Don Van Vliet, the eccentric 1960s rocker who was known as Captain Beefheart during his days of protean musical creativity and who found greater financial success later in life as a painter, died Friday. He was 69.
His death was announced by the Michael Werner Gallery, which frequently exhibited his paintings. The cause of death was complications of multiple sclerosis.
Mr. Van Vliet’s 1969 double album, “Trout Mask Replica,” produced by Frank Zappa, is widely perceived not just as the high point of his recording career but also as one of the seminal achievements in rock’s early decades. It had particular resonance with the punk and new wave generation to come a decade later, influencing bands like Devo, the Residents, Pere Ubu and the Fall.
An often challenging work that didn’t sound quite like anything that had come before (or anything that has come along since), “Trout Mask Replica” features solo vocal songs that sound like field hollers and sea shanties, with lyrics created spontaneously by Mr. Van Vliet; intricately ordered pieces with two guitars playing pre-composed lines unrooted to a chordal center; and surrealist antiwar and pro-ecology songs.
The record gives the impression of a DalÃesque circus where anything can happen; Mr. Van Vliet’s group spent months practicing the music, and the result was an energy that makes it sounds spontaneous.
Mr. Van Vliet’s vocal style was as extraordinary as his compositions: a deep, rough-riding moan turned up into swooped falsettos at the end of lines; it was pinched and bellowing and sounded as if it caused pain. Robert Palmer of The New York Times called him “the most natural white blues singer.”
For all his influence, Mr. Van Vliet, a self-taught musician, never had much commercial success, and in the 1970s he suffered a series of major business setbacks. He enjoyed a triumphant comeback in the early 1980s, but quit music in 1982 to focus on his painting.
He began to show at the Michael Werner Gallery in Cologne, the Mary Boone Gallery in New York and the Leslie Waddington Gallery in London. In the exhibition catalog to a show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the gallery director, John Lane, wrote of Mr. Van Vliet’s work, “His paintings — most frequently indeterminate landscapes populated by forms of abstracted animals — are intended to effect psychological, spiritual, and magical force.”
Having moved away from his early influence of Franz Kline, Mr. Van Vliet was now painting more narrative works with bright color; they were art brut but commanding, with strong images — some of them a continuation of his songwriting concerns, especially those involving animals.
In recent years, as rumors circulated about his health problems, Mr. Van Vliet was rarely seen in public. “I don’t like getting out when I could be painting,” he told John Rogers of The Associated Press in 1991. “And when I’m painting, I don’t want anybody else around.”
A fuller obituary is forthcoming.
An earlier version of this article misstated the date of “Trout Mask Replica” as being 1968.
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