(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Even for resident musical oddity Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart’s relentless need to create was irritating. On the 1975 Bongo Fury tour, Beefheart, real name Don Glen Vliet, joined Zappa and The Mothers of Invention, and while both were committed to avant-garde freakouts, Beefheart’s incessant scribbling soured their relationship so much that Zappa refused to talk to him. Beefheart, who had taken to routinely pausing their set to draw, then filled an entire sketchbook – and a large one at that – with frenzied caricatures of Zappa, knocking them out with a passionate speed that didn’t exactly suggest quality.
Aside from the passive-aggressive drawings, their creative differences caused significant tension. Zappa was disciplined, writing compositions with searing precision, whereas Beefheart’s creations arrived in a flurry whenever ideas took him. When he retired from music in 1982, that explosive tendency worked its way into his surrealist artworks. The uninitiated thought it was just another musician trying their hand at something vaguely creative, but Beefheart’s relationship to art was established long before he was sticking on a trout mask.
Back when he was still Glen Vliet and not yet Beefheart, he spent his childhood making sculptures. In a somewhat dubious account of a thought he had aged five, he once recalled thinking America was too out of touch with nature and that modern society was tyrannising it. In a bid to return to it, he started making elaborate animal sculptures in his room. His parents could be found routinely knocking on the door, begging him to take a break and eat dinner. This forceful five-year-old would win out in the end, and they’d just slide a plate under the door.
That innate pull to nature resurfaced when he took up art again decades later. Typically, this never meant serene images of quaint lakeside scenes. He was drawn to the most extreme, volatile plains there were. His love of the brutal Californian desert echoed the brutality of his music, which was jarring and inhospitable in almost a similar way.
His paintings were so uniquely his that he refused to cite any influences other than the land: “I just paint like I paint and that’s enough influence,” he said. That said, he clearly drew from Primitivism and the surreal and admired the emotively charged works of Vincent van Gogh, who used landscapes to the same devasting effect he did.
Beefheart was largely uninterested in reality. He didn’t care for conformity as a child, and his artworks echoed that – enduring proof of his lifelong desire to reconnect with nature. That his inspiration seemed subconscious is paralleled in his style, which was so singular it essentially removed the need for a viewer and became more of a creative exercise for him alone. These works were solitary explorations that stemmed from deep within him, making his visual art just as prolific as his music.
