# Epitaph for Don Van Vliet by Jack White



## Alex Csank (Jul 22, 2010)

Just wanted to share this with 'youse' guys and gals:

The quoted poem below was published in this month's Mojo (#208 March 2011). It's from a nice 10 page spread featuring some writings on the Spotlight Kid by Mike Barnes (The black rider), PJ Harvey (Like listening to the truth), David Fricke (Fast & bulbous - encounters with the good Captain) and Mark Paytress (Booglarize! Captain Beefheart's key recordings). Jack White (White Stripes, Raconteurs, etc.) wrote this as an epitaph:

*Epitaph for Don van Vliet*

The tape fast forwards and the tape rewinds back. Don clarinet, genius, trapped inside womb, escapes to find himself alone out here. He sculpts the bars of his crib. He listens to Howlin’ Wolf in his basement desert with other sculptors. He plays harmonica through wire hair while stalking through teenage social clubs in the big desert, this one has people, and concrete, and snow. And if you ever saw him you would even say he glows. But did he make a sound? How many people couldn’t hear the low low tones way down in diddy wah diddy? How many sculptors could hear, but can’t carve it like him?

The bass line is a yo-yo string, a jugular vein ripped from Don’s arm, or leg, I’m not sure. The string is laid in a spiral and hot wax is poured over it, and a label is put on it, and it’s put up for sale and judgment. It’s even signed so you know who did it. Your white strokes were the paper with no paint on them, ice cream, snow, milk. And the black strokes were your blood, crow, electricity.

For you the moon was a smoking stone’s throw and you wanted to show us what it could do. The white Howlin’ Wolf, if anybody bothered to notice, bringing the light to those who need to hide their shadow. But when there is peace and love in the air, is it easy to notice a rifle shooting flowers, holding the blues at bay while painting strokes as if the horn were played by man ray up all night soaking in x-ray light?

On rollo, on rockette, on drumbo, on Willie Dixon. The carp you don on your face that made replica to face us with, smells bad, and is not so subtle. The 9 months you spent locked together to try to prove to us that pena, her little head clinking like a barrel of red velvet balls, full past noise, didn’t work did it? Who said three hundred copies sold means you succeeded? You were worried that it was too far out, and you were right. It was perfect.

You performed it live in a few hours, so real, were you surprised that the pope didn’t paint fig leaves on it? The car was full of cauliflower and hair pipes, driving through laurel canyon screaming, to drop the magic boys on the welfare line. To shake us up you decided to tell the coming children to get rid of the labels. You even made a commercial for it. Isn’t it terrible when you have to take them by the arm to show them they exist? It was in plain view. Woe are we.

But the spotlight was always on you, and only you, no matter who paid attention or who paid for it to be made, or who played it that day. The kid was still sculpting. Click clack, don a freight train face on a railroad track, one record going forward, and the other one coming back. Under the curtain of corn flake colored album covers, you don a mask for the blues for the whites. An avant gaurdian of tommy robert lemon johnson with a shuttlecock on top of your head. You donned a curtain of clouds blowing dust, blowing over marimbas, turning them to splinters, tricking yourself from bongo blues to cherry phosphate pop. You even tricked yourself onto motor city television and tricked , and then flicked, the microphone with a look on your face that instigated, agitated, and separated the crowd from you. How flippant to click the microphone down to booglarize them like you wanted them to walk up and hit you in the face? sometimes you have to nowadays, cut to commercial.

Donning a showing scalp flat top, particular about the point it made to us, you were a basket case on stilts with a harmonica taped to a bullet. But at some point you became the desert. A sculptor with no hands. You were either too smart or too dumb. You became subtle. And subtle is louder than 8 octaves, louder than streets, cars, zombies, paintings. You became so subtle that you didn’t move, your heart didn’t beat anymore. And you donned a death mask. And we are forced to make it up for ourselves. We are now alone with you, and you are a salad.

Here lies Don Van Vliet, Captain Beefheart. His creations spinning in the living world in canvas and stereo. His remains under ground in motionless mono. Don’s dust blows forward from the clouds on his black captain cape like a smoke stack, the dust blows forward but to dust he has returned back.

Jack White III


----------

