Pachucos are Chicano youths who developed their own subculture during the 1930s and 1940s in the Southwestern United States. They wore distinctive clothing (such as zoot suits) and spoke their own dialect of Mexican Spanish, called Caló or Pachuco. Due to their double marginalization stemming from their youth and ethnicity, there has always been a close association and cultural cross-pollination between the Pachuco subculture and gang subculture.

One famous pachuco is Roy Estrada, a bass player and former performer in the Mothers of Invention.

Origin

The Pachuco style originated in El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez Mexico and moved westward, following the line of migration of Mexican railroad workers ("traqueros") into Los Angeles, where it developed further. The word "pachuco" originated, probably early in the 20th century, in a Mexican Spanish slang term for a resident of the cities of El Paso and Juárez. Even today, El Paso and Juárez are the "El Chuco Town" or "El Pasiente" by some.

Another theory is that the derivation of the word "pachuco" came from Pachuca, the name of the city in the Mexican state of Hidalgo where Mickey Garcia, thought by some to be the originator of the zoot suit, befriended a local of the town known as "El Hueso". El Hueso was an elderly man known only to have a tattoo on his right shoulder. It is unknown what the tattoo said but some have claimed that it bore two names: one beginning with a "J" and the other with a "B". Mickey Garcia brought his style from Pachuca, Mexico to San Diego. Another theory says that the word derives from pocho, a derogatory term for a Mexican born in the United States who has lost touch with the Mexican culture. The word is also said to mean "punk" or "troublemaker".

Another theory is put forth by Cummings, 2009 (see references), who postulates a possible indigenous origin of the term.

The Mexican comedian and film actor Germán Valdés, better-known by his artistic name "Tin-Tan", popularized Pachuco dress and slang to the Mexican population through his films during the Golden age of Mexican films. The influence of Valdés is responsible for the assimilation of several Caló terms into Mexican slang.

The Mexican Nobel laureate Octavio Paz writes in the essay, "The Pachuco and Other Extremes" that the Pachuco phenomenon paralleled the zazou subculture in World War II-era Paris in style of clothing, music favored (jazz, swing, and jump blues), and attitudes, although there was no known link between the two subcultures.

The pachuco subculture declined in the 1960s, evolving into the Chicano style. This style preserved some of the pachuco slang while adding a strong political element characteristic of the late 1960s American life.

In the early 1970s, a recession and the increasingly violent nature of gang life resulted in an abandonment of anything that suggested dandyism. Accordingly, Mexican-American gangs adopted a uniform of T-shirts and khakis derived from prison uniforms, and the pachuco style died out. However, the zoot suit remains a popular choice of formal wear for urban and rural Latino youths in heavily ethnic neighborhoods. It is typically worn at a prom, or in some cases, at informal Latino university commencement ceremonies.

Pachucos called their slang Caló (sometimes called "pachuquismo"), a unique argot that drew on the original Spanish Gypsy Caló, Mexican Spanish, the New Mexican dialect of Spanish, and American English, employing words and phrases creatively applied. To a large extent, Caló went mainstream and is one of the last surviving vestige of the Pachuco, often used in the lexicon of some urban Latinos in the United States to this day.

The same word "pachuco" is used in Costa Rica to define Costa Rican slang. It nevertheless differs from the Mexican slang. In Costa Rica the term "pachuco" refers to a vulgar or indecent person.

La Pachuca

The "Pachuca", the female counterpart of the Pachuco, had as strong an aesthetic sensibility as the male zoot suiter. The Pachuca's hairstyle tended to be a high "coif" (a more pronounced version of the typical hair style of the time), sometimes using hair grease. Her makeup was heavy, particularly the lipstick. The preferred color of clothing was black. One very loud version of the Pachuca look entailed wearing the masculine zoot suit, albeit with modifications to fit the female form. This was very subversive at the time because of long-held gender roles that dictated how a person should dress. Another variation included full, knee-length skirts with the standard zoot suit finger-tip jacket. Sometimes, she donned the standard heavy gold pocket chain.

This style was associated with gang membership and activity. The idea of gang membership and gang activity came from the Zoot Suit Riots that took place mainly in Southern California. The negative image of the male zoot suiter as a "violent gangster" naturally extended to the Pachuca as well. The promiscuous image came from contravening the traditional "see and be seen" fashion aesthetic — the Pachuca's high public visibility during a time when the "good" minority woman belonged in the home was seen in a scandalous light.

The Pachuca's challenge to the dominant perception of femininity came during the period between the advent of women's suffrage in 1920 and the upsurge in feminist activism of the 1960s and 1970s.

See also

Cholo

Vato

Zoot Suit Riots

Sleepy Lagoon murder

References

Barker, George Carpenter. Pachuco: an American-Spanish argot and its social functions in Tucson, Arizona. University of Arizona Press, 1950.

Cummings, Laura L. "Cloth-Wrapped People, Trouble, and Power: Pachuco Culture in the Greater Southwest" In, Journal of the Southwest, 45 (Autumn 2003).

Cummings, Laura L. Pachucas and Pachucos in Tucson: Situated Border Lives. University of Arizona Press, 2009.

Fuentes, Dagoberto and José A. López. Barrio Language Dictionary. La Puente: El Barrio Publications, 1974. ]

Madrid Barela, A. In Search of the Authentic Pachuco. An Interpretive Essay, Part I. Aztlan, Spring, 4(1), 31 60. 1973.

Paz, Octavio, translated by Lysander Kemp. "The Pachuco and Other Extremes" in The Labyrinth of Solitude. Grove Press, Inc., 1961; originally published in Spanish by Cuadernos Americanos, Mexico, 1950.

Ramirez, Catherine Sue Crimes of Fashion: The Pachuca and Chicana Style Politics. Meridians Vol. 2, No. 2 (2002): 1–35.

Salinas, Raul, Un Trip Through the Mind Jail y Otras Excursiones. San Francisco: Pocho Ché, 1980.

Sánchez-Tranquilino, M. "The Pachuco's Flayed Hide: Mobility, Identity, and Buenas Garras" In J. Tagg – Cultural Studies, New York: Routledge, 1992

Serrano, Rodolfo G. "Dictionary Of Pachuco Terms". California State University, 1979.

Manuel Cantú – Pachuco Dictionary, ISBN 978-0-615-15944-7. Pachuco Dictionary Home Page

Category:Chicano Category:History of subcultures Category:Youth culture

Name	Lil Rob
Background	solo_singer
Born	September 23, 1975
Birth name	Roberto Flores
Origin	San Diego, CaliforniaU.S.
Date of birth	September 23, 1975

Category:1975 births Category:Living people Category:Rappers from California Category:American rappers of Mexican descent Category:American shooting survivors Category:People from San Diego, California

Name	Don Van Vliet
Background	solo_singer
Birth name	Don Glen Vliet
Alias	Captain BeefheartBloodshot Rollin' Red
Born	January 15, 1941Glendale, California, U.S.
Died	December 17, 2010Arcata, California, U.S. (January 15, 1941 December 17, 2010) was an American musician, singer-songwriter and artist best known by the stage name Captain Beefheart. His musical work was conducted with a rotating ensemble of musicians he called The Magic Band, active between 1965 and 1982, with whom he recorded 12 studio albums. Noted for his powerful singing voice with its wide range, Van Vliet also played the harmonica, saxophone and numerous other wind instruments. His music blended rock, blues and psychedelia with free jazz, avant-garde and contemporary experimental composition. Beefheart was also known for exercising an almost dictatorial control over his supporting musicians, and for often constructing myths about his life.
Filename	Moonlight_On_Vermont.ogg
Title	"Moonlight on Vermont"
Description	"Moonlight on Vermont" from Trout Mask Replica, that well illustrates the album's sound and composition.
Format	Ogg
Filename2	PenaCaptainBeefheart.ogg
Title2	"Pena"
Description2	"Pena"; An example of the album's avant-garde instrumentation and bizarre lyrical content.
Format2	Ogg

Trout Mask Replica incorporated a wide variety of musical styles, including blues, avant-garde/experimental, and rock. The relentless practice prior to recording blended the music into an iconoclastic whole of contrapuntal tempos, featuring slide guitar, polyrhythmic drumming (with French's drums and cymbals covered in cardboard), and honking saxophone and bass clarinet. Van Vliet's vocals range from his signature Howlin' Wolf-inspired growl to frenzied falsetto to laconic, casual ramblings. The instrumental backing was effectively recorded live in the studio, while Van Vliet overdubbed most of the vocals in only partial synch with the music by hearing the slight sound leakage through the studio window. Zappa as producer would say of Van Vliet's approach that it was "impossible to tell him why things should be such and such a way. It seemed to me that if he was going to create a unique object, that the best thing for me to do was to keep my mouth shut as much as possible and just let him do whatever he wanted to do whether I thought it was wrong or not." In 2003, the album was ranked fifty-eighth by Rolling Stone in their list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time: "On first listen, Trout Mask Replica sounds like raw Delta blues", with Beefheart "singing and ranting and reciting poetry over fractured guitar licks. But the seeming sonic chaos is an illusion -- to construct the songs, the Magic Band rehearsed twelve hours a day for months on end in a house with the windows blacked out. (Producer Frank Zappa was then able to record most of the album in less than five hours.) Tracks such as "Ella Guru" and "My Human Gets Me Blues" are the direct predecessors of modern musical primitives such as Tom Waits and PJ Harvey". BBC disc jockey John Peel said of the album: "If there has been anything in the history of popular music which could be described as a work of art in a way that people who are involved in other areas of art would understand, then Trout Mask Replica is probably that work."

Later recordings, 1970–1982

Lick My Decals Off, Baby (1970) continued in a similarly experimental vein. An album with "a very coherent structure" in the Magic Band's "most experimental and visionary stage", it was Van Vliet's most commercially successful in the United Kingdom, spending twenty weeks on the UK Albums Chart and peaking at number 20. An early promotional music video was made of its title song, and a bizarre television commercial was also filmed that included excerpts from "Woe-Is-uh-Me-Bop", silent footage of masked Magic Band members using kitchen utensils as musical instruments, and Beefheart kicking over a bowl of what appears to be porridge onto a dividing stripe in the middle of a road. The video was rarely played but was accepted into the Museum of Modern Art, where it has been used in several programs related to music. The LP sees the addition of Art Tripp III, formerly of the Mothers of Invention, playing drums and marimba. Lick My Decals Off, Baby was the first record on which the band were credited as "The Magic Band", rather than "His Magic Band"; journalist Irwin Chusid interprets this change as "a grudging concession of its members' at least semiautonomous humanity."

The next two records, The Spotlight Kid (simply credited to "Captain Beefheart") and Clear Spot (credited to "Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band"), were both released in 1972. The atmosphere of The Spotlight Kid is "definitely relaxed and fun, maybe one step up from a jam." And though "things do sound maybe just a little too blasé," "Beefheart at his worst still has something more than most groups at their best." The music is simpler and slower than on the group's two previous releases, the uncompromisingly original Trout Mask Replica and the frenetic Lick My Decals Off, Baby. This was in part an attempt by Van Vliet to become a more appealing commercial proposition as the band had made virtually no money during the previous two years – at the time of recording, the band members were subsisting on welfare food handouts and remittances from their parents. Van Vliet offered that he "got tired of scaring people with what I was doing... I realized that I had to give them something to hang their hat on, so I started working more of a beat into the music." Magic Band members have also said that the slower performances were due in part to Van Vliet's inability to fit his lyrics with the instrumental backing of the faster material on the earlier albums, a problem that was exacerbated in that he almost never rehearsed with the group.

Clear Spot's production credit of Ted Templeman made Allmusic consider "why in the world [it] wasn't more of a commercial success than it was," and that while fans "of the fully all-out side of Beefheart might find the end result not fully up to snuff as a result, but those less concerned with pushing back all borders all the time will enjoy his unexpected blend of everything tempered with a new accessibility." The song "Big Eyed Beans from Venus" is noted as "a fantastically strange piece of aggression." A Clear Spot song, "Her Eyes Are A Blue Million Miles", appeared on the soundtrack of the Coen brothers' cult comedy film The Big Lebowski (1998).

In 1974, immediately after the recording of Unconditionally Guaranteed, which markedly continued the trend towards a more commercial sound heard on some of the Clear Spot tracks, the Magic Band, which had by then coalesced around the core of Art Tripp III, Alex St. Clair, Bill Harkleroad and Rockette Morton, decided they could no longer work with Van Vliet. They left to form Mallard. Van Vliet quickly formed a new Magic Band of musicians who had no experience with his music and in fact had never heard it. Having no knowledge of the previous Magic Band style they simply improvised what they thought would go with each song, playing much slicker versions that have been described as "bar band" versions of Beefheart's songs. A review described this incarnation of the Magic Band as the "Tragic Band", a term that has stuck over the years. Mike Barnes would say that the description of the new band "grooving along pleasantly", was "an appropriately banal description of the music of a man who only a few years ago composed with the expressed intent of shaking listeners out of their torpor". The one album they recorded, Bluejeans & Moonbeams (1974) has, like its predecessor, a completely different, almost soft rock sound from any other Beefheart record. Neither was well received; drummer Art Tripp recalled that when he and the original Magic Band listened to Unconditionally Guaranteed that they "were horrified. As we listened, it was as though each song was worse than the one which preceded it." Beefheart later disowned both albums, calling them "horrible and vulgar", asking that they not be considered part of his musical output and urging fans who bought them to "take copies back for a refund".

From 1975 to 1977 Beefheart released no new records; the original version of Bat Chain Puller was recorded in 1976 but remains unreleased. He did appear on the Tubes' 1977 album Now, playing saxophone on the song "Cathy's Clone", and the album also featured a cover of the Clear Spot song "My Head Is My Only House Unless It Rains". In 1978 he appeared on Jack Nitzsche's soundtrack to the film Blue Collar. Following his death, John French claimed the 40 second spoken word track "Apes-Ma" to be an anology of Van Vliet's deteriorating psychical condition. Doc at the Radar Station (1980) helped establish Beefheart's late resurgence. Released by Virgin Records during the post-punk scene, the music was now accessible to a younger, more receptive audience. He was interviewed in a feature report on KABC-TV's Channel 7 Eyewitness News in which he was hailed "the father of the New Wave. One of the most important American composers of the last fifty years, [and] a primitive genius"; Van Vliet said at this period, "I'm doing a non-hypnotic music to break up the catatonic state... and I think there is one right now." Huey of Allmusic would cite the Doc at the Radar Station as being "generally acclaimed as the strongest album of his comeback, and by some as his best since Trout Mask Replica", "even if the Captain's voice isn't quite what it once was, Doc at the Radar Station is an excellent, focused consolidation of Beefheart's past and then-present". Van Vliet's biographer Mike Barnes speaks of "revamping work built on skeletal ideas and fragments that would have mouldered away in the vaults had they not been exhumed and transformed into full-blown, totally convincing new material." Ice Cream for Crow, along with songs such as its title track, features instrumental performances by the Magic Band with performance poetry readings by Van Vliet. Ragget of Allmusic called the album a "last entertaining blast of wigginess from one of the few truly independent artists in late 20th century pop music, with humor, skill, and style all still intact"; with the Magic Band "turning out more choppy rhythms, unexpected guitar lines, and outré arrangements, Captain Beefheart lets everything run wild as always, with successful results". Barnes writes that "the most original and vital tracks (on the album) are the newer ones", saying that it "feels like an hors-d'oeuvre for a main course that never came". Soon after, Van Vliet retired from music and began a new career as a painter. Gary Lucas tried to convince him to record one more album, but to no avail.

Paintings

Throughout his musical career, Van Vliet remained interested in art; his paintings, often reminiscent of Franz Kline's, were used on several of his albums.

In the mid 1980s, Van Vliet became somewhat reclusive and abandoned music, stating he had gotten "too good at the horn" Beefheart's first exhibition had been at Liverpool's Bluecoat Gallery during the Magic Band's 1972 tour of the UK, and was interviewed on Granada regional TV standing in front of his bold black and white canvases. and Stand Up To Be Discontinued, first published in 1993, a now rare collection of essays on Van Vliet's work. The limited edition version of the book contains a CD of Van Vliet giving readings of six of his poems: "Fallin' Ditch", "The Tired Plain", "Skeleton Makes Good", "Safe Sex Drill", "Tulip" and "Gill". A deluxe edition was published in 1994; only 60 were printed, with etchings of Van Vliet's signature, costing £180.

In the early 1980s Van Vliet established an association with the Michael Werner Gallery. Eric Feldman stated later in an interview that at that time Michael Werner told Van Vliet he would need to stop playing music if he wanted to be respected as a painter, warning him that he would only be considered a "musician who paints" otherwise. The resemblance to the CoBrA painters is also recognized by art critic Roberto Ohrt,

According to Dr. John Lane, director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in 1997, although Van Vliet's work has associations with mainstream abstract expressionist painting, more importantly he is a self-taught artist and his painting "has that same kind of edge the music has." Lane explained that in contrast to the busied, bohemian urban lives of the New York abstract expressionists, the rural desert environment Van Vliet is influenced by is a distinctly naturalistic one, making him a distinguished figure in contemporary art, whose work will survive in canon. and that "I paint for the simple reason that I have to. I feel a sense of relief after I do".

Exhibits of his paintings from the late 1990s at both the Anton Kern and Michael Werner Galleries of New York City received favorable reviews, the most recent of which were held between 2009 and 2010. Falconer stated the recent exhibitions show "evidence of a serious, committed artist." It was claimed that he stopped painting in the late 1990s. By the early 1990s he had become wheelchair-bound and was suffering from a debilitating long-term illness, eventually revealed to be multiple sclerosis, and described as such by his biographer Mike Barnes.

Van Vliet often voiced concern over and support for environmentalist issues and causes, particularly the welfare of animals. In 2003 he was heard on the compilation album Where We Live: Stand for What You Stand On: A Benefit CD for EarthJustice singing a version of "Happy Birthday to You" retitled "Happy Earthday". The track is 34 seconds long and was recorded over the telephone.

Death

The Michael Werner Gallery announced on Friday, December 17, 2010, that Van Vliet had died at a hospital in Arcata, California, weeks short of his 70th birthday. The gallery stated him to be "a complex and influential figure in the visual and performing arts," and "one of the most original recording artists of his time". The cause was named as complications from multiple sclerosis. Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan commented on his death, praising him: "Wondrous, secret... and profound, he was a diviner of the highest order."

Dweezil Zappa dedicated the song "Willie the Pimp" to Beefheart at the "Zappa Plays Zappa" show at the Beacon Theater in New York City on the day of his death, while Jeff Bridges exclaimed "Rest in peace, Captain Beefheart!" at the conclusion of the December 18 episode of NBC's Saturday Night Live.

Relationship with Frank Zappa

Van Vliet met Frank Zappa when they were both teenagers and shared an interest in rhythm and blues and Chicago blues. They collaborated together from this early stage, and Zappa gave Van Vliet his stage name of Captain Beefheart. In 1963, the pair recorded a demo at the Pal Recording Studio in Cucamonga as the Soots, with the intention of a major label signing them. Their efforts were unsuccessful, as "Beefheart's Howlin' Wolf vocal style and Zappa's distorted guitar" were "not on the agenda" at the time. Van Vliet embarked on the 1975 Bongo Fury tour with Zappa and The Mothers of Invention, mainly due to the fact that conflicting contractual obligations made him unable to tour or record independently. Their relationship grew highly acrimonious on the tour to the point of them refusing to talk to one another. Zappa became irritated by Van Vliet, who drew constantly, including while on stage, filling one of his large sketch books with rapidly executed portraits and warped caricatures of Zappa. Musically, Van Vliet's primitive style contrasted sharply with Zappa's compositional discipline and abundant technique. Mothers of Invention drummer Jimmy Carl Black would consider the situation as "two geniuses" on "ego trips". Their collaborative work appears on the Zappa rarity collections The Lost Episodes (1996) and Mystery Disc (1996). Particularly notable is their song "Muffin Man", included on the Zappa/Beefheart Bongo Fury album as well as Zappa's compilation album Strictly Commercial (1995). This song was used as a finale in Zappa's concerts for many years afterwards. Beefheart also provided vocals for "Willie the Pimp" on Zappa's otherwise instrumental album Hot Rats (1969). One track on Trout Mask Replica, "The Blimp (mousetrapreplica)", actually features Magic Band guitarist Jeff Cotton talking on the telephone to Zappa superimposed onto an unrelated live recording of the Mothers of Invention (the backing track was later released in 1992 as "Charles Ives" on You Can't Do That on Stage Anymore, Vol. 5 ). Van Vliet also played the harmonica on two songs on Zappa albums: "San Ber'dino" (credited as "Bloodshot Rollin' Red") on One Size Fits All (1975) and "Find Her Finer" on Zoot Allures (1976).

The Magic Band

The Magic Band were Beefheart's backing musicians from 1965 to 1982. The name of the band was an extension of the "Captain Beefheart" persona that Frank Zappa, Vic Mortenson and others helped Van Vliet create; the idea being that Captain Beefheart was magic, and thus would have a "magic band." He would simply drink a Pepsi, and the band would appear behind him.

The original Magic Band was Alex Snouffer, a local Lancaster rhythm and blues guitarist, Doug Moon (guitar), Jerry Handley (bass), and Mortenson (drums), the last soon replaced by Paul Blakely. Personnel of the Magic Band for Beefheart's first album were John "Drumbo" French, Ry Cooder, Snouffer, and Handley. French would work on five more Beefheart albums, while Snouffer would work with Beefheart on and off on three more albums. Zoot Horn Rollo (Bill Harkleroad) joined the Magic Band as guitarist for Trout Mask Replica and stayed with Beefheart through May 1974.

While appearing humorous and kind-hearted in public, by all accounts Van Vliet was a severe taskmaster who abused his musicians verbally and sometimes physically, and paid them little or nothing. Drummer John French recalled that the musicians' contract with Van Vliet's company stipulated that Van Vliet and the managers were paid from gross proceeds before expenses, then expenses were paid, then the band members evenly split any remaining funds – in effect meaning that band members were liable for all expenses. As a result French was paid nothing at all for a 33-city U.S. tour in 1971 and a total of $78 for a tour of Europe and the U.S. in late 1975. In his 2010 memoir Beefheart: Through The Eyes of Magic French recounted being "screamed at, beaten up, drugged, ridiculed, humiliated, arrested, starved, stolen from, and thrown down a half-flight of stairs by his employer".

The musicians also resented Van Vliet taking complete credit for composition and arranging when the musicians themselves pieced together most of the songs from taped fragments or impressionistic directions such as "Play it like a bat being dragged out of oil and it's trying to survive, but it's dying from asphyxiation." John French summarized the disagreement over composing and arranging credits metaphorically:

Post-Beefheart, receiving only a "grumpy" reception from him, The band's albums are Back To The Front (on the London-based ATP Recordings, 2003) and 21st Century Mirror Men (2005). After playing over 30 shows throughout the United Kingdom and Europe, and just one in the United States, the band concluded their activities in 2006.

Influence

Van Vliet has been the subject of at least two documentaries, the BBC's 1997 The Artist Formerly Known As Captain Beefheart narrated by John Peel, and the 2006 independent production Captain Beefheart: Under Review.

According to John Peel, "If there has ever been such a thing as a genius in the history of popular music, it's Beefheart... I heard echoes of his music in some of the records I listened to last week and I'll hear more echoes in records that I listen to this week." John Harris of The Guardian praised how the "pulses with energy and ideas, the strange way the spluttering instruments meld together". Piero Scaruffi would characterize "three basic elements": "the ballad out of tune, with guitar interlaced with jolting rhythm, vocal miasma and a rogue harmonica". Scaruffi ranked Trout Mask Replica number one on his list of the greatest rock albums of all time. He says that "the distance between Captain Beefheart and the rest of rock music is the same distance that there was between Beethoven and the symphonists of his time". Nicholas E. Tawa, in his 2005 book Supremely American: Popular Song in the 20th Century: Styles and Singers and What They Said About America, included Beefheart among the prominent progressive rock musicians of the 1960s and 70s, while the Encyclopædia Britannica describes Beefheart's songs as conveying "deep distrust of modern civilization, a yearning for ecological balance, and that belief that all animals in the wild are far superior to human beings." as early as 1970. The Minutemen were great fans of Beefheart, and were arguably among the few to effectively synthesize his music with their own, especially in their early output, which featured disjointed guitar and irregular, galloping rhythms. Michael Azerrad describes The Minutemen's early output as "highly caffeinated Captain Beefheart running down James Brown tunes", and notes that Beefheart was the group's "idol". Others who arguably conveyed the same influence around the same time or before include John Cale of The Velvet Underground, Laurie Anderson, The Residents and Henry Cow. Genesis P-Orridge of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, and poet mystic Z'EV, both pioneers of industrial music, would cite Van Vliet along with Zappa among their influences. More notable were those emerging during the early days of punk rock, such as The Clash

Cartoonist and writer Matt Groening tells of listening to Trout Mask Replica at the age of 15 and thinking "that it was the worst thing I'd ever heard. I said to myself, they're not even trying! It was just a sloppy cacophony. Then I listened to it a couple more times, because I couldn't believe Frank Zappa could do this to me - and because a double album cost a lot of money. About the third time, I realised they were doing it on purpose; they meant it to sound exactly this way. About the sixth or seventh time, it clicked in, and I thought it was the greatest album I'd ever heard." Groening first saw Beefheart and the Magic Band perform in the front row at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in the early 1970s. He later declared Trout Mask Replica to be the greatest album ever made. He considered the appeal of the Magic Band as outcasts who were even "too weird for the hippies". Pere Ubu, Babe the Blue Ox and Mark E. Smith of The Fall. The Fall covered "Beatle Bones 'N' Smokin' Stones" in their 1993 session for John Peel. Beefheart is considered to have "greatly influenced" New Wave artists, "Once you've heard Beefheart," said Waits, "it's hard to wash him out of your clothes. It stains, like coffee or blood." Guitarist John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers cited Van Vliet as a prominent influence on the band's 1991 album Blood Sugar Sex Magik as well as his debut solo album Niandra Lades and Usually Just a T-Shirt (1994) and stated that during his drug-induced absence, after leaving the Red Hot Chili Peppers, he "would paint and listen to Trout Mask Replica." Black Francis of the Pixies would cite Beefheart's The Spotlight Kid as one of the albums he listened to regularly when first writing songs for the band. Kurt Cobain of Nirvana would also acknowledge Van Vliet's influence, mentioning him among his notoriously eclectic range. Beck includes "Safe as Milk" and "Ella Guru" in a playlist of songs as part of his website's Planned Obsolescence series of mashups of songs by the musicians that have influenced him. Franz Ferdinand cited Beefheart's Doc At The Radar Station as a strong influence on their second LP, You Could Have It So Much Better. PJ Harvey and John Parish would discuss Beefheart's influence in an interview together. Harvey's first experience of Beefheart's music was as a child, as her parents had all of his albums in their record collection, which when she listened to made her "feel ill". Harvey was reintroduced to Beefheart's music by Parish, who lent her a cassette copy of Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller)'' at the age of 16. She has cited him as one of her greatest influences since. Parish would describe Beefheart's music as a "combination of raw blues and abstract jazz. There was humour in there, but you could tell that it wasn't [intended as] a joke. I felt that there was a depth to what he did that very few other rock artists have managed [to achieve]."

Discography

{| style="width:100%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" |- valign="top" |style="width:50%"|

Safe as Milk (1967)

Strictly Personal (1968)

Trout Mask Replica (1969)

Lick My Decals Off, Baby (1970)

Mirror Man (1971)

The Spotlight Kid (1972)

|style="width:50%"|

Clear Spot (1972)

Unconditionally Guaranteed (1974)

Bluejeans & Moonbeams (1974)

Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) (1978)

Doc at the Radar Station (1980)

Ice Cream for Crow (1982)

|}

References

Further reading

Barnes, Mike (2000). Captain Beefheart. Quartet Books. ISBN 1-84449-412-8.

Courtier, Kevin (2007). Trout Mask Replica. New York: Continuum. ISBN 0-8264-2781-2

Delville, Michel & Norris, Andrew (2005). Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Secret History of Maximalism. Cambrdige: Salt Publishing. ISBN 1-84471-059-9.

French, John (2010). Beefheart: Through the Eyes of Magic. ISBN 0-9561212-1-7

Harkleroad, Bill (1998). Lunar Notes: Zoot Horn Rollo's Captain Beefheart Experience. Interlink Publishing. ISBN 0-946719-21-7.

Miles, Barry (2004). Frank Zappa. Atlantic Books. ISBN 1-84354-091-6

Bamberger, W.C. (1999). Riding Some Kind Of Unusual Skull Sleigh: On The Arts Of Don Van Vliet. ISBN 978-0-917453-35-9

Beaugrand, Andreas and various (1994). Stand Up to Be Discontinued. (Paperback) ISBN 3-9801320-2-1.

Van Vliet, Don (Captain Beefheart) (1987). Skeleton Breath, Scorpion Blush. (All poems in English, preface in German and English). Bern-Berlin: Gachnang & Springer. ISBN 978-3-906127-15-6

Azerrad, Michael (2001). Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991. Little Brown. ISBN 0-316-78753-1

External links

Beefheart.com - The Captain Beefheart Radar Station

Captain Beefheart at Rolling Stone

[ Captain Beefheart at Allmusic]

Some Yo Yo Stuff by Anton Corbijn

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