No one’s ever accused Captain Beefheart of being easy to swallow. From 1967’s Safe As Milk to 1982’s Ice Cream For Crow, the late avant-rock icon’s catalog draws on everything from the discordant ...

I’ve never loved Captain Beefheart’s “Trout Mask Replica.” Or, rather, I have never loved the album the way my betters did. John Peel, the late BBC d.j. and father figure to thousands, said that “if ...

The film begins with his mother tenderly carrying a cardboard cut-out of a black-and-white photograph of him by his friend Anton. She walked slowly across a patch of the American desert near where Don ...

In Mike Barnes’ biography of Don Van Vliet, the man more famously known as Captain Beefheart, he quotes Vliet on his own birth: “I was born with my eyes open—I didn’t WANT to be born—I can remember ...