Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [83]
Wherever Don Van Vliet gets his rules and messages from, it's rarely the external, so-called rational, I think psychotic “civilized” society we’ve known and lived in. He chooses to live out of it, mentally and physically, and began trying to escape from it at a very early age: “I never went to school. I wet my pants and my mother came and got me as I was running and I told her that I couldn’t go to school because I was sculpting at that time a hell of a lot. That was kindergarten, I think. I tried to jump into the La Brea Tar Pits when I was three, whatever that means. They caught me just in time. I was so intrigued by those bubbles going bmp bmp. I thought I would find a dinosaur down there. I told my mother when I was three years old—she showed it to me not too long ago, in this baby book in that horrible Palmer Penmanship method of writing that she used, you know that fantastic curlicues type stuff that had everything to do with everything other than what it said, on this old yellow piece of paper it's written out, that if she would stay on one side of the room and I would stay on the other, that we would be friends the rest of our life. I used to lock myself in a room and sculpt when I was like three, five, six.” What sorts of things did you sculpt?
Oh God, things that I would try to have moved kinetically try to move these things around. These were my friends, these little animals that I would make, like dinosaurs and… I wasn’t very much in reality, actually.
Do you feel bad about that?
No, I feel good. I was right. The way people treat animals, I don’t like it. One of my horrible memories is the great Auk, the fact that it was extinct before I was born. What a beautiful bird. What were your parents like?
Pretty banal. They moved me to Mojave, that's where they kept the Japanese-Americans during World War II. They moved me up there to keep me out of a scholarship to Europe for sculpture. They wanted to get me away from all the “queer” artists. Isn’t that awful? Periscopes in the tub, right?
In this sense, he's still not very much in “reality.” His problems with record companies over the years are legendary. Yet he has, somehow, kept on making those amazing albums; just when you’ve almost given up hope, somebody else comes along and offers him a contract, and he does another one, and it doesn’t sell. Jon Landau told me in 1970, when he was my record reviews editor at Rolling Stone: “Grand Funk will be more important to the history of rock ‘n’ roll than Captain Beef-heart. And you can quote me on that.” But there are other occasions, like the time I met a young woman in a bar who was not a scenemaker or into avant-rock, and when I asked her what kind of music she liked she said: “This guy I heard named Captain Beefheart. There was just something kind of real sensual and musky about it. I dunno … it was different, but I loved it.”
Beefheart himself thinks women tend to understand his music better than men, so, especially since he can be so elliptically, obscuran-tistly difficult to pin down in interview and describing his music in prose is kind of like trying to catch the prism of a dragonfly wing and hold it intact in the palm of your hand, I’ll talk about his wife. Jan is a young woman of such radiance and wholehearted sincerity that it can be a little stunning at first meeting. Phrases like “earth mother” are too quaint, dreary, way off the mark. She is as active an artist as he and the complexities of her mind are fully up to his moodswings, which can give you jet lag. Which doesn’t mean she's the archetypal Great Artist’ Nursemaid either—she won’t take his shit, and he can be a tyrannica baby at times. Like a lot of us.
Jan helps mightily at broaching some kind of rapprochemen communications-wise between this