Today marks the third December 17th since the world lost Don “Captain Beefheart” Van Vliet, and it’s an anniversary that’s becoming something of a holiday for me. This is going to sound corny as all hell, and I’ll unabashedly cop to that, but the loss of an artist that contributed so much to how so many people understand not just popular music but the process of - and possibilities inherent in - artmaking itself seems a fit occasion for reflection. More than any other identifiably “rock” artist, Beefheart completely blew the lid off of my understanding of music’s construction, and his influence is manifest in punk and post-punk spanning decades from Pere Ubu to The Monorchid, in arty outliers like The Dog Faced Hermans and Stump, and most forwardly in U.S. Maple, the Magic Band fans that transcendeth all knowing. Tom Waits made and continues to make decades of great art by corralling and taming Beefheart’s signature New-Orleans-Blues-band-falling-down-a-flight-of-stairs sound and channeling it into a timeless hybrid of lowlife beat poetry and cocktail soaked after-hours decadence. The man has much great work to take credit for, and that’s before even considering his paintings.

One key thing I’ve always adored about Beefheart’s fandom is how hidden it is. Not that his fans are closeted or anything suchlike - it’s just that his enthusiasts come from a broad swath of types. There’s no fashion lexicon that comes with Beefheart the way it does with hippie, punk or metal; there’s no quick way to identify your tribe from across a room, so when you do find them, it can be in delightfully unexpected places. I’ve met a cop who collects Beefheart bootlegs. I once even served as a hired gun guitar player in a children’s band helmed by a pair of seemingly straight-arrow family men whose Beefheart obsessions (and collections) utterly dwarfed mine. Though he is a quintessential cult artist, his reach is surely deeper into this world than we commonly reckon.

Captain Beefheart effectively died in 1982, when Van Vliet gave up music and retired the persona. Van Vliet died on December 17, 2010, aged 69, after many years of struggle with Multiple Sclerosis. This excellent documentary, hosted by none other than the BBC’s legendary John Peel, does the man’s life far more justice than I can in a blog post.
 

 
Here’s the Captain and the classic Magic Band lineup in 1972, from an amazing German TV broadcast that constitutes some of the best footage available from that period.