Sui Generis: Deceased Artiste Don Van Vliet

Don Van Vliet’s death this past Friday spelled the final departure of one of the 20th-cenutry’s greatest “uncategorizable” musicians. Sure, he’d been out of the music business since 1982, and it had been made public years ago that he was suffering from multiple sclerosis. Still, I think some of us wondered if some new material might not be released — certainly not new music, but perhaps new poetry, since that had been the final forum for his uniquely surreal verbal excursions.

The man better known to music fans as Captain Beefheart left us, though, with eleven amazing albums (that discounts the two he truly hated, and adds in Bongo Fury, his collaboration with Zappa) and many paintings, since fine art was his true love all along. In reading items about his life to prepare to write this, I noticed that all of the obits rightly hailed him as an unbridled, (again) uncategorizable genius, but that the longer pieces on his life went into the “cult-like” way in which his most unique album Trout Mask Replica was made.

It’s hard to tally those accounts of a dictatorial madman who verbally and physically abused his bandmates with the exceedingly nervous and mellow gent we see in the three on-camera interviews he gave later in his life (two of them sadly with David Letterman, who you can see didn’t a crap about who the guy he was talking to was). Watching Van Vliet in the superb short “Some Yo-Yo Stuff” (see below), one can’t imagine that that humble, weird old genius (who’s only about 51 in the film) is the same guy who supposedly terrorized the Magic Band for the eight months they lived together and made that amazing record.

Well, such schizo rifts are the very stuff of artistic genius. As my favorite line on the subject from John Waters goes (a propos of Fassbinder in Waters’ case), I hear he was a monster, but I don’t care, I never had to live with him. What Van Vliet left behind is a singular musical legacy that is diminished by the label “outsider music,” which puts him, a sophisticated musical innovator, with the likes of “primitives” like Hasil Adkins and the Shags (both acts I enjoy the hell of, by the way — “no more hot dogs!”). Creating that kind of umbrella label for acts so radically different, and on such different sides of the creativity spectrum, is merely a handy way to create a bailiwick for certain musical archivists.

Van Vliet/Beefheart existed in some sense “outside” the music industry, since his work remains uncategorizable to this day, but all his albums were on major labels, he did have a rather sizeable cult following during his lifetime (especially in, natch, Europe), and he was, most importantly, aware of his musical eccentricities. If his albums sound out of key to the average ear that’s because he was exploring new musical territory, not because he didn’t know how the melody would’ve conventionally been played, as is the case with with the “primitive” outsiders.

But, enough about labels, since Beefheart’s music escaped them all. It was rock, it had a blues foundation, it was unpredictable as the finest jazz, and had lyrics that certainly rate as pure surreal/Beat poetry. He was one of a kind, and while some music critics have done a good job of explaining verbally what he was doing, nothing beats listenting to the music. Thus, I will abandon all attempts at a conventional obit for Van Vliet and will instead just make one media-minded remark: in going through the tapes that exist of Beefheart through the years, I think it’s pretty safe to say he made less than 10 appearances on American television over the close to 20 years he was in the music business (again, on major labels). I can only count seven myself, but if anyone can think of any others, send ’em on.

The seven I come up with are: his appearance on Dick Clark's crappy evening show Where the Action Is (lip-synching “Diddy Wah Diddy” on a beach — god, were Clark’s shows cheap-ass productions!); his “call-in” to American Bandstand (see below); a 1971 live appearance with the Magic Band on the Detroit show Tubeworks; the 1980 Saturday Night Live appearance that introduced a lot of us to what he was like live; the “Eye on L.A.’ interview (see below); and the two Letterman segments. I don’t think I need to add that all of the other TV appearances you can find are from Europe and England. It is a pure and simple fact that the best American culture does attract major followings in Europe while it is ignored by the mainstream over here. Beefheart was yet another shining example of that.

On to the clips! His best TV appearance in my opinion is his spirited performance of “Upon the My Oh My” on The Old Gray Whistle Test. Not his best song, but boy, is he commandeering the camera:



And the perfect melding of his true love, painting, and his music, was the music-video he put together for his song “Ice Cream for Crow”:



The single best extended intro to his life is this British TV docu, "The Artist Formerly Known as Captain Beefheart," narrated by legendary DJ John Peel:



The first great performance on film is this rather odd gig on the beach at Cannes in January 1968. Here Beefheart and the Magic Band perform “Electricity”:



Thanks to his high school friend Frank Zappa, Beefheart made his full-blown masterwork Trout Mask Replica, which can’t ever date because it isn’t rooted to the time it was made. It is a radical album that is joyous, catchy, disturbing, and sometimes even a bit scary. Here is the song “Ella Guru”:



And an instrumental from the album that supplies a perfect example of the disjunctive and brilliant sound Beefheart kept pursuing until the final album, Ice Cream for Crow.:



Beefheart’s TV ad for the album Lick My Decals Off, Baby, which never aired because it’s so fucking surreal. Best element is, no question, the conventional radio-voiced announcer:



A raw TV performance, the Magic Band doing “I’m Gonna Booglarize You, Baby” on German TV in 1972:



A cover never performed on LP, “Sweet Georgia Brown”:



A rare live version of “Willie the Pimp” from Zappa’s Hot Rats album with Beefheart on vocals:



A very odd bootleg LP that mixes live Beefheart and Zappa tracks with them hosting a radio show where they played their own rare records:



The single longest document we have of Beefheart and the later Magic Band in concert is the French TV show Chorus from 1980. Several songs from the band were included in the show. Here is the unforgettable “Bat Chain Puller”:



And the only other TV interview he ever did beside the two Letterman appearances. Here he’s nervous as hell on camera, but says some very quotable things, including the fact that his music is “non-hypnotic”:



Anton Corbijn’s 1992 short “Some Yo-Yo Stuff” is Van Vliet’s last testament to his public. It is brilliant and touching, with “interview” questions by a wisely abstract David Lynch:



The very final time the Captain sang for an audience, a phone recording of him warbling “Happy Earthday” released on a charity album:



And the single rarest item on YT, the time he called into American Bandstand, one of the most important pop-music shows in American TV history and also one of the most cheaply produced *EVER*:

The Return of the Son of the Trail of the Curse…: Deceased Artiste Blake Edwards

Blake Edwards, who was often hailed as the “next Billy Wilder” (but never really was), died on Wednesday at 88, causing film fans to reminisce fondly about his best films and try to forget about the many (many) bad ones that followed.

Edwards’ career was a study in indulgence, and indulgent moviemaking can be a superb thing (Fellini) or a very painful one (Vincent Gallo). When Edwards received his honorary Oscar — back when they showed the Lifetime Achievement awards on the program! — he thanked his wife Julie Andrews and omitted two of the people without whom his legacy would’ve been a hell of a lot poorer, Audrey Hepburn and Peter Sellers.

Ther are several rock-solid comedies and drama in Edwards’ filmography, but Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) was a seminal work that added much to the “dream” aspect of NYC (“…she’s a phony, but she’s a genuine phony…”). Hepburn became a style icon more for that film than any other, despite its awful interludes (Mickey Rooney as a cartoon Japanese character that makes Jerry Lewis’s Asians seem politically correct).

Interestingly, my favorite snatch of dialogue from an Edwards film comes from Tiffany’s but was not scripted by Edwards — instead it came either from the original Capote novella or the marvelous Sixties filmmaker George Axelrod, who scripted the film. It comes when John McGiver finds out that there are still prizes in Cracker Jack boxes and says, “That's nice to know. It gives one a feeling of solidarity, almost of continuity with the past, that sort of thing.” I think about “continuity with the past” quite a lot (as regular readers of this blog already know).

And Sellers! A comic actor of boundless energy, he did what he had to do (silly French accent and pratfalls) in The Pink Panther (1963) and stole what was otherwise a pretty mediocre jewel-thief comedy. The follow-up, A Shot in the Dark (1964), was much better, but the later entry The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976) was probably the most enjoyable pic in the series.



It’s been well documented that Sellers and Edwards couldn’t stand each other, but both gents needed each other very badly in the mid-Seventies. Neither man had had a hit in several years when The Return of the Pink Panther (1975) came along, and both gentlemen rode the character for a few years until the underwhelming Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978).

But Sellers’ death didn’t stop the series (and thanks, Steve Martin, for wasting our time sullying Sellers’ legacy, twice, once you’d finished burying in the dirt Phil Silver’s finest comic creation). Edwards went on to create a trio of horrible Pink Panther films without Sellers. Trail of the Pink Panther (1982) is a godawful “search” for Inspector Clouseau that is simply an excuse to show Sellers outtakes. (I remember Edwards’ excuse for the film being that Sellers had once said to him that the public should see the outtakes from the three preceding films — but he never mentioned framing them with a plot!) Curse of the Pink Panther (1983) was an attempt to create another Inspector Clouseau, this time an NYPD detective played by Ted Wass. And Edwards’ very last theatrical feature, Son of the Pink Panther (1993), was an unbelievably bad English-language vehicle for the otherwise wonderful Roberto Benigni.

Yes, there were a lot of very bad Blake Edwards movies. Remember when he decided to remake Laurel and Hardy’s Music Box with Ted Danson and Howie Mandel (A Fine Mess)? (This after trying to top the longest pie fighter ever, from a silent L&H comedy, with a much, much bigger one in his cute and well-cast but endless The Great Race.) Or when he made a cheesy sitcom-like farce with randy jokes, including one featuring a glow-in-the-dark condom (Skin Deep)? Or when he remade Goodbye Charlie for no perceptible reason (Switch)?

Rather than dwell on how many of the later Edwards films were outright embarrassments (basically anything after Victoria/Victoria, 1982), let’s remember his true talent with one of my favorites of his pictures, and surely his most acidic outing, the attack on major-studio Hollywood he called S.O.B. (1981). In that film, he finally got to show his prim and proper wife’s raunchy side, got to resurrect a famous Hollywood urban legend about John Barrymore and his poker buddies, and got to have his movie stolen by veteran comic wildman Larry Storch, as a goofy guru.

If there’s one moment that Edwards did seem like Billy Wilder — albeit the latter-day curse-happy Wilder of the Seventies — it was in S.O.B.: