Don Van Vliet, RIP

Very sad news today about Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart.

I remember my brother putting some Beefheart songs on a cassette for me when I was maybe 14, and having the living daylights freaked out of me. In a good way.

You can read Maura Johnston's short piece in Rolling Stone here. And of course you could always check out Kevin Courrier's book about Trout Mask Replica - details below:

In the spring of 1969, the inauspicious release of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band’s Trout Mask Replica, a double-album featuring 28 stream-of-consciousness songs filled with abstract rhythms and guttural bellows, dramatically altered the pop landscape.

Yet even if the album did cast its radical vision over the future of music, much of the record's artistic strength is actually drawn from the past. This book examines how Beefheart's incomparable opus, an album that divided (rather than) united a pop audience, is informed by a variety of diverse sources. Trout Mask Replica is a hybrid of poetic declarations inspired by both Walt Whitman and the beat poets, the field hollers of the Delta Blues, the urban blues of Howlin' Wolf, the gospel blues of Blind Willie Johnson, and the free jazz of Ornette Coleman. This book illustrates how Trout Mask Replica was not so much an arcane specimen of the avant-garde, but rather a defiantly original declaration of the American imagination.

Table of Contents

Prologue: The Truth Has No Patterns
Chapter One: A Desert Island of the Mind
Chapter Two: A Different Fish
Chapter Three: Jumping Out of School
Chapter Four: A Little Paranoia is a Good Propeller
Chapter Five: Music From the Other Side of the Fence
Chapter Six: Fast 'N Bulbous
Epilogue: Everyone Drinks From the Same Pond

Kevin Courrier is the author of several books, including Dangerous Kitchen: The Subversive World of Zappa, and Randy Newman's American Dreams. He has been a writer/broadcaster and film critic for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) since 1990.