Oh, Captain, my Captain...

(January 15, 1941 – December 17, 2010)

Don Van Vliet, known throughout the world as Captain Beefheart, has died at the age of 69 ...

his  music touched my life since "Safe as Milk" I was fortunate enough to have had an hour and change to talk with him after the Toads Place show in December of 1980 courtesy of Gary Lucas.

"The way I keep in touch with the world is very gingerly, because the world touches too hard"

It makes me itch to think of myself as Captain Beefheart. I don't even have a boat.

 "There are only forty people in the world and five of them are hamburgers."

"Everybody's colored or else you wouldn't be able to see them."

 I think most people try to get others to see through their eyes.
 
I think Shakespeare is really the one. Words as music and music as words. Everything he wrote was good, which is really frightening.
 
I would never kill a living thing, although I probably have inadvertently while driving automobiles.

I don't look like a desert person because I stay indoors most of the day and fool around at night. That's what the desert animals do - they don't have a tan either.

I'd never just want to do what everybody else did. I'd be contributing to the sameness of everything.
 
I'd rather play a tune on a horn, but I've always felt that I didn't want to train myself. Because when you get a train, you've got to have an engine and a caboose. I think it's better to train the caboose. You train yourself, you strain yourself.
 
James Brown is important because he decorates the clock correctly and he's good with lower mathematics. Don't get me wrong - he's good.
 
Man has done a lot to make himself dangerous and animals get the worst of all of it. But then, man too is an animal.
 
Most of modern rock and roll is a product of guilt.