Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band Grow Fins: Rarities (1965-1982) (Revenant)
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
This, ironically, is why I can’t brook the myth of Captain Beefheart, solitary genius. The romantic half-truth of the great artist as loner, ritualized outsider, Uberuntermensch, actually contributes to the banality of our lives. By placing our artists on pedestals, we isolate them. In isolation, they lose inspiration, so we tear them down and move on. In reality, no one creates completely alone: it requires the energy and interaction of a community to give dreams their waking-world flesh. And if one’s dreams happen to be extraordinary, then it can take an extraordinary community to bring them to life.
Don Van Vliet retired from music in 1982 and now lives in a small town in California, where he’s devoted himself to painting and maintains a strict public silence on just about everything, from his past musical work to rumors of a severe illness. In his absence, the story of his community has finally begun to emerge.
Why? Maybe the cultish methods of the Magic Band broke down French’s and Harkleroad’s egos so thoroughly that establishing an independent identity afterward proved impossible. But I don’t think so. I think the answer’s in the records–which is one of the many paradoxes that make it impossible to use music as a social-ideology blueprint or consistent morality tale. The history of the arts is populated with both gentle, ethical folks and sociopathic SOBs who made great works–and with both gentle, ethical folks and sociopathic SOBs who never made a dent. Whatever his megalomaniacal tendencies, whatever brutalities Van Vliet inflicted, he envisioned some great fucking music.
Writing in 1993 in Mojo, Dave DiMartino described Kaiser and French’s efforts to tell another side of the story as an attempt to “diminish” Van Vliet’s musical legacy. I don’t think it does, or could–the records are there and are not available for diminishment. Revealing all the players’ work ethic and willingness to go the extra creative blue million miles doesn’t diminish jack shit–in fact, what is revealed is far more awe inspiring than the myth. The true legacy of such richly imagined, carefully created, and highly inspired music so full of clashing sounds and ideas–of true negative capability–may be how difficult it is to see Captain Beefheart in such crude blacks and whites: how wrong to think that if Van Vliet needed collaborators he couldn’t have been a true visionary, and that if he had a streak of villainy he couldn’t also have been a true hero.
