Beefheart: Through the Eyes of Magic (Revised Edition)

By John Drumbo French

A no-holds barred account of working with Beefheart featuring interviews with all key players inside and around The Magic Band and the Mothers Of Invention.

As drummer and musical director for the iconoclastic Captain Beefheart, John "Drumbo" French was a key contributor to the band's many groundbreaking albums including Trout Mask Replica.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Last Music Company
• Release date: Apr 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9780992806248

Book preview

John French circa 1962. Courtesy of John French.

Cop out! Van Vliet shouted at me. I cringed and moved quickly to my right as the sharp jagged point of the broomstick he was holding dug into the soft wood of the laundry shed wall at my back. The adrenaline caused my thoughts to flow at an incredible speed. In between each new lunge of the stick, a different phase of my 20 years of life came under review. I wondered, is this similar to the sensation of those who have a near-death experience in which their life passes before their eyes?.

I studied the expressions on the faces of bassist Mark Boston and guitarists Jeff Cotton and Bill Harkleroad who stood in a semicircle behind Don. He had ordered them to push me back against the wall if I attempted to escape this dilemma, and they obeyed – just as I had in times past. They had all been in my shoes time after time and I in theirs. Guilt was written on their faces, just as it probably had been written on mine in recent times during their turns. Similar scenes had been played out many times before, but this was more physical and violent than most.

Where are you at, man? Why are you so selfish? Don snarled, and another jab and another dance on my part to avoid the broomstick occurred. Was Don purposely avoiding actually hitting me in the abdomen with the sharp point? I wasn’t sure, but it seemed he was bluffing. This was most likely just another attempt to humiliate one in front of the others - another of his ridiculous witch trials. I know, however, that I was feeling a great deal of fear, more than I’d ever felt. Whether this was real or a bluff, it was convincing enough for me.

A relatively normal day – if one day of recent months in this house could be called normal – would be comprised of ridiculous amounts of dedication on the part of myself and the others to the fragments of music Don called his compositions. These were days in which we spent most of our waking hours learning and memorizing a steady stream of these fragments and arranging them into songs.

A day like today 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.

A million questions swept through my mind at the speed of thought. How was this man able to exert such power over us? How did he continue to manipulate us in such a fashion? Was a mind-control agent such as LSD being put into the tea? How was it that we allowed one man to control us all to this ridiculous extent?

I had been standing out here, ducking this stick for what seemed like half an hour. I glanced over to my left at the lighted window of the house. It looked like a book cover illustration, almost fake. Not real at all, just a cardboard cutout set up with yellow light streaming out. The walls were glossy red. I could see a part of my drum kit, a cymbal, through one of the windows and the piano in the background where I spent so much time. Other than the situation, it was a beautiful night, perfectly still, and just the right temperature.

Talk man! Van Vliet growled, and again another thrust of the broomstick. It had been hours since this had started as a mild interrogation session in the house. I think the basis for suspicion against me had been the fact that Don was convinced that I was commercializing one of his compositions. It was a song called Fallin’Ditch and anyone who heard it in the years afterward never once said This is unusually commercial in comparison to the other compositions. It was an absurd accusation, as all of Don’s accusations were.

I often suspected a touch of mental illness as the cause of Don’s delusional state. We did nothing to alter his music. I was the guy in charge of transcribing his untrained meanderings on the keyboard into musical notation. I would then play them back so the others could learn them, and also had the daunting task of deciding who played what, how many times, and in what order. I’d never seen people work so hard on any project.

If a particular piece of music didn’t sound right to Don - often this music was taught to the band many days after it had been created – then someone had to be blamed for this travesty. A drama would begin to unfold in which Van Vliet would ask a few casual questions. Tensions would begin to mount in anticipation. If he were not satisfied with the answers, as was often the case, this would soon escalate into a group meeting with one of us labeled as the conspirator.

Van Vliet was an expert interrogator. He was very relaxed and entertaining to all who were not in the barrel. The suspected party would be isolated socially by being ignored a bit as Don would address the jury of peers and state his case. The defendant would become the brunt of all Don’s sarcasm and humor. The goal seemed to be to completely strip the individual in question of all dignity, self-worth and pride. I was often called nigger John. When I was given something to eat or drink, Don would say, See, I’m so nice I’d even feed a nigger – Joohhhnnn – drawing out my name sarcastically and speaking to me as though I was a rapist or murderer, or just some transient.

Why? I kept asking myself over and over again, … is he doing this? What possible goal could he have in mind? This album project was dragging on and on. Obviously, morale was extremely low. No one enjoyed living like this. I wanted to play onstage and meet girls. I had no social life. I wanted to make money and have some freedom to come and go, to visit friends and eat out in a restaurant or see a movie. None of us had a car of our own, and we hadn’t played onstage in months. We were all nineteen and twenty-year-old kids and this guy, at twenty-eight, was our leader - the guy we were looking to for direction.

My intuition also told me that the music we were writing was not going to be received well by the public, and that all these months and months of 12-hour workdays were never going to be compensated for financially. This made my morale even lower. How on earth, I kept wondering, Could he not see that and keep saying that we were going to ‘make it’? How on earth could that wonderful blues band that played in my hometown three years back have turned into this horror story?"

After being haunted by these memories for forty years, and being asked about this experience repeatedly, I decided to write down everything I could recall. One cannot answer a simple question like "What was it like rehearsing for Trout Mask Replica?" with a simple soundbite. It’s a long story, and one I would rather tell once than repeat over and over again. Maybe if I write it down, it will stop re-playing itself in my head.

The members of the various Magic Bands span several eras and age groups. The older members were born in the early to middle 1940s. Their early musical experience would be more connected with the big band era. The period of their adolescence spanned the early years of Rhythm & Blues and Rock ’n’Roll.

This group includes:

Don Van Vliet: Singer, composer, harmonica player, sax player and leader.

Alex St. Claire Snouffer: Guitarist/drummer and founder of The Magic Band

Doug Moon: Guitarist

Rich Hepner: Guitarist

Denny Feeler’s Rebo Walley: Guitarist (contemporary, but not a member until 1975)

Gerald (Jerry) Handley: Bassist

Roy Orejon Estrada: Bassist (contemporary, but not a member until 1972)

P.G. Blakely: Drummer

Vic Mortensen: Drummer

The middle or Trout Mask/Decals era members were generally born in the late 1940s to early 1950s. (For the uninitiated, Trout Mask Replica is a landmark Beefheart album recorded in 1969 and Lick My Decals Off, Baby was recorded in 1970.) Their early recollections would be of the end of the big band era, and the beginnings of R&B and R&R. The British Invasion occurred during their adolescence. The band members all had pseudonyms given them by Don Van Vliet.

This group includes:

Bill Zoot Horn Rollo Harkleroad: Guitarist

Jeff Antennae Jimmy Semens Cotton: Guitarist

Arthur Ed Marimba Tripp III: Drummer, percussionist, marimba

Mark Rockette Morton Boston: Bassist

John Drumbo French: Drummer

The last generation of Magic Band members (I’m only guessing here, not having interviews) were probably born in the 1950s. Their youth would have coincided with the heyday of the Beatles specifically and the British Invasion in general, and their adolescence would have exposed them to the end of the psychedelic era and, among other things, Captain Beefheart And His Magic Band. Most of these players were fans before becoming members of the band.

This group generally includes:

Jeff Moris Tepper: Guitarist

Richard Redus: Guitarist

Gary Mantis Lucas: Guitarist

Eric Kitabu Drew Feldman: Keyboardist, bassist

Bruce Fossil Fowler: Trombone

Gary Jaye: Drummer

Robert Wait for Me Williams: Drummer

Influences and styles in the Magic Band can be traced back to the same sources: names like Robert Johnson, Sonny Boy Williamson, Son House, Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker, Elmore James, Muddy Waters, and BB King.

Early Magic Band members are more apt to remember the likes of Little Richard, Jimmy Reed, or John Lee Hooker. The later band members are probably more likely to recall the British Invasion of the ‘60s. This indirectly introduced them to some of the same influences - Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and so on - along with Chuck Berry, but all through the interpretations of such groups as The Yardbirds, The Rolling Stones, or The Animals.

The members of the early band were more likely to wear Greaser (a nickname derived from the fact that the boys used hair oil or pomade to achieve the desired style) or Pachuco style haircuts, and to wear khaki pants. Their successors were more prone to have bridged the gap between the surfer and hippy eras.

The Trout Mask/Decals band, my contemporaries, grew up around tie-dye shirts, love beads, and flared jeans. We were around during the Love Generation – the hippy era, and it influenced our look to an extent, yet we were not really part of that. We were an encapsulated counter-culture unto ourselves, trapped in a house in Woodland Hills on 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.

One thing all the members had in common was a fascination with drums, bass, guitar, and the various nontraditional rock instruments that came to be featured in later versions of the Magic Band, such as marimba and trombone.

By taking these same influences and adding a few new ingredients, the results can be extremely unique. Add a sparse desert setting, the Antelope Valley, near Los Angeles that was isolated enough by mountain ranges to remain an enclave partially detached from the cultural influence of L.A.’s urban growth, the high desert area became a creative center for adolescents with an abundance of time on their hands and little in the way of diversion.

John French: What do you think about the environment of the desert and the way it affected the way you thought about music?

Jim Sherwood: I think it drew me to music, because it was so boring up there. It was nothing. There was nothing to do. All you did was walk out through the desert. Nothing! What I did was just spend my time walking out to the bowling alley, which was about five miles away, and then walking back. Or [you could] walk downtown and go to the restaurant and get a malt or something. They had a great little hamburger stand called Bubi Burgers.

JF: Oh yeah, that was on the corner of Sierra and J?

JS: Yeah. You could go over there and pick up a hamburger and a Coke and fries for like 75 cents. Then, they had Foster’s Freeze, which was only two doors up, which later on became a hangout for a lot of the guys.

JF: Right, which is also where the Bongo Fury cover was (later) shot.

Jerry Handley had a similar take:

Jerry Handley: I got interested in music when I was about 13 because there wasn’t much else going on. I wasn’t involved in anything else, and there wasn’t that much activity to do. You were out stealing hubcaps or you were out playing music.

Fresh ideas and new approaches were more likely in a remote area, where the urban cultural influences did not have such an immediate presence. Add young adults from different parts of the country brought together by an (aircraft) industry closely attached to the Military Industrial Complex. Suddenly, a new cultural mixture emerges, ideas collide and re-form, and creativity takes a slightly different route.

Radio was a very influential link and common bond throughout the U.S. in the 1950s. Adolescents used it as a catalyst to start conversations and form friendships. Young bands developed and started imitating their heroes of the airwaves to celebrate cultural independence from their parents. A new sound began to be heard in the girls gymnasium on Friday nights after the game.

Such was the mixture of events that took place in the Antelope Valley and other areas of Southern California in the early fifties. America was the leader of the world, and a hero to many nations. We had fought the good fight both on the side of the Allied forces in Europe and Africa and against a formidable foe in the Pacific theatre in WWII. The U.S. had come out victorious and prosperous, recovering from a great financial recession. Americans had the spilled blood of their relatives to once again remind them of the cost of freedom. Many had lost loved ones, and patriotism was revitalized. Everyone was once again seeking the American Dream, and enjoying the good times they felt they had earned after a long world war and the preceding depression.

Mortensen’s Early Childhood

Vic Mortensen was the Magic Band’s first official drummer, although unofficially preceded for a very short period by Paul (P.G.) Blakely. In his interview, Vic recalls his childhood back in the late forties and early fifties.

John French: Well, I think it might be good to trace back from your beginnings. Briefly describe how you got started as a drummer, where you grew up, where you were born and that kind of thing.

Vic Mortensen: Well, that’s kind of funny because it’s like growing up at your mother’s knee. I was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan March 10th, 1942. We lived on a ten-acre piece of land out in the middle of nowhere. It was on a place called Hogback Road … my mother had a piano and my father had bought me a little parade drum. My mother would play the piano and I would play the drum. She would play marches, like Hail to the Victors, the University of Michigan fight song.

JF: How old were you?

VM: Started as a drummer (laughs) about the age of three.

During World War II, plans for relocating anywhere were impossible. All of the adults were engaged in the war effort. Individual dreams were temporarily suspended in lieu of patriotism. The Mortensen’s, however, had probably already begun to form a dream of one day moving to warm and sunny California, where the streets were paved with gold, to seek the American dream and escape the cold Michigan winters. Mr. Mortensen, a native of Denmark, worked in a place called Willow Run, working in a factory assembling bombers.

When peacetime ensued, the American Dream was again possible, and the Mortensens sold off some property and bought a new car and a nice travel trailer. Sometime in 1948, they settled in Claremont, California. Mr. Mortensen, who had always been a cook, sometimes spent as much as 16 hours a day making candy in his newly acquired candy store. Mrs. Mortensen was working in a hospital, and then would work several more hours helping in the store.

Denny Walley, Accordion And Guitar - 1950

At about the same time, five-year-old Denny Walley was living on the East Coast and beginning to study accordion. Born February 4th 1943 at Abbington Hospital in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania. Denny not only became a featured guitarist in the Frank Zappa band during the Bongo Fury tour (1975–1976), but also played on the 1976 recording sessions for the original version of the Captain Beefheart album entitled Bat Chain Puller (still unreleased at the time of this writing). In addition to the amazing slide guitar tracks on that album, Denny was responsible for the accordion part on the accompanying track Harry Irene.

The Walley family moved to Flatbush, New York, soon after Denny’s birth. By the time Denny was seven, they had moved to the New York suburbs on Long Island. One evening, Denny’s parents had taken him along to a cocktail party at the home of a family friend, where the children were soon relegated to the basement.

Denny Walley: Well, I found this box down there. I opened it up and found [a] twelve base accordion.

John French: What does that (term) mean?

DW: Well, the left hand had twelve buttons.

JF: OK, so that’s small?

DW: Yeah, it’s very small; it’s like a child’s size. I think it (the right hand keyboard) had about 2½ octaves. It was white with red keys and it smelled so good. The whole thing, it was like when I opened it up, it was like Whoa – this is a VERY IMPORTANT THING!. I picked it up, strapped it on, and I was playing (with) both hands before the end of the evening.

Upon his parents’ and host’s simultaneous discovery and recovery from the initial shock that Denny had violated the non-snooping oath, they noticed that he was actually playing the instrument. His affinity for the accordion eventually prompted his parents to invest in lessons.

John French: How long did you continue to take those lessons?

Denny Walley: I took those for about five years.

JF: Until about the age of twelve.

DW: Yeah, then we moved to Lancaster…

Although Denny would play no role in the discography of either Zappa or Beefheart until 1975, this move initiates his connection with the residents of Lancaster earlier in the 1950s.

My Birth; 1948

I suppose 1948 may be a good year for me to interject a little of my own early memories, as it was the year I was born, on September 29th to be exact. My parents and my three older brothers had moved from Springfield, Ohio, to San Diego just prior to the beginning of World War II (my mother, Pearl, came out with my brothers, and my father joined her soon afterwards). She may have been the original Rosie the Riveter the first of the female aircraft workers. She recalls having her picture taken as the first woman (non-clerical, I suppose) to enter the gates of Consolidated Aircraft as an aircraft worker. The family eventually moved to San Bernardino, California, arriving the day the war was over in 1945, and I was conceived three years later after the 1948 New Year’s Eve celebration, or so I’ve been told. My father continued to work in the aircraft industry from mid-wartime until his retirement in the late 1960s. My mother, like Vic Mortensen’s, was also a nurse.

All of the members of the Trout Mask band were born around 1948 to 1950 and were baby-boomers. So, we all had our beginnings around the time Vic Mortensen’s family moved to Claremont, and perhaps a year or two prior to Denny’s first accordion lessons on Long Island.

Mortensen’s Formal Training / Claremont 1954–55

Vic Mortensen began formal music training when he was 12 or 13, in the early to mid-1950s, on an instrument not of his choice: the piano, which he dutifully practiced while my friends were out playing football in the street.

Vic Mortensen: After years of pestering, they gave me drum lessons. I wish I could remember the gentleman’s name, but I literally went to his house and started learning to play the drums. He had been a drummer for Les Brown and his Band of Renown. So, the guy had some chops. They didn’t send me there to learn parade drumming. They sent me to a guy who had played, in those days, big band drumming. So I fiddled around and then started driving my parents crazy. They bought me a practice set. I have a photograph of me somewhere playing that. The bass drum is as big as your living room. It still had the palm tree on it because we got it used someplace and it probably said, Caruso And The Palm Knockers, or something, on the drumheads.

Like many drummers, however, Mortensen didn’t truly learn how to sight-read drum music. Although able to study charts and grasp all the concepts, Mortensen would study what he was seeing until he grasped the concept.

Vic Mortensen: When you say read, when I think of the cats that read music, I think of the guys in the Johnny Carson Show band, OK? They would pay someone else to go to their rehearsals, make notes on the charts, and then [they would] come in themselves and sight-read the stuff. Now, that’s what I call reading music … no, I would never deem to say I could read music … fluently. One day, he let me sit down at the drum set, right? He started hipping me to the fact that, all right, these are called hi-hats. And now that you know how to go dah, dat-de-dah with the drumsticks, let me show you what these are all about. Then, learning the bass pedal, where the bass pedal goes. When to use the hi-hat - boom, chick, boom, chick. We went through that for quite some time until I was able, in those days, to turn on a Benny Goodman record and try to cook along with the boys. Always behind Mr. Krupa, if you will.

Because playing the drumset is more a matter of feel than of technicality, most drummers learn by playing along with other drummers. One learns to distinguish each drum from another, and certain roles are determined for each limb. Soon, Mortensen was playing well enough to land his first semi-professional gig.

Vic Mortensen: I played my first professional gig at the age of thirteen. There was a group of college kids in town. They had put together a little thing. It was called The Lamplighters if that will give you a clue. (Sings Doo - wah) They called the drum teacher to see if he had a student that could cut it. They were in a jam, you know. So here I was, thirteen, man, and I show up - my parents bring me to the gig. (Laughs) John French: … so, you must have been doing pretty well for the teacher to start recommending you for gigs when you were thirteen.

VM: But, I could have been his only student. (Laughs) Who knows?

Actually, Vic had no way of knowing this because of the manner in which he received lessons.

Vic Mortensen: … Those were different times. I went to this old boy’s house… he had an old two-story house in Claremont. You know, really crotchety, and I’m sure he was associated in some way with the colleges there. Claremont was entirely a college town. No, this was like going to this weird, haunted house to have drum lessons.

John French: OK. You were probably going to high school by that time. Did you join in any of the music stuff in the high school?

VM: OK, let me lay this on you. In those days, there was no middle school, as it is today. You went to grade school from the first through the sixth grade. Then you went to high school, from the seventh through the twelfth grade. Because it was a small town and that was it. So, when we were in the seventh grade, you couldn’t be on the football team, but you could be in the band. (Heh!)

JF: I see, so you were probably already in the band by then.

VM: Yeah, I was in the marching band in the seventh grade.

JF: Did they have a dance band?

VM: No, are you kidding? There were only like five hundred kids in the high school. I was also playing in the classical orchestra. I played snare drum (faux sophisticated voice) in the classical concert band. We did the music from Victory at Sea. I played snare drum and stood right next to the cat playing the bass drum. We’d go bop-a-te-baaa, and there would be like a hundred and twenty-four bar rest, and so all we did was sit there and count. I’d wake him up and say, Hey, wake up, we’re coming to the part where you go boom bah boom," and lay back for another thirty-two bars.

JF: OK. Claremont, where is that located?

VM: Claremont, California, is about thirty miles east of L.A. It’s the home of the Associated Colleges of Claremont California. At least, that’s what they used to be called - probably still are.

1954 - French Moves To Antelope Valley

It was around this time that I was introduced to the Antelope Valley, just before the age of six. In the spring of 1954, my family moved there from San Bernardino, about 90 miles to the south. The reason for our relocation was simple. My father had been working for a company called Northrup Aircraft in Ontario, California, not far from our home. Now, they were transferring him to their Palmdale location, Plant 42.

Coincidentally, at about the same time, Denny Walley’s family moved to Lancaster. Although he and I didn’t know one another during this period, we shared a common environment for a few years. He also made acquaintance with some of the main characters in the story.

Denny Walley Moves To The Valley

The push/pull factor (I learned that from a sociology class I took just before dropping out) that moved the Walleys (including Denny, his parents, and his sister Ellen) to the Valley was the same one that brought a lot of other families to the high desert in the 1950s. Denny’s father worked for Republic Aircraft. He had worked for the company in Farmingdale, Long Island, and was transferred to Edwards Air Force Base, located at Muroc Dry Lake. Muroc was the reverse spelling of Corum, the surname of the family who had originally settled on the dry lake years earlier. Denny lived in the Antelope Valley from 1954 to 1958, and during that time made connections that would become valuable later.

John French: So, you loved it here, what were your impressions of the Valley, what were your first thoughts - the things you remember vividly?

Denny Walley: We arrived in the evening, by the time we drove from the airport to [our] home, the one thing that really impressed me was … remember they used to have the garbage disposals outside, where you could burn your trash?

JF: Oh yeah, incinerators. We have one of those in our yard here.

DW: I thought that was the coolest thing in the world. Also, I could see foothills from the house, and I said, Mom, pack me a lunch, I’m gonna walk over there. How did I know it was like 80 miles away? That was in the time when there was no smog. It was like you could reach out and touch it. Yeah, I’ll take this sandwich, go over there, and I’ll sit on the hill and wave to you.

JF: Three weeks later.

DW: Yeah, right.

Although always claiming to despise the desert because of the heat, Don Van Vliet at one point admitted to a certain subtle beauty that existed in the desert. There was loneliness and the ever-present battle with boredom, but also there was a freedom that came with the isolation. Perhaps it was that very freedom that allowed him to break rules in music that hadn’t been broken before, and to take a group of musicians on a search, exploring in unknown territories of sound.

Background On The Valley

The section of the Mojave Desert where we lived, called the Antelope Valley, is an arid region, but one that is attractive in its own special way. Primarily and initially settled by alfalfa farmers and cattle ranchers, the valley had a distinct agricultural inclination. Eventually, the United States Air Force discovered the open sky there, and a whole different breed of valley-ites began to augment the local population (coots and codgers, as Zappa referred to them). Muroc Dry Lake was transformed into a giant runaway for experimental test aircraft, and soon became known as Edwards Air Force Base.

The alfalfa farmers would eventually begin to die out as the lowered water table from the larger population forced water prices up. The outskirts of town illustrate this fact, with such common sights as dried up reservoirs and collapsed windmill remains. Most of the farms are mere remnants, monuments to a different era, a simpler – perhaps more human - time. In the 1950s, many of the alfalfa fields had not yet been replaced by housing tracts.

Denny Walley: It used to be alfalfa, maize, and turkeys. We know that. I used to buck hay on some of the farms in the summer to make some money. Pick some corn and do all that.

John French: Yeah, this was quite an agricultural area then.

DW: It was fabulous then. Especially [coming there] from New York.

JF: From a city environment into that, yeah!

DW: After seeing that, I thought I was Davy Crockett, and they [the locals] thought I was from Mars.

French’s First Impression Of The Mojave Desert

Several months before our move, my father had decided to buy a U-Finish house in an area called Quartz Hill, a small town a few miles northwest of Palmdale. This house had a purchase price of under $5,000 and was basically a wrapped or covered frame with no interior finishing. All the walls were open studs. No wiring or plumbing had been hooked up.

The desert had a quality that cannot easily be described. On the good days, when the wind wasn’t blowing and it was not too hot outside, it had a subtle, surreal quality, a deafening silence, occasionally punctuated by a sonic boom - the result of the latest fighter jet being tested in the surrounding skies. I am sure the coots and codgers didn’t appreciate this assault on their senses. This resulted in resentment growing between the established valley-ites and the newcomers.

Our home had not been hooked to electricity, and therefore we had no access to either television or radio. The walls were all open except for the bathroom. My mother hung blankets up to afford some measure of privacy. My father worked slowly on the house with hand tools.

I remember the metallic taste that the water had after being transported through the new galvanized pipe my father had laid by hand in the backyard. It was hard water, with a strong mineral content. The precious fluid even sounded different coming out of the tap: not such a high hiss, but more of a hushing sound, as though there was lots of air in the water, which had a cloudy look in the glass.

The house was without cooling or air-conditioning, but in the evening a cooling breeze would usually come. The screen-less windows were opened routinely in a hopeful attempt to cool the house for evening. Moths and other insects would collect near the coal oil lamps and lanterns that were our only source of light. However, those first summer evenings were long and cozy. My father worked swing shift, which was about 3:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. My mother, older brother, and I would sit outside and stare at the stars and talk. Sometimes my mother would read Bible stories to me by lantern light.

The weather was warm, often unbearably hot. Our food was kept in an old-time icebox, which actually held large blocks of ice. In order to replenish the supply, we would frequently visit ice machines. These were white, trailer-sized refrigerated vending machines. We had a camp stove, which was hooked to a large propane tank in the back yard. Our heater was a non-vented, floor-standing model in the living room, next to the hall door. My brother Phil laid asphalt floor tile over the bare concrete floors throughout the entire house, which involved dealing with thousands of one-foot squares of ugly brown stuff – the tile that came with the house.

The night air had a crystal clarity, making one feel more on board a starship than on a planet. There were no streetlights in our area. This caused the night sky to reveal much more of its personality, and the stars took on more of a three-dimensional depth, some seeming farther away than others. Because the summer nights were so warm and still, many people would turn off the TV sets (thus evading pouring mounds of stupidity into their otherwise healthy minds) and sit outside, conversing about simple things. I found these moments to be among the most magic.

Electricity came and soon we had our own two inch black and white television. This was a big deal for us. I remember watching Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Gunsmoke, The People’s Choice, and a terrible version of Robin Hood with Richard Greene. Loretta Young had her own show, and Walt Disney featured Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier. I had my own Davy Crockett outfit - a coon-skin cap, a buckskin jacket with fringe, a plastic musket and flintlock pistol, and a plastic powder horn.

Our U-Finish house was never finished while we lived there. My father eventually resolved to coexist with unpainted sheetrock and gypsum board (more commonly called drywall), which still showed the compound at the seams. An older couple, the Eastmans, had moved a house trailer onto the lot next to us and built an entire home, completely finished and landscaped, while our house still stood unfinished. We finally traded them; our unfinished house (which they eventually finished and sold) for their smaller but finished one. Our new home had wooden floors and wainscoting in the kitchen. Although a smaller house - two bedrooms to the others three - it had a built-on garage, and a big redwood enclosed patio. There were mulberry trees in the front yard, and a thick, green lawn.

Most of the indigenous vegetation in the Mojave Desert is short, dry weeds interspersed with an occasional Joshua tree. Some areas with a higher altitude or a higher water table have greater concentrations of juniper trees, an evergreen that appears more like a large bush and produces a small round berry that can be used for medicinal purposes. There were once antelope in the Antelope Valley, but they are long gone. The native wildlife consists largely of coyotes, jackrabbits, cottontails, field mice, and ground squirrels. There are reptiles, as well, such as lizards, horned toads, and snakes, including the infamous and deadly Mojave Green Rattlesnake, to name a few.

Man has changed the landscape of the valley more and more, depleting its water table for the sake of watering lawns, trees, and other plants that could never have survived there naturally. Once a landmark, the Joshua tree is now almost entirely removed from developed areas.

Palmdale

Thirty-five miles south of the town of Mojave lies Palmdale, named after the mistakenly identified Joshua tree, which the first settlers thought was a palm tree. It later became the home of Northrup Aircraft’s Plant 42, which consists of several aircraft factories joined by a common runway. Mostly government contract work was done there: building bombers, fighters, and the like. In later years, Lockheed’s L1011 commercial transport and all the Space Shuttles would be built at this site. Here lay the economic base of the new Antelope Valley. The painful transition occurred slowly.

Edwards/Air Force Base

I mentioned Edwards Air Force Base earlier, which is a flight test center for new designs in aircraft, mostly experimental prototypes. Edwards has a rocket engine test site also, the huge dry lakebed was excellent for emergency landings. Anyone who saw the film The Right Stuff knows that one important aerospace location was Edwards AFB in the Mojave Desert. The astronauts received some of their early testing and training there. Chuck Yeager, among others, broke the sound barrier in the open skies above the flight test center.

Twenty-five miles or so northwest of Edwards lies the small town of Mojave. The bulk of Mojave is situated to the east of the main road, Sierra Highway, and the train tracks lie to the west. It is a bleak, desolate area, whose high winds animate dead tumbleweeds and transmit huge amounts of dust everywhere. Mojave began basically as a large truck stop, which later became home to many of the civilian employees of nearby Edwards AFB. According to Don Van Vliet’s memories, there was also a Marine base nearby, although this does not appear to be accurate and he may have been referring to the Air Force Base.

Glen And Sue Move Donny To Mojave

Somewhere about this time — the early to middle 1950s — was when the young Don Van Vliet, then known as Don Glen Vliet, was moved to Mojave. After living in a beautiful home in Glendale, CA, it is almost certain that he was disappointed and traumatized by the move. It obviously was the cause of a great deal of pain, as Don mentioned this particular snapshot of his youth quite often in personal conversation and interviews, and the story always seemed mixed with a good portion of bitterness.

According to Van Vliet, the reason for this move was an artist named Augustino Rodriguez. This artist’s first name has sometimes been listed as Augustonio, Augustonino, or Antonio (on various Beefheart websites). Additionally, Rodriguez has often been referred to by journalists over the years as a famed Portuguese sculptor, but I have yet to see a trace of his work. Anyway, after meeting young Donny at the L.A. Zoo, Rodriguez purportedly had recognized and nurtured Van Vliet’s rudimentary sculpting skills until they had grown to the level where the word prodigy was applicable. Most of this information is derived from Don himself, however, and should be taken with a grain of salt. It is important to realize that those who were close to him have long considered Don to be a teller of tall tales. Nevertheless, throughout the years, this background information on sculpting has been reported by several journalists as fact, though I can find not one shred of information on this famed sculptor under any of several spellings of the name.

Doug Moon: Alex and I come from the same place concerning Don. We both knew him in high school. We knew what a liar he was. He made up all these stories about his sexual conquests and all these things; you know … we would go along with it just because it was good entertainment. He was entertaining and was fun to be around. But that’s where the difference comes in, because a lot of people believed every word and hung on every word that he said. Frank, Alex, and I, and other people who knew him in the early years — we knew the real guy.

Alex Snouffer: He was entertaining. Just mark it right up to that. You never knew what you were going to be confronted with when you saw Don. You shoulda seen … whatever. Here we go again.

Don Aldridge: When he told me that he was a child prodigy, I’m sorry, I didn’t believe him. I’m not sure I do now. No one can really …

Gary Marker: I got fourteen different stories and you know how it is with him. He would explain stuff, he would tell you what was happening, and every time the story would change.

Dennis Ling: I don’t know that Don doesn’t have some … (laughs) fantasies. I have no idea. I knew that a lot of times when he talked to me about certain things in his life, I took it tongue-in-cheek, thinking that he was just … blowing smoke.

Whether Augustino Rodriguez was indeed a famed sculptor will remain unanswered in this book though I made a valiant attempt to settle this question. It is almost certain that the man at least existed, as Van Vliet often described moments from his relationship with Rodriguez. Once, when we visited the L.A. County Museum of Art, while strolling past the La Brea Tar pits, Don recalled a story about Augustino (spelled the way Van Vliet pronounced it). He pointed to the sculptures of dinosaurs in the water and said, "I could do that stuff, man!"

This triggered his memory to tell me the following: at some point, Rodriguez had apparently taught Don the basics of sculpting, and eventually had him work with a nude female model. Van Vliet described being instructed by Rodriguez in employing the use of a set of calipers to make measurements of the woman’s body. When asked his reaction, he stated simply, "I was really scared and nervous; I was just a kid and she was nude, man!"

At another point in time, when I was experiencing great anxiety concerning my career and future, Don tried to offer me encouragement. He told me that he recalled Augustino going through very rough times financially, and when Don had asked him what he was going to do for security, Rodriguez had supposedly replied by saying something like, There is no security; security does not exist, it is an illusion.

He just kept working - kept busy all the time, Don recalled. Laurie Stone, Don’s girlfriend, seemed to recall this visit also.

The Vliet family, who were living in Glendale, California, at the time when Rodriguez is said to have been fostering young Donny’s talents, apparently grew fearful and concerned about their only child’s involvement with this sculptor. They were at the same time, however, proud enough to save a newspaper-clipping showing a young Don Vliet giving a demonstration of his sculpting skills on a local television station. Sue Vliet showed photographs of his early sculptures to gallery owner Michael Werner, probably sometime in the early eighties, according to a 1993 article in the British music magazine, Mojo.

He was indeed a child prodigy with an early devotion to art. He sculpted in clay (a fact confirmed by Werner, who’d seen photographs of the pieces).¹

In describing his preoccupation with sculpting, Van Vliet demonstrated the same sense of hyperbole that became characteristic in all his later interviews. He claimed that he had locked himself in his room for months at a time, and that during this period he had sculpted all the known dinosaurs, surviving only by having his food passed under the door.

The actual interpretation of this story may differ in some greater or lesser degree when the element of hyperbole is removed. Perhaps young Van Vliet actually stayed in his room for merely a few days and refused to eat with the family at the dinner table, preferring instead to eat in his own room. (After all, how many bedroom doors are high enough to slide a plate of food beneath?) Perhaps a ten-year-olds perception of sculpting a few dinosaurs from a child’s book featuring pictures of the extinct creatures equaled reproducing all the dinosaurs in his world. Perhaps Rodriguez was a famed sculptor only to Don because of this same limited perception, in much the same way as a child might say, My daddy is the strongest man in the world. Rodriguez may have been a local art teacher in the Glendale area. Perhaps it was Van Vliet’s own imagination that created the illusion that Rodriguez was a famed sculptor.

Whatever Don’s relationship with Rodriguez was in reality, it obviously concerned his parents enough for them to pack up and move ninety miles away after Don purportedly received an art scholarship to go to Europe at age thirteen (probably around 1954). Don has often indicated how devastated he was by this decision. However, the Vliet’s relocation merely for the sake of their child’s welfare could also be viewed on their part as quite sacrificial in the sense that they left behind a beautiful home and probably many friends. Then again, perhaps that house on Waverly Drive in Glendale was actually the home of Don’s grandparents, which they may have been sharing with their offspring on an extended family basis.

Why Mojave?

The push/pull factor of this move also leaves much to speculation. According to Van Vliet, his parents moved him to Mojave because they believed, as he would often quote (in true backwoods characterization), that all artists are queers. The truth may never be known, since there have never been any interviews with either of Don’s parents. This is due in part to Don’s insistence of censure in his mother’s case, and also to the fact that his father died before Don achieved any fame. Speculation insists that all possibilities be considered. Perhaps Rodriguez exhibited enough homosexual traits to convince the elder Vliets that their son should be separated from this man. Perhaps the Vliets feared indoctrination of their impressionable young son would lead to his acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle at an age when he was emotionally incapable of discerning whether or not this would be a wise choice. Perhaps they simply decided that he needed a few more years to just be a kid.

However, attempting to prevent their son from becoming an artist might be considered prone to attempting to prevent a bubble from rising to the surface. Like water, Van Vliet would eventually seek his own level, gaining worldwide acclaim in two unpredictable areas: rock music (for lack of a better term) and later, oil painting. His parents’efforts to separate him from undesirable elements at an early age, however painful to Don at the time, may have been more of a blessing than a curse.

Perhaps his parents decided that it would be best for Don if he could finish his education with no distractions, and have a chance to mature and establish more conventional values. This decision may have been based more strongly on father Glen Vliet’s thought processes than on those of his wife. The passive and undisciplined Sue Vliet I met does not seem a likely candidate to have pushed for this kind of decisive action. She would later become the woman that Don would scream at for a Pepsi.

Years later, Don often joked that it seemed most of his friends came over not so much to visit him as to visit with his lovable mother. Sue always was a warm and friendly person. Her conversations were surprisingly revealing and showed a level of observation far above that for which son gave her credit. At times, he would passionately describe her as being soooooooo stupid, but this was probably more of a reaction to the fact that she disagreed with him than an evaluation of her level of intelligence. The dominance and lack of parental respect displayed by Don may have been a behavior he learned from his father and carried on after becoming the breadwinner of the family. Or it may have been a manifestation of his frustration for not being allowed to pursue his sculpting career.

So, the true story of the young Vliet’s Glendale days may never really be revealed or understood, as the only living person who could probably accurately portray the story cannot be reached for an interview. Don has told the story himself, and as this book will show, he has often romantically and artistically stretched the truth. Were Jan, his wife, to write a book, she would only be able to draw her interpretations from his descriptions of earlier events. Even this would still be based partly upon (1) the bias of her loyalty and devotion to Van Vliet himself, and (2) the influence of his telling and re-telling various stories of his life. This elusiveness in itself may have a great deal to do with the interest focused upon this subject by many of the fans.

Life In Mojave

As an adult, Don recounted how he had sometimes roamed during his boyhood to the west side of the highway, the proverbial wrong side of the tracks, to visit the hobos camped there. He recalled that they would occasionally offer him a tin can containing Mulligan stew to fill his stomach while they filled his head with stories of their adventures jumping freight trains. It is difficult to discern whether Don really had these experiences, or if they were fantasies that eventually became real for him. However, several of his later songs, including Hobo Chang Ba and Hoboism, had lyrics that showed strong insight into the lifestyle of the hobo.

The young artist had experienced what he recalled as a shocking transplant from his home in Glendale. One view of the environment in Glendale compared to that of Mojave shows such sharp contrast that it is not surprising that bitterness developed over his parents’decision. The Glendale of the 1950s was an upper middle class neighborhood filled with well-manicured yards. The Mt. Wilson Observatory was not that far away. (Actually, a film that depicts the setting and mood of this era quite well is Rebel Without A Cause, featuring icon James Dean playing the role of a troubled youth.) There were signs of culture and completeness everywhere. Crime was low, and decent people treated each other, for the most part, with respect.

In contrast, Mojave was dusty and dry. Culture was defined in primitive terms. The Military Industrial Complex had just begun to strongly dominate what had predominately been an agricultural area. Mojave was a bleak truck stop filled with cheap motels and small diners. It was a haven where weary truck drivers could grab a meal and some sleep before heading on. Heading north would lead up the east side of the Sierra Nevada range to small towns such as Lone Pine and Bishop, or ski resort villages such as Mammoth. East led towards Barstow, and eventually Las Vegas. West took one towards Tehachapi and Bakersfield, and finally to Highway 5, the dreary main artery of northbound or southbound vehicular transportation.

Van Vliet claims that, when young, he encountered violence in the form of men he described as Marines, but who more likely were airmen, nicknamed wingnuts, from nearby Edwards Air Force Base, then called Muroc Air Force Base.

Van Vliet would describe being violently attacked by these military men and losing most his of molars as a direct result of their assault. As if to reinforce this fact, he would push in both cheeks with his index fingers, illustrating with the hollows that there were no teeth inside to impede this action. Whether the loss of his teeth was due to violence from the military men in the area or just bad dental hygiene is unclear. However, some later reports do lend credence to Van Vliet’s assertion that he was indeed the victim of violent and brutal attacks. He claimed on several occasions that he was chased home by these Marines, and once described swinging on a bar and kicking an assailant in the head with both feet.

Recounting these claims of violence and searching for the sources of Don’s anger brings to mind a story that he related, presumably in reference to his early childhood in Glendale. He once described walking down a sidewalk as a youngster, and having a man toss a fifty-cent piece into his path. As Don bent over to retrieve it, the man kicked him in the mouth, sending him sprawling. A tearful young Vliet was then told by his assailant that this was a lesson in life, or words to that effect.

As to the source of his genius, Van Vliet once related that he was involved in some childhood accident, which caused a severe but not critical trauma to his head. He said that everything was different when he awoke from this blow. Perhaps some neurotransmitter was released in larger quantities than before; some physiological phenomenon that could, if investigated, account for his amazing mental prowess.

Whatever the source, however, most people who knew Van Vliet would agree that he was no ordinary individual. Regardless of how uncomfortable or painful his relationships with others may have been, there seems to be, for the most part, a common respect for his uniqueness, his constant creative talents, his sense of humor, and his influence - on individuals, as well as on the worlds of music and art.

East Coast/Art Tripp

In a different part of the country during this period, the young Art Tripp was forming the basis for his later relationships with both Frank Zappa and Don Van Vliet.

Although Arthur Dyer Tripp III was born in Athens, Ohio, the home of Ohio University, he really considers Pittsburgh his home because his family moved there when he was about a year old. He started playing the drums in grade school. His father took him over to a meeting with the band director, who asked young Arthur what he wanted to play. After demonstrating the clarinet, trumpet, and a few other instruments, the band director played a snare drum, which young Tripp found interesting. He quickly made the decision to study drums and was given a practice pad (a little rubber square glued on a piece of wood) on which to practice stick control. Junior high school brought a real snare drum and the chance to play in the school band.

Mortensen In Claremont

Meanwhile, in Claremont, California, Vic Mortensen was having his first encounter with a person who would later form a particularly significant relationship with young Vliet: Frank Zappa.

Mortensen Meets Zappa – 1955

Vic Mortensen: I went to Claremont High, and that’s when I (first) met Frank Zappa, when I was in the marching band in seventh or eighth grade, I don’t know which. We had to go out and play (at) a football game, and in those days, the (drum) skins were literally skins. You would get out and it would start to mist up a little bit, and you’d keep tightening your heads, otherwise, you’d play the national anthem and it would sound like a funeral dirge, because everybody’s playing a tom-tom. So you kept tightening them up and tightening them up and tightening them up. OK, then you get back on the bus and you kept loosening up and loosening up and loosening up. I’ve heard drums explode. So, I had gone up to the band room, to make sure that the drumheads were still loose enough. There was this crazy guy in there who had taken all of the band drums and lined them all up and had tuned them down to tom toms. He was going bump bump a diggy bump bump a diggy bump bump (Note: sounded like a Bo Diddley beat to me). I said, What the…are you doing? He said, Wow, man, I don’t have a drumset and I just wanted to try out some different sounds. I asked, How’d you get in here? and he said, "Well, I know the guy (probably referring to the janitor). I was fascinated. He was doing some pretty good things. Didn’t see him again until I was a freshman in high school. Never forgot him - that’s how we got together years later.

John French: So, how old were you and he and that time?

VM: How old are you when you are in the seventh or eigth grade? … He was about a year older than I was. He couldn’t have been much older. I had never seen him around the school. I said there were five hundred kids and there was a dude in the band room that I had never seen at school.

So Vic seems to have been the first to encounter Frank Zappa, who would later become high school friends with Don Vliet, who would later become Captain Beefheart and form a magic band. Although Frank does not mention living in Ontario (near Claremont) or a surrounding area in The Real Frank Zappa Book until a later date, he describes a lot of moving during this period when the family first came to California from Maryland. Two places mentioned are Monterey and San Diego.

Vic Mortensen: … the next time I saw Frank Zappa, I was a freshman in high school (1958-9 perhaps) and he was jamming at a high school in Upland. They had a big cafeteria there, and there was a glass wall that separated the cafeteria from the big band room, at Upland High School. I was in there having lunch and the band room was empty, but by this time they were doing some big band stuff, and there was actually a drum set. You couldn’t hear anything because of the glass. Normally, the room would be empty during lunch. I was getting my lunch, I looked in, there was a cat sitting up playing on that drum set and I knew it was Frank. But, I didn’t even talk with him.

Jim Sherwood

Kansas-born Jim Sherwood lived most of his youth in San Bernardino California. San Bernardino is about 90 miles south southeast of Lancaster. It is lower in elevation and higher in humidity than the Antelope Valley. The Sherwoods and their four children Chuck (known as Bone because of his massive jawbone), Jim (known as Bone 2 and later as Motorhead), Ivan, and sister Toni moved to Lancaster in the mid-fifties. This was due to a family incident that made it impossible for them to stay in San Bernardino. Jim was about 12 at the time and didn’t think much of his new home.

John French: What was your impression of the Antelope Valley, of the desert in those days?

Jim Sherwood: (Big laugh) Well, there basically wasn’t anything there. There was one housing tract that they had just built and that was where my dad bought the house. It was on Carolside.

JF: What year was that.

JS: It’s either late ‘53 or early ‘54.

JF: So, it was pretty bleak to you, right?

JS: Yeah, it was just desert. There wasn’t anything around. We had the little shopping center on the corner, and then they built the housing tract and that was it. Ours was the first street built.

JF: Carolside - that’s where Don later lived.

JS: Yeah, Don Vliet lived up the block.

JF: At the time?

JS: I think he moved in a little later.

Denny Recalling Jim And Bone Sherwood

Denny Walley: I knew

Reviews for Beefheart

[cappybear · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Perhaps I shouldn't review this book as I gave up reading it after three chapters. It's basically a succession of interviews by friends and contemporaries of Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart. The book quickly gets bogged down in debates about whether a band folded up in 1962 or 1963, or whether somebody played bass before moving to guitar. Tedious stuff, which would benefit from editing. Mike Barnes's Captain Beefheart: The Biography is much better.