牛心上尉

Don Van Vliet (; born Don Glen Vliet; January 15, 1941 – December 17, 2010), known by his stage name Captain Beefheart, was an American singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and visual artist. Leading a rotating ensemble known as the Magic Band, he recorded 13 studio albums between 1967 and 1982. His music blended elements of blues, free jazz, rock, and avant-garde composition with idiosyncratic rhythms and absurdist wordplay. He possessed a distinctive gravelly voice and a wide vocal range.

Known as an enigmatic persona, Beefheart frequently constructed myths about his life and was known to exercise extreme, dictatorial control over the Magic Band. Although he achieved little commercial success, he sustained a cult following and became an influence on many experimental rock and punk-era artists.

Van Vliet began performing as Captain Beefheart in 1964, when he joined the original Magic Band lineup. The group's 1969 album Trout Mask Replica would rank 58th in Rolling Stone magazine's 2003 list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. After a period of recording more conventional blues rock to dissatisfaction among critics and fans, Beefheart formed a new Magic Band with a group of younger musicians and regained critical approval on his final recordings.

In 1982, Van Vliet retired from music and pursued a career in visual art. His abstract expressionist paintings and drawings command high prices, and have been exhibited in art galleries and museums across the world.

Early life

Van Vliet was born Don Glen Vliet in Glendale, California, United States, on January 15, 1941, to Glen Alonzo Vliet, a service station owner from Kansas, and Willie Sue Vliet (née Warfield), who was from Arkansas. Van Vliet said that he was descended from adventurer and author Richard Halliburton and related to actor Slim Pickens, and that he remembered being born.

Vliet began painting and sculpting at age three. His subjects reflected his "obsession" with animals, particularly dinosaurs, fish, African mammals and lemurs. Considered a child prodigy, at age four he was featured with his animal sculptures on a Los Angeles television program. At the age of nine, he won a children's sculpting competition organized for the Los Angeles Zoo in Griffith Park by local tutor and sculptor Agostinho Rodrigues.

During the 1950s, Vliet worked as an apprentice with Rodrigues, who considered him a prodigy. Van Vliet said that he was a lecturer at the Barnsdall Art Institute in Los Angeles at the age of eleven, although it is likely he simply gave a form of artistic dissertation. He said that his parents discouraged his interest in sculpture due to their perception of artists as "queer". According to Van Vliet, they declined several scholarship offers, including one from the local Knudsen Creamery to travel to Europe with six years' paid tuition to study marble sculpture; this made him so bitter that he abandoned his art until he was twenty-three.

When Van Vliet was 13, the family moved to the farming town of Lancaster, California, in the Mojave Desert, where there was a growing aerospace industry supported by Edwards Air Force Base. It was an environment that would greatly influence Vliet creatively. He remained interested in art; several of his paintings were later used as covers for his albums. He developed his taste and interest in music, listening to the Delta blues of Son House and Robert Johnson; jazz artists such as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, and Cecil Taylor; and the electric Chicago blues of Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters. Vliet socialized with members of local bands such as the Omens and the Blackouts. The Omens' guitarists, Alexis Snouffer and Jerry Handley, who would later found the Magic Band; the Blackouts' drummer was Frank Zappa. Van Vliet collaborated with Zappa on his scripts for "teenage operettas", one of which was entitled "Captain Beefheart & the Grunt People". The earliest known recording of both Beefheart and Zappa is "Lost in a Whirlpool", recorded c. 1958–59 and included in the 1996 posthumous Zappa album The Lost Episodes.

Van Vliet claimed that "half a day of kindergarten" was the extent of his formal education, but his graduation picture appears in the Antelope Valley High School yearbook. His disavowals of education may have been related to his dyslexia; though never officially diagnosed, this condition was obvious to Magic Band members John French and Denny Walley, who observed his difficulty reading cue cards and his frequent need to be read to.