkleroad perceived something disconcerting about the environment, as his friends seemed simultaneously uncomfortable and excessively animated: “John and Jeff were not the same guys I used to know. They both had a seriously dire look in their eyes, yet on occasions would slip into a seriously over-the-top excitement” (23). The dissonant dimension of the experience diffused, however, in the face of the rewarding complexity of Van Vliet's compositions. He recalls, “That was really one of the best parts of being in the band. It legitimized art as opposed to that whole attitude of, ‘You're supposed to go to the post office and work and have three kids’” (26). Quickly, however, the admiration and animation Harkleroad experienced was transformed into disdain and disorientation. “The whole vibe consisted of us being enlightened by our overseer,” he remarks, once he recognized the degree to which he had become a “slavedog,”’ practicing sometimes sixteen or seventeen hours a day (38, 39). In addition, when the band was not practicing, they were subjected to belligerent indoctrination sessions led by Van Vliet that felt like little more than brainwashing.
Their wills broken down by lack of sleep, little food and long bouts of strenuous performance, these young men not long out of high school were compelled by Van Vliet to think of one another as potential deviants from the cause, as their overseer divided his ensemble into initiates and apostates. With Don there was always a “culprit,” there always had to be a person for him to vent his “beef” of the moment onto. Don was always picking on whoever he deemed to be the “bad person” of that particular moment. This always rotated, all of us were in that position at one time or another.…As a result of picking on people, it was not at all uncommon for us to literally go around beating the shit out of each other! (Harkleroad Citation68) One time in private with John French, Don asked him what he thought of another band memeber, after John told him he didnt think he was very good, Dom later brought it up in front of the whole band what John had said behind his back. Divide and conquer at its finest.
Harkleroad does not dwell upon these abuses, although he does characterize himself as a “beaten little puppy” who rationalizes his continuation in the ensemble because of the challenges of the repertoire and the skills to be learned as Van Vliet's musical amanuensis (85). He transcribed the separate shards that the bandleader created, assimilated them into coherent compositions and taught them by ear to his associates. After six years, however, Harkleroad could no longer tolerate this treatment and quit. He puts in perspective the length of his endurance with the conviction that Van Vliet was a truly great and abusive person in equal parts. As for worldly rewards, he received no money for his labors and admits to underplaying the depth of his degradation: “To this day I don't think I've ever really represented the situation as bad as it really was. I've just told parts of it” (130–31).
If Harkleroad minimizes his pain, John French maximizes the psychological and professional baggage incurred by placing himself in a subordinate position to a frequently belligerent taskmaster. What Harkleroad withholds, French unveils. Beefheart: Through the Eyes of Magic possesses a kind of Tolstoyan amplitude. A hefty 800 plus pages, it interweaves the drummer's exhaustive recollections along with information drawn from interviews with various members of the Magic Band as well as other associates and acquaintances from Van Vliet's past. The resemblance of French to the Russian novelist as an interrogator of behavior, however, does not stop at a simple matter of page length. He exhibits a comparable eagerness to comprehend convoluted human acts equal to that which impelled Tolstoy to inquire what drives societies to engage in battle or distinguishes one unhappy family from another. French concludes Van Vliet's erratic actions, their obscure motivations and the damage that arose in their wake to be as ultimately incomprehensible as the bulk of the public find the composer's repertoire. At the same time, the substantive difference between that audience and the drummer comes down to the simple fact that most people avoid repeated encounters with the Beefheart catalogue whereas French returns with a dogged persistence not only to perform with the composer but also to attempt to suss out what makes him tick. He has committed his lifetime both to that repertoire as well as to the dissection of the personality of its creator.
Beefheart: Through the Eyes of Magic opens with the explosive impact of a close-up in a Sam Fuller feature film, such as the object struck into the camera lens that begins The Naked Kiss (1964): John French is jammed into a wall by his bandmates as Van Vliet angrily interrogates him in the process of “another of his ridiculous witch hunts” (7). He continues, ''A day like this seemed to happen after about five normal days. In fact, most of the days like this lasted two days, occasionally even three. They were comprised of the sleepless horror of either being the target or watching the target and knowing you soon would be next. Huge amounts of tea were consumed to keep us awake and alert.'' (CitationFrench, Beefheart 7)
The paradox at the core of this scenario that French will unpack with the skill of a therapist and the dedication of a fictional shamus comes down to how encounters such as these, whose goal “seemed to be to completely strip the individual in question of all dignity, self-worth and pride,” could coincide with an artistic agenda that would result in “a quest to finish an album that would later land the position of 33rd in the top albums ever recorded—at least according to Rolling Stone magazine” (8, 9). French concludes by assessing that, notwithstanding the harassment, the poverty, the physical wear and tear, “I knew it was a privilege—albeit certainly wrapped in an ironic cloak—to be associated with this man” (768). And yet, so varied and unpredictable could Van Vliet be that, out of the blue, he might act in a manner that puts the kibosh on any conclusive judgment of his character. In that regard, the last, altogether typically gnomic things that Van Vliet said to French hold considerable resonance: “You were always there, man,” repeated three times with his hand on his heart, and then the ultimate admonition, “I'll see you around. Watch your topknot, and keep your eyes on the skyline” (French, Beefheart 748, ”Watch Your Topknot” 35).
Exhaustive as French's detailing of his experience with Van Vliet may be, it is possible to subdivide the acrimony into categories. Otherwise, a reader can become as swamped by the evidence as French often feels overwhelmed by his emotions and memories. Two bodies of information particularly stand out: first, the refusal on the bandleader's part either to practice standardized musical language or to alleviate his ignorance in any manner. This led to his dependence upon French, and others including Harkleroad, to translate his ideas and transfer them to their confederates. If one were to put the matter in an automotive context, Van Vliet adamantly demanded to occupy the driver's seat but steadfastly refused to earn a license. Second, there was the manner in which Van Vliet maltreated his accompanists psychologically and eventually physically in a seemingly systematic effort to evacuate them of any sense of self-worth, even of personality. Part of the rationale for both the length of the book and the scope of the evidence is to permit French not only to validate his reading of Van Vliet but also to reinforce its accuracy by means of the corroboration offered to him by others who were treated in the same manner and suffered the same indignity.
He states, “Don's strongest talent may lay not in his musical abilities as most would think, but in his theatrical abilities, which he had developed at an early age….Van Vliet's theatrical abilities were able to convince others that he was a genuine blues singer, when, in fact, he was merely playing a composite role of the heroes of his adolescence.…Don was often lost in his own songs” (Beefheart 125). Putting the time into practicing or endeavouring to learn his own material with sufficient precision such that he could repeat it from one occasion to another—an ability he routinely demanded of his accompanists—apparently failed to stimulate Van Vliet's imagination. Part of the impetus behind his ill treatment of his accompanists consequently arose from his deliberate lack of a common language that he could share with them. Whenever he could not translate his ideas into a communal form, Van Vliet would turn upon the others and attack their very professional competence rather than recognize the liability of his own failure to acquire certain elementary musical skills. His commitment to his music remained, start to finish, resolutely self-referential; adamantly committed to the assumption that other performers were vehicles for his work, not individuals to be valued for themselves.
This posture can perhaps be most accurately illustrated by Van Vliet's habit of explaining how he wanted his accompanists to perform in a manner that refused to be anything other than metaphorical. Biographer Mike Barnes sympathetically explains the process as follows: “Van Vliet was becoming more interested in using found sounds to generate musical ideas and his descriptions of what he wanted were beginning to sound like a verbalized equivalent of a section of graphic score” (303). For example, the drummer Cliff Martinez reports receiving the following sets of instructions from Van Vliet: “Make it like Fred Astaire dangling through a tea cup; like BBs on the plate; babies flying over the mountains” (Barnes 303).
Even if the composer believed his intention was to disrupt the conventional patterns of communication, French and others speculate whether, in fact, the practice was yet another means of controlling the situation without having to step outside a rigidly defined comfort zone. John French's description of what it was like to be Van Vliet's musical amanuensis reinforces this tactic of simultaneously controlling others while abnegating the role of authority: “Putting together Don's music was like taking a dozen jigsaw puzzles and dumping them into the same box, then dividing the scrambled parts and putting several puzzles together at once. Everything was incomplete and disorganized. It made the whole effort seem intensely overwhelming” (292). It would be a mistake to assume that Van Vliet routinely acted in such a passive manner, for he repeatedly exercised his authority with considerable vigor at least and overt violence at worst. French and Harkleroad each report on how he often deliberately adopted the role of despot. Even when an ostensible rationale for his behavior could not be discerned, Van Vliet did not seem to require a distinct impetus in order to launch into aggression. French nonetheless uncovers a method, or perhaps a formula, to his belligerence. ''It was a bit of Pavlov, mixed with Synanon, interrogation procedures, sleep deprivation, and brainwashing techniques all rolled up in a bundle. It was actually brilliant work on Don's part. I think his most brilliant work ever—his total control and manipulation of four young men. This was group encounter in which negative reinforcement techniques transformed us into obedient minions.'' (French, Beefheart 375)
Sometimes these techniques led to a one-on-one attack upon a particular musician, usually in the form of character assassination. The most indistinguishable factors set off Van Vliet. So indelible was the impact of his behavior that, years later, members of the Magic Band could still flinch at simply hearing a phrase that he would use to dismiss them. Harkleroad writes:
Recently I got together with Citation John French, he was here visiting and my wife and I took him out to dinner, and he said a phrase I hadn't heard for years, it almost made me quiver. He said “You have a thing”. And when you “had a thing” you were the culprit. The dirty thing you had done, whatever it was, was undermining the brilliance of our situation. So we all “had things”, of course. Except one person—and you can guess who that was (43).
On other occasions, as in the episode that opens French's narrative, Van Vliet enlisted the rest of the Magic Band as accomplices and dealt out physical punishment to the individual who had been labeled an apostate. In the body of his memoir, French provides an even more detailed and disturbing description of the attack upon him. ''Don shouted, “Get him!” On that verbal cue, all four of them started hitting me at once, mostly in the face. I can only recall this kind of physical attack happening to me and only this once, but it was absolutely terrifying.…I had been scared, but this time I actually thought I was going to die, and this was more real than anything before. I remember being cornered in the kitchen and hand after hand hitting and slapping me on the face and upper body and being kicked.…This was the most frightened I had ever been and I shouted “stop” several times.'' (French, Beefheart 451)
What proved to be equally if not even more disconcerting to French than the physical pain inflicted upon him was how Van Vliet switched positions almost immediately. The very next evening, he was appointed “Don's ‘special friend’ again,” urged not to leave, and informed he was crucial to the maintenance of the Magic Band (455). Nothing about Van Vliet's behavior on this latter occasion came across as premeditated or purposefully sanctimonious. To French, “This was a very emotional and heartfelt moment, and I almost never saw Don appear this sincere in my whole experience with him” (455). At the same time, the variability of Van Vliet's behavior does not contradict his primary aim of being in control at all times. French hypothesizes how the fact that he was an only child instilled in Van Vliet an innate and inflexible sense of superiority. Van Vliet reinforced this supposition when he forthrightly informed the drummer, “You realize, John, that I am a King.…John, you know I am” (507). Van Vliet was also not above being simply and purely petty and vindictive. For all that French did to actualize the very material contained on Trout Mask Replica, he was denied any credit on the jacket sleeve of the album. Admittedly, his image appears among the other oddly dressed individuals in the incorporated photos, yet the list of performers would lead one to assume that the drumming was performed by a phantom.
When the master does not allow his or her individuality and distinctiveness to swallow up this environment, the passing along of tacit knowledge can dominate, facilitating growth on the part of his or her subordinates, and a supportive community comes into existence.
Sociologist Richard Sennett presents a vision of how a workshop can most demonstrably permit this kind of growth in his book The Craftsman. He writes, ''In theory the well-run workshop should balance tacit and explicit knowledge. Masters should be pestered to explain themselves, to dredge out the assemblage of clues and moves they have absorbed into silence within—if only they could, or if only they would. Much of their very authority derives from seeing what others don't see, knowing what they don't know; their authority is made manifest in their silence.'' (Sennett 78)
Sennett believes that one of the primary acts that indicate how much masters are willing to subordinate their authority to the needs of the workshop is how they explain their skills, how they transmit their expertise. Even though an apprentice learns a great deal by osmosis, whenever the master demonstrates some skill, a burden exists on the part of the apprentice to be sure that they figure out, as Sennett states, “what turned the key in the lock,” so to speak (181). A genuine and potentially transformational transposition of knowledge is encouraged whenever the master recognizes the vulnerability of the apprentice, and “[t]his turn to vulnerability is the sign of sympathy the instructor gives” (186). He adds, “the expert guides by anticipating difficulties for the novice; sympathy and prehension combine” (186). Whenever masters, however, fail to consider beforehand how their skills come into being, that partial, and ultimately incomprehensible, explanation is defined by Sennett as “dead denotation” (183). This form of instruction becomes vivid only to someone who has accomplished the task beforehand. Over-familiarity on the part of the master can only increase the degree of dead denotation. Therefore, Sennett asserts, “The challenge posed by dead denotation is precisely to take apart tacit knowledge, which requires bringing to the surface of consciousness that knowledge which has become so self-evident and habitual that it seems just natural” (183). Appraising the degree to which this transmission succeeds necessitates a moral judgment upon the masters, as their willingness or failure to interpolate in their instructions the degree of vulnerability possessed by a novice indicates their capacity for extinguishing solipsism and inaugurating sympathy. Even if neither Harkleroad nor French appears to be aware of Sennett's study, their memoirs together reinforce how Van Vliet chose to embody the role of master in a particularly truncated and ultimately inefficient fashion. His level of sympathy appears to have been attenuated, and his willingness to take apart and render into public discourse his inner thoughts and forms of expression virtually negligible. Consequently, he may well have been frustrated to the extreme by finding himself in this position, and his objectifications of the Magic Band resulted to some degree from his sense that they as a group occupied a separate and lamentably incompatible universe. Van Vliet in the end abnegated his very exercise of authority as a master by failing to attempt to comprehend what these young men, just barely out of high school and only embarked upon manhood, knew and did not know. He chose by and large to manifest his authority through either silence, illustrated by his lack of practice time spent with his accompanists, or a form of expression so driven by private references as to be virtually inexplicable. Of course, as even Sennett admits, a workshop does not guarantee the acquisition of knowledge; sometimes it does not ever transmit the skills required for a particular activity. Nonetheless, how that process occurs is rich with ethical implications.
Perhaps, in the end, the assumption that Van Vliet could or even wished to exceed the least common requirements of the role of master flies in the face of the core of his personality. Clearly, neither Harkleroad nor French felt, despite considerable interaction with him personally and professionally, that they ever cracked the code of the core of his being. An insurmountable barrier of personal inhibitions and prohibitions intervened. Maybe they would have been forewarned more explicitly as to that obstacle had they read certain of Van Vliet's lyrics as an index of his character. As stated earlier, one of the core paradoxes of his accomplishments remains how a body of work that challenges fixation and celebrates open-mindedness should have incorporated such a profound degree of rigidity in order to come into existence. One cannot therefore soft-pedal the encomiums in his words to the vitality of physical nature or appreciate his employment of a broad range of the possible forms of the imagination without keeping in mind the occasions when his musicians were made to feel less than human.
One way potentially to make sense of this conundrum is to recognize that there are those kinds of individuals who can bring more oxygen into a room than already exists in a space, allow those they share that territory with to breathe more fully and experience a beneficial giddiness. And there are others who suck much of the oxygen out of a given environment and leave their cohorts gasping for breath and disagreeably light-headed. Don Van Vliet seems to be both of those kinds of individuals, as he could inspire and incapacitate his associates at one and the same time.
So you would get the band living communally and being subjected by Beefheart to extreme social isolation, starvation and that most delightful of brainwashing techniques, scapegoating. This happens in many places - the leader (Beefheart in this case) picks out a group member (could be Jimmy Semens one week, Rockette Morton the next, John French the week after that) and blames him for screwing up some song or another, or generally bringing everyone down with his miserable vibe, or eating too much bread, or anything. Beefheart would then subject the individual to hours of verbal abuse, cranking up the menace and browbeating everyone else to join in, until the scapegoat was taking insults escalating to physical violence from all the others. Ribs were broken at times, fists were used.
After a while it’s clear that the cultish atmosphere includes many features of what we now recognise as Grooming and Psychological Manipulation. Group members were cut off from friends and family. The Captain controls everything to do with money, living conditions, drugs and food as well as the music. As someone says very perceptively towards the end of the book: “Don van Vliet was fortunate to have lived in an era where his psychopathic behaviour could be misconstrued as genius” At least Manson had an income though, the austerity in Vliet’s HQ was verging on some sort of Soviet reverse opulence. The entire commune had zero income other than welfare for the duration of their stay and powered through 14-hour practice sessions every day fuelled by no more than a cup of soybeans that had usually been stolen on scavenger hunts. With extreme punishments for stepping out of line, the process moved forward tentatively. As Drumbo puts it, “It was as though someone had taken a blank jigsaw puzzle, randomly picked up pieces and scribbled little pictures on each one, and said, ‘Put this together, I’ll be out later to see the thing when it’s done’.”
Even when Vliet entered the studio for more professional phases, he recorded the overdubbed vocals by hearing the original songs through a slightly ajar window. Owing to the fact that he could barely hear the melody the vocals remain complete unsynchronised. When this was pointed out to him, he presumably left the studio like The Fonz twirling his keys on his fingers as he quipped, “[Synchronising?] That’s what they do before a commando raid, isn’t it?” The result is an album that remains beyond review. The mayhem bleeds through, but depending on who you ask, a few moments of magic can be found in the melee. All that is left to say, is that there is certainly nothing so strange as folk.
The same can be said when the pieces were finally ready to be put together. One of the initial recordings involved Zappa coming to the house with engineer Dick Kunc and setting up the recording equipment in the centre of the house then achieving sound separation by having each musician play behind a closed door in a different room of the house. It’s this question that becomes a recurrent theme – how a scene that was initially based on the potentially liberating forces of psychedelics soon produced a kind of dystopia where it became “uncool” at the very least to challenge obnoxious behaviour. Drumbo gives numerous examples of how the group were intimidated by the Captain, and afraid to be the one to stand out. Equally, the media didn’t want to look uncool by not “getting it”. There’s a particularly fawning 1971 Rolling Stone interview where nonsense like “there are only forty people in the world, and five of them are hamburgers” go unchallenged.
