From a moving tribute to his old friend, mentor and tormentor by one of the finest drummers to ever walk the earth, John “Drumbo” French:
Van Vliet had a real love for a movie called Jeremiah Johnson, and I could see why. It was a man’s film in the sense that it showed the bonding between Johnson and the character played by Will Geer. As Geer’s character walks away, after telling “Pilgrim” that he had done well, his farewell line was “watch your topknot and keep your eye on the skyline.” The brevity of their words made each hang in your ears and pulled you into the emotion and the bonding that had occurred between these two and you understood exactly what was going on between them in a way a billion words could have never described.
After “Doc” sessions, in 1980, on which I played mostly guitar, I had to walk away from Captain Beefheart for the last time. He had asked me to learn a ridiculous amount of music on the guitar in an impossible amount of time. After hearing my decision, he slammed his hands angrily into the door of my vehicle, and it was scary and sad at the same time.
A few months later, I drove by his mobile home one night. He looked out the curtain, as though he knew I was coming and came out to greet me. “I thought I’d come by and break the ice.” He said, “well, you picked a good night for it,” and gestured at the sky. There were tiny ice crystals falling. Not snow, not anything I’d ever seen – before or since—tiny crystals of ice slowly floating to the ground.
One night while I was playing with a jazz group, he happened into the club with Jeff “Moris” Tepper. After Tepper left, Don and I went to an old hangout from the early days of the band – before I was even a member – a coffee shop at The Antelope Valley Inn. We sat for a time as he told me that he was going to paint. He was moving to Northern California and said “Jan finally got the house she wanted – the one with redwood shingles.” I asked, “will you still do music?” and he said, “Of course!” As we know, he never did.
After observing a miniature drunken marine trying to pick a fight with one of the customers, I drove Don home. He got out of his car, turned to me and said, “Watch your topknot – and keep your eye to the skyline.”
I sensed then with sadness that it was the last time I would see him. He was gone, and though I spoke once with him later on the phone, requesting that he give me credit for drums on the CD release of Trout Mask Replica, I never saw him in person again, nor did I speak to him again after that phone call – which was quite entertaining and very expensive, as Don decided to play me a number of blues pieces I’d heard a thousand times before.
The phone number was soon changed, and though I sent Christmas cards journaling my marriage and the growth of my daughter Jesse, there was no reply and I rationed out a bit of grieving here and there until it ran out with the dulling of time. I heard the rumors of his physical decline, the last being that he was bedridden and could no longer speak. It came to me that it may have been God’s way of silencing him long enough to whisper His own message to him, to prepare him for his next journey.
I was gathering firewood in the rain when my cell phone rang and I received the news. Scott Collins, the guitarist from my Drumbo group said to me, “I don’t know if you heard yet, but Don died today.” I thanked him for relaying the information and became numb for a few days, then angry, then complacent.
I went out tonight and found my Sherman cigarettes, lit one, and stood in the door of my garage, staring out through the cool rain and the cloudy sky. “You would have liked this weather, Don,” I said to myself, and the words to a Richard Thompson song came to mind, so I sang them quietly into the night air:
“I am a bird, in God’s garden.
And I do not belong to this dusty world.
For a day or two, they have locked me up, in this cage of my own body.
And He, who brought me here, will take me… back again.
To my own country. To my own country.”
Goodbye Don. Watch your topknot, and keep your eye to the skyline.- John French, 21 December 2010
Bonus clip : The classic Electricity from the Safe as Milk LP set to previously unseen photos of the infamous 1967 show where Don (probably on acid) tumbled off the stage after playing a song and a half, essentially putting an end to his commercial prospects…
