Don Van Vliet, the pioneering and adventurous musician and artist who went by the name of Captain Beefheart and created such influential but unhinged albums as "Trout Mask Replica" and "Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller)," has died at the age of 69, reportedly of complications from multiple sclerosis.
Captain Beefheart's music was a surreal, wildly experimental and often purposefully chaotic blend of rock, blues, jazz and psychedelia. The album considered his magnum opus, 1969's "Trout Mask Replica," was ranked fifty-eighth on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.
Although his own records were never big sellers, he was a significant influence on artists including Tom Waits, Devo and the Clash, as well as an icon to much of the punk and post-punk movement of the 1970s and '80s.
Rolling Stone's Geoffrey Stokes described the Beefheart sound, which was often polyrhythmic but rooted in the blues, as "Elmore James meets Archie Shepp somewhere on the road to Oz."
Van Vliet was born in Glendale, California and was an avid painter and sculptor as a child. He became friends with Frank Zappa while in high school, and collaborations with Zappa helped launch a musical career lasted from until the early 1980s, when he largely abandoned music to concentrate on a well-received career as a visual artist.
He had made few public appearances over the past two decades, living quietly in small towns in California. According to Entertainment Weekly, Van Vliet died at a hospital in Northern California on Friday morning.
