“USE MY EXPL DING NOTE THEORY!”
NEW MUSICAL EXPRESS
NOVEMBER 1, 1980
“GODDAMN THAT BEAT!” Don Van Vliet slams out a foursquare tattoo on the dashboard of his blue Volvo estate. “That mama heartbeat. That bom... bom... bom! Why do they do that? Don’t they know it’s bad for the heart? I would never treat my heart that way. I don’t want my heart to attack me!
Don Van Vliet is railing against the evil monotonous mama heartbeat of what passes for music in a world of limited sensibility where he lives with his unlimited sensibilities. And he isn’t kidding. Where he hears a myriad symphony I hear only the wind whistling through the window. Where he sees a terrifying menace I see only a large, gleaming truck.
But if his grip on reality is slack, his grip on the wheel is sure. For a moment, it’s hard to tell which is enjoying the greater acceleration, his mind or his car.
“I have four wheels beneath me, one in my hand, and I’m trying to do this interview. You have a lot of nerve, Sir,” he exclaims as we slide past the gleaming menace. “You’re not even worried!”
Why should I be? I’m safe. Safe as milk.
I’m in the hands of someone who knows how to plug in, to connect, to strip away the surface and feel the sensation. His nerve ends are alive to sensory input most of us have learned to tune out for sanity’s sake. Don Van Vliet may be a lot of things but he will never be bored. “I breathe with every pore,” he says, and I have no reason to doubt him.
Besides, before he became Captain Beefheart, the legendary Captain Beefheart, when he was just Don Van Vliet, a teenage beatnik prodigy, he used to race Porsche 904s, a sleek little ’50s fastback that could turn on a dime. He used to race them out in the desert, to which we are heading, out of Los Angeles on the