His music blended elements of blues, free jazz, rock, and avant-garde composition with idiosyncratic rhythms, absurdist wordplay, and Vliet’s gravelly singing voice with a wide vocal range.

A sculpting prodigy in his childhood,[4][8][9] Van Vliet developed an interest in blues, R&B, and jazz during his teen years in Lancaster, California, and formed "a mutually useful but volatile" friendship with musician Frank Zappa, with whom he sporadically competed and collaborated.

[11] In 1974, frustrated by a lack of commercial success, he pursued a more conventional rock sound, but the ensuing albums were critically panned; this move, combined with not having been paid for a European tour, and years of enduring Beefheart's abusive behavior, led the entire band to quit.

[12] Beefheart eventually formed a new Magic Band with a group of younger musicians and regained critical approval through three final albums: Shiny Beast (1978), Doc at the Radar Station (1980) and Ice Cream for Crow (1982).

[21] Local newspaper cuttings of his junior sculpting achievements can be found reproduced in the Splinters book, included in the Riding Some Kind of Unusual Skull Sleigh boxed CD work, released in 2004.

According to one of Van Vliet's versions of this story, they declined several scholarship offers, including one from the local Knudsen Creamery to travel to Europe with six years' paid tuition to study marble sculpture.

When he was thirteen the family moved from the Los Angeles area to the more remote farming town of Lancaster, in the Mojave Desert, where there was a growing aerospace industry supported by nearby Edwards Air Force Base.

The Omens' guitarists Alexis Snouffer and Jerry Handley would later become founders of "the Magic Band" and the Blackouts' drummer, Frank Zappa, would later capture Vliet's vocal capabilities on record for the first time.

[34] While attending Antelope Valley High School in Lancaster, Van Vliet became close friends with fellow teenager Frank Zappa, the pair bonding through their interest in Chicago blues and R&B.

He spent most of his time locked in his room listening to records, often with Zappa, into the early hours in the morning, eating leftover food from his father's Helms bread truck and demanding that his mother bring him a Pepsi.

The guitars of the Magic Band mercilessly bend and stretch notes in a way that suggests that the world of music has wobbled clear off its axis", with the lyrics demonstrating "Beefheart's ability to juxtapose delightful humor with frightening insights".

The raft of material left behind eventually emerged, firstly on CD as I May Be Hungry, But I Sure Ain't Weird and later on vinyl, implemented by John French, as It Comes To You in a Plain Brown Wrapper (which has two tracks that are missing from the former release).

Critically acclaimed as Van Vliet's magnum opus,[61] Trout Mask Replica was released as a 28-track double album in June 1969 on Frank Zappa's newly formed Straight Records label.

The inner spread "infra-red" photography is by Ed Caraeff, whose Beefheart vacuum cleaner images from this session also appear on Zappa's Hot Rats release (a month earlier) to accompany "Willie The Pimp" lyrics sung by Vliet.

Van Vliet had also begun assigning nicknames to his band members, so Harkleroad became Zoot Horn Rollo, and Boston became Rockette Morton, while John French assumed the name Drumbo, and Jeff Cotton became Antennae Jimmy Semens.

In the end, after the album's recording, Beefheart ejected French from the band by throwing him down a set of stairs, telling him to "Take a walk, man" after not responding in a desired manner to a request to "play a strawberry" on the drums.

[88] Magic Band members have also said that the slower performances were due in part to Van Vliet's inability to fit his lyrics with the instrumental backing of the faster material on the earlier albums, a problem that was exacerbated in that he almost never rehearsed with the group.

These concepts eventually coalesced around the core of Art Tripp III, Harkleroad and Boston, with the formation of Mallard, helped by finance and UK recording facilities from Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson.

[107] Van Vliet's biographer Mike Barnes writes of "revamping work built on skeletal ideas and fragments that would have mouldered away in the vaults had they not been exhumed and transformed into full-blown, totally convincing new material".

Raggett of AllMusic called the album a "last entertaining blast of wigginess from one of the few truly independent artists in late 20th century pop music, with humor, skill, and style all still intact", with the Magic Band "turning out more choppy rhythms, unexpected guitar lines, and outré arrangements, Captain Beefheart lets everything run wild as always, with successful results".

Released in 2004 by Rhino Handmade in a limited edition of 1,500 copies, this signed and numbered box set contains a "Riding Some Kind of Unusual Skull Sleigh" CD of Vliet-recited poetry, the Anton Corbijn film of Vliet Some YoYo Stuff on DVD and two art books.

[15] His debut exhibition as a serious painter was at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York in 1985 and was initially regarded as that of "another rock musician dabbling in art for ego's sake",[19] though his primitive, non-conformist work has received more sympathetic and serious attention since then, with some sales approaching $25,000.

The limited edition version of the book contains a CD of Van Vliet reading six of his poems: Fallin' Ditch, The Tired Plain, Skeleton Makes Good, Safe Sex Drill, Tulip and Gill.

[121] The resemblance to the CoBrA painters is also recognized by art critic Roberto Ohrt,[27] while others have compared his paintings to the work of Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Antonin Artaud,[15] Francis Bacon,[27] Vincent van Gogh and Mark Rothko.

Curator David Breuer asserts that in contrast to the busied, bohemian urban lives of the New York abstract expressionists, the rural desert environment Van Vliet was influenced by is a distinctly naturalistic one, making him a distinguished figure in contemporary art, whose work will survive in canon.

[128] Other associates such as his longtime drummer and musical director John French and bassist Richard Snyder have stated that they had noticed symptoms consistent with the onset of multiple sclerosis, such as sensitivity to heat, loss of balance, and stiffness of gait, by the late 1970s.

Around 13 minutes and shot entirely in black and white, with appearances by his mother and David Lynch, the film showed a noticeably weakened and dysarthric Van Vliet at his residence in California, reading poetry, and philosophically discussing his life, environment, music and art.

[166] Van Vliet's influence on post–punk bands was demonstrated by Magazine's recording of "I Love You You Big Dummy" in 1978 and the tribute album Fast 'n' Bulbous – A Tribute to Captain Beefheart in 1988, featuring the likes of artists such as the Dog Faced Hermans, the Scientists, the Membranes, Simon Fisher Turner, That Petrol Emotion, the Primevals, the Mock Turtles, XTC, and Sonic Youth, who included a cover of Beefheart's "Electricity" which would later be re-released as a bonus track on the deluxe edition of their 1988 album Daydream Nation.

Other post-punk bands influenced by Beefheart include Gang of Four,[7] Siouxsie and the Banshees,[167] Pere Ubu, Babe the Blue Ox and Mark E. Smith of the Fall,[168] who covered "Beatle Bones 'N' Smokin' Stones" in their 1993 session for John Peel.

[172] Black Francis of the Pixies cited Beefheart's The Spotlight Kid as one of the albums he listened to regularly when first writing songs for the band,[173] and Kurt Cobain of Nirvana acknowledged Van Vliet's influence, mentioning him among his notoriously eclectic range.