Mike Barnes - Captain Beefheart: The Biography

In earlier editions of this book, some of the text dated back to the time before it was so easy to get in touch with people online. The amount of accessible material on Safe As Milklyricist Herb Bermann was minimal. His presence in the book amounted to little more than speculation and some jocular reminiscences that the subject might not necessarily think were particularly funny. He didnt, although the 2004 update of the book included some recently unearthed press material.

Then in 2006 Derek Laskies two-part interview with Bermann appeared on the Captain Beedfheart Radar Station website, www.beefheart.com

Unfortunately and inexplicably, I failed to notice part two of the interview, in which Bermann is very critical of the way he is portrayed, through the quotes of others, in this book. Only reading it a couple of months back, I immediately contacted him via his publishers, Brass Tacks Press, apologising for causing offence, explaining that I had no intention of being disparaging to him and offering him the chance to put forward his views to be included in an appendix. He stuck by his resolution of giving no more interviews, but he offered me this one quote.

Don Van Vliet lied, cheated, and stole from me. Great artists have been known to do that.

Yet, as with many people who have felt short changed by Van Vliet, he had an abiding admiration for him despite feeling justifiably hard done by financially in terms of songwriting credits. Van Vliet, keen to draw attention away from his one-time writing partner back to himself, was also deliberately vague as to who Bermann was.

Bermann admitted to Laskie that when Safe As Milkwas re-released in 2000 that theres a paragraph in the liner notes on Herb Bermann and they weigh whether Herb Bermann really existed. He goes on to say that there was speculation whether he was a figment of Dons imagination or a ploy as a tax dodge. It was astounding. Van Vliets mischievous ploy to write Bermann out of history proved remarkably successful, but this edited extract from his interview with Laskie proves beyond doubt both his corporeality and also states his considerable contribution to the early Magic Band.

How did the meeting with Don happen?

Don grew up in Lancaster with Frank Zappa and they both went to Lancaster High School. We had a little ranch house out in Quartz Hill, on the outskirts of Lancaster. One Saturday night my first wife, God bless her, got cabin fever and said, I want to hear some live rock n roll music. Cant we go into town? Theres a local band playing in a bar on Sierra Highway named Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band? Cant we go hear them? I said, What do they play? and she said, I think they play Mississippi Delta Blues. I said, Yeah that piques my interest.

Like most writers Id built up a writers trunk of this and that, and fragments and poetry through the years, since I was a small boy. I always had an eye on whether I could master the boundaries of the limits and the forms of writing, whether it was poetry or static literature, or novels or screenwriting or songwriting.

We went to hear Don and he knocked me out. Hes much better in person that he is recorded, in my humble opinion. Hes a very powerful performer live on stage in concert. So I was one of his biggest fans after the first set. He sang songs like St James Infirmary and some wonderful, classic Muddy Waters and Howling Wolf Mississippi Delta Blues stuff, and this was unheard of. It was 1966 and we were on the brink of the best pop music coming down the pike in the late sixties, and Dylan and The Beatles and The Stones had already happened, and all these British groups were beginning to happen.