‘Why Doesn’t Someone Give Him A Pepsi?’: Frank Zappa’s ode to Captain Beefheart
Don Van Vliet wasn’t quite one of God’s own prototypes; a stranger creature begot him than any known deity on record, but he was one of a kind. The gravel-voiced oddball, who called himself Captain Beefheart, went through life marching to the beat of his own drum to such an extent that when the poor fellow tasked with translating his rhythm for the Magic Band missed one of those beats, he was placed in a barrel that Beefheart would then whack with a stick.
Such idiosyncratic creative practices were the product of an equally idiosyncratic life. “Half a day of kindergarten” was apparently the extent of his formal education, with the musician citing his skiving ways as an intentional move, “If you want to be a different fish, you’ve got to jump out of the school”. Naturally, it’s hard to decipher the facts from the orchestrated fiction in the early days of Vilet, but one insight we do get is from his childhood friend, Frank Zappa.
Vilet had been a child prodigy in the world of sculpting. This was part of the reason his schooling was so lax. He was an artiste who had no time for foolish things like formal qualifications, and as such, he was also afforded liberties in his cushy home life. In his recollections, Zappa often paints his friends as a junior version of Will Ferrell’s character in Wedding Crasher, a stay-at-home son barricaded in his room listening to records.
“He had dropped out of school by that time, and spent most of his time staying at home. His girlfriend lived in the house, and his grandmother lived in the house, and his aunt and his uncle lived across the street,” Zappa recalled in the BBC documentary, The Artist Formerly Known as Captain Beefheart. “And his father had had a heart attack; his father drove a Helms bread truck, part of the time Don was helping out by taking over the bread truck route [and] driving up to Mojave.”
He comically continues: “The rest of the time he would just sit at home and listen to rhythm and blues records, and scream at his mother to get him a Pepsi”.
However, his parents were more than happy to oblige because, like the young kid kings of old, he had shown a promise that prognosticated greatness. After all, he had won a sculpting competition at the Los Angeles Zoo, and they don’t just have those out to any young whipper-snapper. In fact, he had started sculpting at age three, and apparently, he quickly became so devoted to perfecting his dinosaurs that his parents had to slide dinner under his door.
However, there was a side-effect to his sugary indulgences: all future bandmates would feel the wrath of Pepsi moods. When his slumps took hold, things would get strange, hence why Zappa penned an ode to his friend titled, ‘Why Doesn’t Someone Give Him A Pepsi’. Creative genius comes at a cost, and Vilet’s was a carbonated soda reliance. Zappa’s fitting ode featured on his Bongo Fury tour, but it was never formally recorded.
