Musical Collaborations of Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart

by Greg Dixon

Frank Zappa and Don Van Vliet (“Captain Beefheart”) had a very close and complex musical relationship. They first met each other as teenagers forging a musical relationship that would last through many years. Frank Zappa was particularly influenced by the R&B music that Don Vliet exposed to him as a teenager growing up in Lancaster, California. Both Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa admired the musical abilities and accomplishments of each other and this resulted in several fruitful collaborative works between the two musicians and composers. Zappa and Beefheart’s musical relationship can be seen through a close examination of their collaborative works. The relationship of Captain Beefheart to Frank Zappa’s project/ object will be explored and allows the work of Captain Beefheart to be seen from a Zappa’s very different perspective.

As a young teenager, Frank Zappa hung out at Don Vliet’s house in Lancaster listening to R&B and eating leftover sweet rolls from Don Vliet's father, Glen’s, bread truck. Zappa mentions that Don would often yell at his mother, “Sue, get me a Pepsi!” while they were listening to records. Frank Zappa was finishing his senior year of high school, but Don Vliet had already dropped out at that point. Zappa would later drop out of college after his first year and continue to reject the value of the American educational system throughout his life and with his children. Already at a young age, Captain Beefheart would influence Zappa’s tastes in Rhythm and Blues as well as his distaste for public education.

Frank Zappa made relationships with many more interesting people in Lancaster that helped make the boredom of living out in the desert more bearable. Zappa and Vliet were also friends with many of the black and Mexican teenagers from Sun Village, on the outskirts of Lancaster. At this time during the late 50’s, schools and communities were still were not completely racially integrated, especially in Lancaster. Frank would eventually form a band, The Blackouts, with members from Sun Village and play shows with them there. Zappa faced resentment from white high school students from the Lancaster community for having black and Mexican friends. Frank Zappa would later write the song "Village of the Sun" about these and other experiences in Sun Village.

Vic Mortenson provides a very good insight into Vliet and Zappa’s relationship because he was a friend and musical cohorts with them during high school. He spoke in an interview about what it was like hanging out with Zappa at Studio Z, never sleeping and talking for hours. All the while, Zappa would be recording their conversations. Zappa had come up with the character Captain Beefheart after hearing Don Vliet’s uncle compare his penis size to a "Beefheart". Zappa and Mortenson would often sit around and try to come up with interesting band names and Mortenson claims that he came up with the name "Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band". In an interview he explains, "Captain Beefheart was supposed to be a magical character. His thing is he would drink Pepsi Cola and he could make magic things happen, he could appear or disappear. I told Frank, 'Hey, wouldn't it be cool if Captain Beefheart had a Magic Band, and wherever he went, if he wanted the band to appear, he would take a drink of Pepsi, and BINGO there's the band right behind him, 'jukin'?" The next thing Mortenson knew, Don Vliet was asking him if he wanted to join his new band "Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band" to which he agreed. Obviously, Zappa had liked Mortenson's story and had related Mortenson’s ideas to Beefheart, who claimed he had made them up himself.

The release of The Lost Episodes in 1996 provides an important insight into many of the early recordings in which Zappa and Beefheart collaborated together. These early years saw several collaborations between Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart including “Lost in A Whirpool” (the earliest recording to feature Beefheart, recorded between Dec. 58’ and Jan. 59’ at Antelope Valley Jr. College and played by Frank Zappa, Don Vliet, and Bobby Zappa), and “Tiger Roach” (recorded in 1964 at Pal Studios in Cucamonga and played by Frank Zappa, Don Vliet, Janschi, Vic Mortenson, and Alex Snouffer). Also featured on The Lost Episodes are two recordings from 1969, “I’m a Bandleader” (a piece for Beefheart’s solo voice) and “Alley Cat” (recorded in Zappa’s basement and played by Zappa, Beefheart, and Magic Band members John French “Drumbo” and Elliot Ingber “Winged Eel Fingerling”).

In addition to The Lost Episodes, another compilation of early material called The Mystery Disc provides even more recordings of Zappa and Beefheart’s collaborations. In 1963, when Zappa moved in to Pal studios and called it “Studio Z,” Beefheart and Zappa began working on a screenplay and movie together called Captain Beefheart vs. The Grunt People. They also started a rock band called “The Soots” and made several historical recordings during Zappa's brief stay at Studio Z. These early Soots songs are featured on The Mystery Disc. "The Birth of Captain Beefheart" includes Captain Beefheart introducing Zappa’s band, The Mothers. Beefheart describes their music as a "teenage opera." "Metal Man has Won His Wings" features Beefheart singing with his Howlin' Wolf inspired vocal sound along with an electric rhythm and blues accompaniment. Finally, "I Was a Teenage Malt Shop" features a vocal introduction by Beefheart with a ferocious laugh.

In 1969, Zappa decided to produce and record Captain Beefheart and The Magic Band’s double album Trout Mask Replica for release on his record label, Straight Records. The first recording of the album took place at the Magic Band's house where they rehearsed for Trout Mask Replica. Zappa explained that he “wanted to do the album as if it were an anthropological field recording.” Apparently, Beefheart flipped out after hearing the first recordings and told Zappa that they had to do them in a more professional recording studio environment. Drummer John French says that Beefheart motioned to his band and said to Zappa, "Look at them, Frank! They're trapped! They can't transcend their environment!" The actual recording of Trout Mask Replica that would be released on Zappa's Straight record label would be recorded later at Whitney Studios in Glendale, CA.

Beefheart and the Magic Band’s unique style of music on Trout Mask Replica combined rhythm & blues with avant-garde free jazz influence. The result is a completely original style of music that was organic, heavy, angular, surreal, and psychedelic. Trout Mask Replica was an ambitious project that combined many different musical styles and complex polyrhythms. Many Beefheart fans today consider Trout Mask Replica to be Beefheart’s finest album. Trout Mask Replica is extremely different from most rock n’ roll and was obviously not made to be a large commercial success. Zappa probably heard the music that Beefheart and his band were making and considered it to be unique and historically relevant enough to release on his label.

Zappa, when interviewed about the Trout Mask Replica recording sessions, talked about Beefheart's unconventional approach to recording his vocals without headphones, instead preferring just to hear the bleed-through from the control room in his vocal booth. Zappa also mentions that Beefheart placed pieces of corrugated cardboard on the drum set to mute John French “Drumbo”'s drums. Zappa mentions that his role as "producer" on Trout Mask Replica was that "if he [Beefheart] was going to create a unique object that the easiest thing for me to do was keep my mouth shut as much as possible and just let him do whatever he wanted to do, whether I thought it was wrong or not."

Beefheart said on several occasions that the whole Trout Mask Replica album was "written and recorded in just 8 and 1/2 hours." This claim is commonly disputed and many believe it to be entirely false. It's very hard to believe, especially because the album is so long, dense, complex, and intricate. Beefheart, unlike Zappa, could neither read nor write music so this complicates the matter even more. With Beefheart’s claim, the merits of the members of The Magic Band are not even factored into the equation. John French (Drumbo), long-time member of The Magic Band, explains that the story of "Beefheart writing Trout Mask Replica in 8 and 1/2 hours" is a complete myth and that it took Beefheart and his band hundreds of hours to complete the project. French also says that Zappa liked his drumming style and was completely amazed at how tight the band played, recording the twenty-eight pieces on Trout Mask Replica in just four and a half hours at Whitney Studios. John French also said in his letter to Mojo Magazine in 1993 in an attempt to "set the record straight" that with Trout Mask Replica he had "never seen a group of people work so hard on a musical project in my life before or since that project."

Composer/guitarist/producer and Beefheart historian Henry Kaiser has said that compositional credits have not been attributed to the members of Beefheart's Magic Band and that Don's "8 and 1/2 hour story" is a myth in an attempt to boost his band image and a ploy to sell more records. This attitude towards giving the members of the band more compositional credit is something that comes up often also with regard to Zappa's band members and their talents, especially with “spontaneous composition” involved in improvisation.

Several of Zappa's band members also played with Captain Beefheart as members of the Magic Band. Roy Estrada, Bruce Fowler, Art Tripp, Denny Walley, and Elliot Ingber each had various stints playing with both The Magic Band and The Mothers. Vic Mortenson played with both Zappa and Beefheart during the early years at Studio Z. This pool of friends and performers from both bands is largely because Zappa and Beefheart hung out in the same parts of California. Also, after Zappa gave Beefheart a job with the Mothers doing the Bongo Fury tour in 1975, he was able to convince a few of the Mothers, Bruce Fowler, Elliot Ingber, and Jimmy Carl Black, to join the Magic Band for a fall tour.

"Willie the Pimp" from Zappa’s 1969 album Hot Rats features Captain Beefheart singing with his Howlin' Wolf influenced, ultra-powerful cranked up voice. In contrast to the angular and disjunct nature of much of Beefheart's own compositions this track is very much a jam-out, riffing song for Zappa to play an extensive guitar solo. Beefheart sings in a style that is very similar to his more rhythmically repetitive, blues-based albums Mirror Man and Spotlight Kid that he recorded around this same time period. "Willie the Pimp" is completed at the end with Beefheart's falsetto bird-like solo hoots found also at the endings of his songs "I'm Gonna Booglerize Ya Baby" and "I Love You, You Big Dummy". This piece represents another fruitful collaboration between Zappa and Don Van Vliet.

Beefheart and Zappa’s musical collaborations stopped after 1969 for a period of about six years, during which both artists worked solely with their own separate bands or projects. Their friendship at this point appears to have deteriorated. After Beefheart recorded Trout Mask Replica and Lick My Decals Off, Baby on Zappa's Straight record label he broke away from Zappa's label in frustration. Beefheart said in an interview with New Musical Express: "Zappa is an oaf. All he wanted to do was make me into a horrible freak . . . Zappa made me look out of the question, and the kids out there on the streets started to take dope because they thought that was the only way they could possibly get into my music. It was disgusting and totally degrading that Zappa should do this to me." This statement by Beefheart holds hardly any validity since Trout Mask Replica and Lick My Decals Off, Baby are arguably two of his best and most creative albums that have stood the test of time for many sober listeners. The overdub-laden and crisper production style of much of Zappa's own music was not used for recording Beefheart's music. Many have said that the recordings are lacking in quality. However, Zappa’s recordings have a rawer, gritty quality that worked in Beefheart's favor, bringing his music closer to his electric blues influences such as Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf.

After Beefheart made his commercial and creatively poorer albums, Unconditonally Guaranteed and Bluejeans and Moonbeams, on Mercury Records in 1974, he went into seclusion in the woods. This later became known as the “Tragic Band” era. Beefheart wished that he had never made the past two records and needed a new job. Zappa says in The Real Frank Zappa Book that Beefheart had bound himself up contractually and could not make any albums on his own. Beefheart decided to apologize to Frank Zappa for the nasty things he had been saying about him and ask if he could audition for The Mothers of Invention. Zappa accepted his apology and tried him out, but he did not make the first audition. Beefheart could not sing rhythmically accurate enough for Zappa's band and was often forgetting the words to old songs like "Willie the Pimp". Beefheart barely passed the second audition and joined Zappa's band. Together once again, Zappa and Beefheart collaborated on a tour and album Bongo Fury, released in 1975. The album was made from a set of two live concerts from May 20-21 in Austin, Texas, at Armadillo World Headquarters in conjunction with studio recordings that Zappa had done in 1974. According to Zappa, Beefheart still forgot words on tour and had to have lyrics on paper by his feet on stage and that his rhythm was still a little shaky. Zappa attributed this to Beefheart still not being completely comfortable performing on stage. Beefheart expressed his admiration for Zappa in an interview around this time saying Zappa "is probably the most creative person on this planet. He writes things for instruments that haven't even been invented. He's another Harry Partch... only he hasn't dried up yet. Get it?" This reference to Harry Partch is incredibly interesting because it shows that at the time of the interview, around 1974, Beefheart was familiar with the music of Harry Partch and held it with high esteem. Perhaps Zappa had even been the one to introduce Harry Partch's music to Beefheart or vice versa.

During the Bongo Fury tour, Zappa and Beefheart started to butt heads once again. Zappa complained about Beefheart keeping all his belongings in a plastic bag and constantly forgetting it places on the road. Beefheart would often draw pictures of Zappa on stage during the sets and show them to the band members and audience. By the end of the tour Beefheart had drawn three sketchbooks worth of material, all strange distorted pictures of Frank Zappa. Zappa didn't really appreciate Beefheart's contorted pictures, one of which portrayed him as the devil. Jimmy “Carl” Black explained that their two enormous egos were simply not able to share the same stage and that he was very surprised that they completed the entire three-week Bongo Fury tour.

After the Bongo Fury album and tour, Beefheart played harmonica on Zoot Allures, but the collaborations stopped there. However, in 1992 Frank Zappa would compose yet another “collaboration” with Captain Beefheart, the piece “The Grand Wazoo.” It wasn’t a collaboration in the true sense because Beefheart was not involved directly. In fact, Beefheart had retired from the music business to pursue painting full time in 1982. “The Grand Wazoo” from 1992 is completely different than the song “The Grand Wazoo” from the 1972 album, The Grand Wazoo. For the composition of the new “The Grand Wazoo,” Zappa took a recording of Beefheart’s voice originally made in 1969 and juxtaposed it against new music written for Synclavier. The result is stunning and Zappa truly comes full circle by bringing Captain Beefheart back into his music near the end of his life. The technique of combining musical recordings from two different times is directly related to what Zappa calls “xenochrony.” Zappa probably enjoyed this older original recording of Beefheart’s voice and decided to directly sample that for “The Grand Wazoo” in 1992, twenty-three years after the original recording was made.

There is a Pepsi reference, or conceptual continuity, with regards to Don Van Vliet that repeatedly occurs in Frank Zappa's music and his interviews. According to Zappa, Don would yell at his mother, "Sue! get me a Pepsi!" This Pepsi reference would provide a conceptual continuity with regards to Vliet in Zappa's universe from then on. In "Why Don't You Like Me?" the line, "Get Me a Pepsi!" is a reference to Michael Jackson's hair catching on fire during the Pepsi commercial shoot, but it is also in reference to Beefheart's mannerisms from high school. Later on, when Beefheart tried to release recordings of the original Bat Chain Puller, which Zappa owned the rights to, the Pepsi reference came up yet again. According to Magic Band member Gary Lucas, Zappa suddenly changed his mind about the recordings and decided "I thought there might be a higher market value out there in 'BeefheartLand' if I didn't split up the set." It is said that the recordings were made by Beefheart as a favor to pay back Zappa for helping him get back on track after his Tragic Band era, in return for Zappa’s assistance and collaboration on the Bongo Fury tour and album. These recordings of the original Bat Chain Puller album have never been officially released. According to Lucas, Zappa asked, "How many minutes do you need to fill? I said, 'about fifteen.' He says, 'Well, I got a track about 12 minutes long called "Do You Want a Pepsi?" Don sings on it. I wrote it. It's one of my tunes.' I said, "You really think we want to put a Frank Zappa tune on a Captain Beefheart album?" This Zappa song with Beefheart vocals, "Do You Want a Pepsi?," was never released.

It is difficult to put an exact label on Beefheart’s relation to Zappa’s “big note” or the project/object. Beefheart had a significant impact on the early musical education of Zappa by sharing his R & B record collection with Zappa. It is also notable that both Zappa and Beefheart were interested in sea shanties. This can be seen by Zappa’s version of the traditional sea shanty “Handsome Cabin Boy” and Beefheart’s sea shanty-like song “Orange Claw Hammer.” Fittingly, Zappa would accompany Beefheart on guitar for a version of “Orange Claw Hammer” during their live radio program An Evening with Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart in 1975, promoting their Bongo Fury record.

It could definitely be argued that Zappa saw the concept of Captain Beefheart as his own idea; perhaps for Zappa, Don still represented the mystical character that he and Vic Mortenson had originally dreamed up at Studio Z. Zappa may have still felt this way, even though Don Van Vliet had taken his persona (Captain Beefheart) into his own distinctly different direction. Captain Beefheart can thus be considered a part of the project/object that is not simply an inanimate object, like zircon-encrusted tweezers, but a living and breathing entity that is part of the project/object. This theory would put Captain Beefheart into the same category as other recurring characters in Zappa’s oeuvre such as Pamela Zarubica’s role as Suzy Creamcheese.

In conclusion, Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart were both extraordinary musical talents that were unique in vastly different ways. They collaborated with each other several times throughout their years as young high school teenagers and throughout their adult lives as they grew up to be full-time composers, touring musicians, and bandleaders. Frank Zappa was directly influenced by the music that Don Vliet exposed to him as a teenager growing up in Lancaster, California. Both Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa admired the musical abilities and accomplishments of each other and this resulted in several fruitful collaborative works. Zappaologists may consider the theory that Captain Beefheart, especially the original superhero-like character created by Zappa, was a part of Zappa’s project/object as a human entity. However, this theory would not account for the fact Don Van Vliet’s identity as Captain Beefheart was completely different than what Zappa imagined or incorporated into his own works.

Selected Bibliography

Frank Zappa and Peter Occhiogrosso. The Real Frank Zappa Book. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989.

Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart. Bongo Fury. Liner notes. Rykodisk RCD 10097, 1989. Compact disc.

French, John. Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band: Grow Fins: Rarities 1965 -1982 [LP liner notes]. Atlanta: Xeric/ Table of Elements, .

Vliet, Don Van. The Artist Formerly Known As Captain Beefheart. Directed by Elain Shepherd BBC2. 19 Aug. 1997.

Weitzman, Steve. "Zappa and the Captain Cook" Rolling Stone July 1975, 3 ed.

Williams, Richard. "The Beefheart Zappa Talk-In" Melody Maker November 1969.

Zappa, Charles. Frankie and Me: Growing Up Zappa. unpublished.

Zappa, Frank. The Lost Episodes. Liner notes. Rykodisk RCD 40573, 1996. Compact disc.

Zappa, Frank. The Mystery Disc. Liner notes. Rykodisk RCD 10580, 1998. Compact disc.

Selected Discography

Captain Beefheart. Trout Mask Replica. Straight STS 1053, 1969. LP.

Zappa, Frank & Captain Beefheart. Bongo Fury. Rykodisk RCD 10097, 1989. compact disc.

Zappa, Frank. Hot Rats. Rykodisk RCD 10508, 1995. compact disc.

Zappa, Frank. The Lost Episodes. Rykodisk RCD 40573, 1996. compact disc.

Zappa, Frank. The Mystery Disc. Rykodisk RCD 10580, 1998. compact disc.

Zappa, Frank. Zoot Allures. Rykodisk RCD 10523, 1995. compact disc.