Rock - Richard Cook on the enduring enigma of Captain Beefheart

There may be only a handful of true originals in rock music. Don Van Vliet, alias Captain Beefheart, is surely one of them. He came out of nowhere and has ended up back there, an obscure, untutored genius. If his records have hardly been successful in terms of sales, he is one of those figures whom everybody knows about, even if they can't name any of his songs or albums. The only instrument he seemed able to play was the soprano saxophone (and he was pretty awful on that), yet he taught his groups to perform like nobody else. Dense and fraught, yet simple and free, his music is cryptic but pure, untainted. If ever there was a shaman in rock music, it is Van Vliet.

He has long since disappeared from music-making: his last album, Ice Cream for Crow, came out in 1982, and he hasn't performed in public for many years. How can such a faraway figure still cast any shadow on what goes on now? He exists as a kind of half-remembered spirit, a bewildering zephyr that blew in and out, devastating his surroundings. The discography began in 1967 with an album called Safe as Milk, a dangerous concoction of electric blues and psychedelia, but really took shape with the vast canvas of Trout Mask Replica and its even tougher successor, Lick My Decals Off, Baby. The Magic Band, Beefheart's accomplices, played in a kind of drunken stagger that had its own rigour and cussed logic. Time signatures, figured out by John "Drumbo" French with hours of obsessive practice, were nothing like the normal business of rock bands. The spiny, ratcheting guitars criss-crossed as Van Vliet's huge bellow declaimed lyrics that spoke of a frightening but better place. "I cannot go back to your frownland," goes the first song on Trout Mask Replica, and it often seems as if Beefheart and his Magic Band were escapees from somewhere else, squirming and struggling on Planet Earth.

A two-disc compilation called The Dust Blows Forward (Rhino, US import) culls many of their finest moments from a career that was blotchy and often troubled by legal problems. If you've never heard Beefheart before, the discs will be hard work, and are best sampled a few tracks at a time. Yet at this distance, it's often the playfulness of the music that engages, not the zaniness. "Beefheartian" has come to be a synonym for "weird" in rock, but groups which followed in the Magic Band's footsteps, such as the Birthday Party, insisted on the baroque aspects at the expense of Van Vliet's essentially benign musings. He is much more Lewis Carroll than Poe. When reluctant to break open a piggy bank, he turned the idea into a country blues bemoaning that "I don't wanna kill my china pig". He welcomed "Big-Eyed Beans from Venus" and always seemed to see the moon shining down, looking "like a dandelion". He was arguably rock's first ecology activist, hurt by humankind's relentless attacks on the natural order, but it was a pitch so cloaked in the surreal that nobody much noticed.

Some of the mid-1970s albums were feeble compromises, seemingly made to try and sell records, but his later music - especially the cranky, explosive Doc at the Radar Station - restored the balance in Van Vliet's favour. He and Frank Zappa were cronies as teenagers, and they were associated on and off, though a final falling-out was healed only when Zappa told Van Vliet of his terminal cancer. A couple of tracks where the Captain sang with Zappa's group are also on the compilation, and they only prove what a hopeless case it was to try and harness Van Vliet to anyone else's muse. He has since turned to painting and solitude somewhere on the American west coast, possibly ill, though no one seems to know for sure. Primitive modernist or modernist primitive? School of one, definitely.

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