Captain Beefheart A Success?

NOTE: Nobody was ever more fun to hang out with than Don Van Vliet. We took a number of dinners over the years, including one especially memorable evening at Sam’s Café, where he went off about the mounted deer head and how it needed ticks running around the snout. Not ordinary ticks, mind, but those fancy imported European mechanical ticks. The night of this interview, as I recall, Don decided he could turn anything into an artwork by signing it and we were autographing soji screens in the restaurant, newspaper racks on the sidewalk.

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