Captain Beefheart and Gary Lucas
Guitarist Gary Lucas has worked with everyone from Jeff Buckley to Nick Cave to Leonard Bernstein throughout his music career. But there's one artist who stands out above all others: Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart, the mercurial blues singer whose avant-garde recordings with The Magic Band changed his life. Lucas worked as both Beefheart's manager and a member of The Magic Band before Vliet quit music entirely in the early '80s. When Captain Beefheart died last December, after many years of suffering from multiple sclerosis, Lucas took it upon himself to become his unofficial ambassador, and began holding Captain Beefheart Symposiums around the country as tributes to his friend and mentor. Tonight, he'll hold one such Symposium at the Knitting Factory Brooklyn, with special guests including Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Richard Pena, Danny Fields, and Hal Willner. We talked to Lucas about the history of The Magic Band, and eating ribs with Captain Beefheart.
When did you first hear Captain Beefheart? I first heard him when I was in high school, but that was going back to the late sixties. I bought, just because I was intrigued, the second album, Strictly Personal. It was already a cut out. I think I got it for $1.97 on Blue Thumb records; it had a beautiful cover. But I first heard about him because the summer of '68 I ran into a kid on the Syracuse University Marshall Street District. He spotted me, really, because I was carrying an album by The Move, a very great but kind of obscure English band, and he was an anglophile. So we started talking—he had the longest hair of anybody I ever saw—and in the middle of it I noticed he was carrying a guitar case, acoustic guitar, and on it was written, in magic marker, "Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band." And I said, "What's that? Who are they? I've never heard of them." And he said, "That's a band my brother just produced." And then later on I realized his name was Fred Perry, and I kind of put two and two together and I said, "Did your brother produce Tiny Tim?" I really liked this Tiny Tim album and he said, "Yeah."
So that's how I first heard about him and then I saw the second album. I was intrigued but I wasn't really knocked out. I was used to very slick productions of the music I was listening to in the psychedelic genre, and I found it a bit rough. But then six months after that I saw Trout Mask Replica on the rack at the record store and it said "Produced by Zappa" and I loved Zappa so I got it. And that one really sunk in, after a few listens anyway. At first I wasn't sure whether they were improvising and making noise and then I realized there was a brilliant structure behind everything; very poetic and far-ranging. It had a colossal impact on me.
Then I went up to Yale University, I was a student of English Lit, and I showed the lyrics to a very famous Polish writer named Jerzy Kosinski. He wrote Being There if you know that film. He just glanced at it briefly, but then he said, "This man is a very sophisticated lyricist!" I saw his first show in New York in '71. I came down from New Haven and he just blew my mind. It changed my life utterly. I'd never seen anything as cool and powerful, and I said, "If I ever do anything in music I'm going to play with this band." I was a pretty accomplished guitarist, but coming more from blues rock, traditional, wailing Jeff Beck-type guitar. The way Beefheart was orchestrating his music and approaching the performance of it...I just found every aspect intriguing. Unlike anything I've ever seen. It was like running away to join the circus.
How did you end up going from being a fan to joining The Magic Band? Well, it took a few years. What happened was, I made a point to go and see them every time they came in the vicinity of Yale, basically New York-based gigs. I got to interview him. He actually came up to Yale the next year and I interviewed him and saw the band. We bonded, we got friendly, I'd go backstage and hang with them, He gave me his number, and he was an amazing conversationalist. So I'd have these very lengthy, some would say rambling, conversations on his end, but they were fascinating. He was an amazing raconteur. His imagery was so poetic. He was unlike anyone I've ever met, with maybe one or two exceptions. But none of them really hold his candle power, his brain.
But I didn't tell him I played because I was shy and I didn't think I was really good enough. Secretly, I was studying songs of his and trying to figure out how to play them on the guitar. I invited him up to be a judge at a film festival—I was a director at the Yale Film Society—and I didn't hear from him. Then he apologized and said things were bad, and then he sort of disappeared. The next year I heard he'd fired the old band or they had left, it's still unclear. He had a very sad period of trying to do a commercial record of two that seemed to just alienate all of his hardcore fan base, and not win any new fans unfortunately. I avoided seeing him then.
Then I was home from Yale then and ready to go off and have adventures and work in the Far East and I saw in the paper that he was going to be a guest of Frank Zappa at the Syracuse War Memorial where I'd seen classic shows in my youth growing up in Syracuse. And I said, "Whoa! How can that be? I thought he hated Frank!" At least he used to say they were on the outs and he would criticize him. But I went down to see it and there he was. They brought him on stage for a few numbers. I approached him and he remembered me and we had this great reunion and he hugged me and he said, "How have you been? Happy to see ya!" So I took him out for barbecued spare ribs. There was a black guy who ran this underground barbecue pit in the ghetto of Syracuse, the black ghetto, behind his house; this amazing place you could go after midnight, so he closed pretty late and he had a pit there. I thought Don would enjoy that so he did.
In the middle of those chowing down on ribs and Don was singing the blues, I then played my card. I said, "By the way, if you ever put a band together, I've love to audition for you." And he said, "Really? Why didn't you tell me you played the guitar, man? Bring your guitar up, I'm gonna play up in Boston in a few days with Frank!" I said OK, I went up on the Greyhound bus a few days later with my Stratocaster and crashed with a friend. Went to his show, met him backstage again and went back to his hotel and played for him. And he said, "Yeah, we're gonna do something." But he was vague, you know, and I had plans to go off for to Far East, which I did.
I came back a couple years later and rang him and he had a new band together but he said, "I still want to do something with you." So we stayed in touch and eventually by '79/'80 he was ready to incorporate me. The first thing was, he gave me a solo piece to learn for the record Doc at the Radar Station, Virgin [Records], called "Flavor Bud Living." It took a long time to learn and master and then he further modified it. He said, "I really want you to use my exploding note theory." "What's that?" "Well play every note as if it had no relation to the previous note." Very staccato, I guess, like bombs bursting. So that you can hear on that album. That was my first appearance on a record. I went out and did the session in one or two takes. I got off the plane, took a cab to the studio in Glendale, California, near where he'd grown up. And there he was.
He just ushered me in and I did it. He asked me and my wife to manage him, we co-managed him when the record came out. I went on tour and played that and a few other numbers, and read one of his poems and played bass on another number. So I was like a utility player on the tour as well as being the manager and setting up the interviews and get him from A to B, which was difficult. At times pretty difficult, he didn't like to budge. "Well I wanna drink my tea! What are you doing?" "Don, we have to go sound check." "I don't need my sound check!" It was madness, but I wouldn't change anything in retrospect.
I split up with my wife, at that point, and stayed in touch with him. Then he did one more record for Virgin, called Ice Cream for Crow and I played as a full member of the band on that. He also gave me one really hard solo piece called "The Evening Bell." There are clips of me playing on YouTube. This thing got reviews like, "Gary had to grow extra fingers to negotiate his way through it." That was in Esquire and there was a review in Rolling Stone. But he didn't want to tour and I said, "Well you gotta make a video. Videos are what's happening now. MTV." So I begged this money off Virgin and Epic, who put the record out in the US, all of $5,000 in total. We made a brilliant video and then MTV rejected it, but it lives on! It has one hundred thousand hits on YouTube, or something crazy like that, maybe more. I'm going to show some of these clips tomorrow at the symposium, which is my celebration of a true American visionary, pioneer, genius. I had my ups and downs with him and he was famous for some bad behavior but I can tell you, in my experience, it was worth it. I'm just here to emphasize the positives because as far as I'm concerned, he should be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It's ludicrous that he's not.
Considering the intracacies of his songwriting, was it difficult working with him in the band? Well, from time to time it could be, because it was hard to understand some of his instructions. Sometimes he'd say, "Play like you died." He whispered that in my ear before I played. So how does one interpret that? Sometimes it was unclear. We pulled it together and he edited everything down to the last minute. It's really all his music, the way he wanted it. If you tried to throw in any other stuff you'd be out. There was no improvisation to speak of. He got to improvise, though, with his voice and his harmonica.
Did you keep in touch with him after he retired from music? Were you still close with him? Well I did for a bit and then I finally resigned and quit in '84. After getting him situated...if he wanted to make another record he could have. Virgin would have rolled it and I would have played on it. But he was all poised to do the show through the auspices of Mary Boone Gallery and Michael Werner Gallery, which are very big art dealers, and that's what he wanted to do. At this point he said, "I don't want to do music anymore, no one will take me seriously as a painter, and I want to just do painting now I'm really sick of music." So I just resigned and said, "Look, here are all the contacts. I had a great four or five years, thank you, but I just can't do this anymore." I really didn't want to be his art pimp and worry about it anymore. I resigned and then began my own thing and really cut myself off from him. It was not really out of anything other than self-preservation.
If you knew him, he demanded a lot of time out of individuals who worked with him. The closer you got, the more time-consuming it became. You'd get calls in the middle of the night that could go on for over an hour, just at any time. So that was great when I was younger, but at that point it was like, "I just really need to get busy and do my own thing and establish my own name in music." It was a great experience, I'm very proud of working with him. He was a mentor to me and a very close friend. At that point, when I left, I just thought, I'd rather just concentrate and remember the good parts of the friendship and try to preserve the relationship. It could be fraught, because of the business getting in the way. Trying to get his business organized was not easy, shall we say, because he wasn't always the most easy person. So without really going into specifics, I just cut myself off, but I retained my love for him in my heart and admiration for his work. I'm probably his biggest fan in the world.
Did you talk to him before his death in December? No, I just, really...you know what's odd? I hadn't spoken to him since the '80s. Once in a while I would pass a message through a third party and it was friendly, and I would get a friendly greeting back but I didn't really see a point. Also, he got really sick in the '90s and got even more reclusive and didn't really speak to many people at all. I just wanted to remember him the way...it just broke my heart to see and hear the film footage that came out in the late '90s, and there's some spoken word stuff that's just horrible, horribly tragic, to hear the deterioration of his physical being.
I never stopped loving him. Then I was coming back from Havana, having just played the Havana Film and Jazz festival in mid-December, and when I got to Nassau there was a text message saying, "Don just passed away." And I was in shock because, honestly, the night before some words of his just popped into my mind out of nowhere, and this doesn't happen often to me. It was a poem that he wrote that's on the back of an album called The Spotlight Kid. It's very short, it goes, "The stars are matter, we are matter, but it doesn't matter." As I was like, "What did he mean by that?" I was pondering this as we were driving along in the darkness of the Cuban night on the way to this gig. And I thought, well maybe it meant that we are all part of the fabric of the Universe; we don't really die, we don't really...you know what I mean? We're all matter. We're like the stars, and stars are eternal. So that was a comforting thought. But then I got this message 18 hours later, and I was a bit shaken by it because in the light of this premonition, that I got the night before, it was as if I was getting a message that he was dying. He was known to exhibit, from time to time, what you might say was clairvoyance. I've seen it. People can scoff at it and laugh at it, but most of the people who were around him for any length of time would see it from time to time. He was really a sensitive person, and attuned to vibrations and frequencies most people would never pick up on. He had all of his windows open.
Do you find that more people are open-minded to his music now? You know, I don't know, I'm not sure that they are. In fact, one reason that I started doing these symposiums was because I was afraid that his reputation had been, more or less, an eclipse, for the last few years. Basically there weren't many young fans who even knew about him or knew his name, and I thought that was a shame. When I got involved with him back in the day, part of it was that I felt I was on a mission to further expose his genius to the world because I didn't think he'd gotten very a fair deal and a lot of groups in the punk and post-punk era had taken a lot, uncredited, from Don, without going into names. Let's say he was a big influence then.
Now I wouldn't say so, but I'm not really up on the current scene so I could be wrong there. Maybe there are. In any case, it was a combination of fear that he'd fallen off the map, and a burning desire to rectify that. And also to counter some very nasty books that had come out over the last couple years by former members of The Magic Band that just trashed him without giving him his due as a great artist and a genius and a poet. They really focused, more or less, on the bad behavior aspects, which are old stories that circulated for years. I was determined not to let them have the last word and that's one reason I started doing this. That somebody would stand up for him in a big way; I stood up for the guy for years while other people ran in the other direction. Now, the symposiums have actually been pretty successful, we pack them in. There's a great review in Relics. Yesterday, The Library of Congress, selected Trout Mask Replica as one of their 25 records going in their permanent collection.
What other sort of things should people expect at the symposium? It's an overview; I do a little bit of talking about working with him, his methodology. Then we show selected clips of what I think are really great, emblematic performances from various versions of The Magic Band, and give a lot of the great players who came through the ranks a tip of the hat because quite a few great people put in a lot of time and work doing Don's music. Then I show slides of his paintings and drawings, which are beautiful. Then I invite guests, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, from various post-punk, punk bands, Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV are probably best known; he and I are going to do some kind of improv based on Don's music and he'll play guitar, he's going to improvise. We have various people reading poetry of Don's, a wide variety, cross-section of people. People on the art scene. The Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Richard Pena, is one of Don's biggest fans since he was in college and jumped at the chance to get up and read one of his poems. Danny Fields, Hal Willner, people who knew him. Danny was a DJ years ago, he has the distinction of being the first DJ in America to play Trout Mask Replica.
Danny Fields is the same Danny Fields who signed The Doors, right? And Iggy Pop? Yeah. The Ramones. Nico.
Do you plan on continuing the symposiums, turning them into an annual event? Yeah. Well, I will do them, I will continue to do them if there's a desire for people to hear this stuff. I think it's important work to do and he should be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. My god, some of the people they've let in there, it's a disgrace. He's one of the most influential, significant figures who worked within the idiom. You could say it's jazz, or whatever, however you want to categorize it, he was a world-shaking musician. It was stuff that he pioneered.
Do you have a favorite song of his? I'm partial to material from Trout Mask Replica and Lick My Decals Off, Baby The song "Bellerin' Plain," I like that very much. That's on Lick My Decals Off, Baby. There are so many great songs. "Click Clack," that's a great one, if you want a good introduction for people who are maybe not ready for the hard stuff.
