Don Van Vliet, the musician and visual artist better known as Captain Beefheart, passed away Friday. Beefheart was a cult figure, and his DNA is all over punk, post-punk, and commercially successful bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Captain Beefheart wasn’t a Jew, but he was the perpetual outsider whose life and work could take a semester of college to understand and appreciate.
My first experience with Beefheart actually came in college, when I first heard the album Trout Mask Replica. The person playing it for me announced that “every song on this album is poetry, and every note has meaning.”
While I’m not totally sure if that’s true, I was instantly captivated by the song “Dachau Blues,” mostly because it was the only song from the peace and love generation that I had heard (long before I heard songs like The Fugs “Kill for Peace”) that didn’t seem to advocate peace with the common “peace, love, dope” message coming from many artists of the time. Instead, Beefheart used the imagery of the Holocaust as a way to emphasize the horror that is war, and ended up creating one of the best pleas for peace I’ve ever heard.
Dachau blues those poor Jews
Dachau blues those poor Jews
Down in Dachau blues, down in Dachau blues
Still cryin’ ’bout the burnin’ back in world war two’s
One mad man six million lose
Down in Dachau blues down in Dachau blues
Dachau blues, Dachau blues those poor jews
The world can’t forget that misery
‘n the young ones now beggin’ the old ones please
t’ stop bein’ madmen
‘fore they have t’ tell their children
’bout the burnin’ back in World War Three’s
War One was balls ‘n powder ‘n blood ‘n snow
War Two rained death ‘n showers ‘n skeletons
Danced ‘n screamin’ ‘n dyin’ in the ovens
Cough ‘n smoke ‘n dyin’ by the dozens
Down in Dachau blues
Down in Dachau blues
Three little children with doves on their shoulders
Their eyes rolled back in ecstasy cryin’
Please old man stop this misery
They’re countin’ out the devil
With two fingers on their hands
Beggin’ the Lord don’t let the third one land
On World War Three
On World War Three
Fine, I saw your site in digg and the posts really helped me ~