*"I don't know anything about music."

*--Captain Beefheart in a 1980 interview with Lester Bangs.

Don Van Vliet died last week, but for those who worshiped his work as Captain Beefheart, he's been gone a long time. His last album with the Magic Band, Ice Cream for Crow, came out 28 years ago. So it's a little shocking to realize he was only 69, and spent so much of his life in musical silence.

But even if Van Vliet got quiet (moving on to a second career as a world-renowned painter), the rest of the world kept talking about him. There are legions of Beefheart experts, and in the past three decades they've created a living library of document and lore. Take Grow Fins, the 1999 5-CD box of rarities and demos on John Fahey's Revenant label; Lunar Notes, a revealing memoir by Bill Harkleroad, aka Magic Band guitarist Zoot Horn Rollo; Captain Beefheart: The Biography, Mike Barnes' excellently-researched 2002 overview; and scores of remembrances and re-evaluations in magazines and websites. Last January, Magic Band drummer John "Drumbo" French added a massive memoir called Beefheart: Through the Eyes of Magic. I haven't braved its daunting 880 pages, but apparently it's so sprawling that it led Byron Coley to suggest that Van Vliet died trying to read it.

So if you want to learn about the Captain Beefheart story, there are lots of ways to do so. That's even truer since his passing, which has inspired many informative obituaries (try The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Village Voice for starters) and personal memoirs from those close to Van Vliet, like composer Peter Gordon and author/songwriter Grant O'Neill. Seemingly every part of the Beefheart legend has been documented (often in multiple conflicting stories, a product of Van Vliet's cryptic self-revision), and if anything remains uncovered, it's not for lack of digging.

Determining his musical influence is trickier. Ask any post-1960s experimental rock musician to list influences, and they'll surely cite Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band. Probably the only other act you can say the same about is the Velvet Underground, but while it's easy to hear the VU in droves of subsequent rock bands, it's tougher to pinpoint echoes of Beefheart. There are some clear descendents among musicians who came up while he was still making music-- the Residents, Devo, Pere Ubu, Tom Waits. Not long after them, bands like the Fall, Public Image, Ltd., and the Minutemen split Beefheart's structural innovations into new branches of art-punk, while in the 90s, bands like Sun City Girls, Thinking Fellers, and U.S. Maple drew on Beefheart's skewed song structures and wry humor. Recent examples are less abundant, though his growl persists in the White Stripes (who recorded covers for a 2000 Sub Pop single), his rhythmic density in Deerhoof's angular songs, and his slamming together of styles in Fiery Furnaces' hectic compositions. But as Barnes put it in his Beefheart primer for The Wire, "For someone so influential, his mark is usually only detectable in superficial traces in the music of his admirers. The paths he mapped towards a new musical language have rarely been explored and lie largely neglected."

Maybe that's because Beefheart's language isn't easy to learn. Throughout 16 years of making records with the Magic Band, he built a supernatural meld of guttural blues, stoner psych, primitive howl, free jazz ecstasy, and Dada-esque absurdity, creating songs that often sounded like three bands playing at once. It's not only hard to think of another act with such a packed sound, it's tough to even imagine one, especially without Beefheart's multi-octave voice and multi-phonic sax spraying extra layers of counterpoint on top. And somehow, a lot of the music is pretty catchy, too.

Even more impressive is how Beefheart's approach persisted through lineup changes and stylistic detours. The Magic Band actually started as a blues-rock outfit, scoring a West Coast hit with a cover of Bo Diddley's "Diddy Wah Diddy" and following it up with a 1967 debut LP, Safe as Milk, that, thanks to guitarists Alex St. Clair and Ry Cooder, hinted at more adventurous territory. That territory exploded into a universe of its own on the band's most famous record, 1969's Trout Mask Replica, and the darker follow-up, 1970's Lick My Decals Off, Baby. Here, the fanatically-practiced ensemble (featuring a teenaged Zoot Horn Rollo) ripped out singular tunes as if possessed. Beefheart leaned back to the commercial plane in the 70s, with results both successful (1972's Clear Spot and The Spotlight Kid) and not (1974's Bluejeans and Moonbeams and Unconditionally Guaranteed, both suffering from the defections of the classic Magic Band lineup). But he ended as strong as he began, with two 80s records (Doc at the Radar Station and Ice Cream for Crow) that touched on the best of all eras, and welcomed originals like French back into the fray.

If nothing in punk, post-punk, or new wave sounds quite like these records, it's just as true that those movements would be very different if Beefheart hadn't come before. Maybe Beefheart was more influential as a role model than a musical architect. He made unconventional art while steering clear of the studied and highbrow, priding himself in being self-taught, and finding artistic touchstones in Robert Johnson and Howlin' Wolf as much as Franz Kline or Ornette Coleman. His methods were primitive too-- his preferred songwriting routine was to bang out abstract ideas on a piano or sing them into a tape recorder, then enlist a band member to transcribe the results and mold them into a song. "He saw music as shapes, rather than musical forms," Gordon notes, citing Beefheart's "50/50 method" wherein "you play whatever you want and half the notes are bound to come out right." Anyone who has made arty music with simple means-- Jad and David Fair of Half Japanese spring to mind-- owes something to these ideas.

Even more inspiring was the way Beefheart combined extreme control with trust in chaos. While making Trout Mask Replica, the Magic Band lived together and practiced 14 hours a day to hone the album's complex songs. In Zoot Horn Rollo's account of the time, Beefheart comes off like a cult leader, berating his musicians, provoking them into fights, and enforcing bizarre rules on matters as trivial as how they held their cigarettes. Of course, there are other versions of how this all went down, but clearly control issues were a major part of the Magic Band, and Beefheart's work ethic-- healthy or not-- contradicted any notion that his art was haphazard noise or some kind of hoax. Creating, learning, and executing this music took extraordinary effort.

Yet no Magic Band record feels like the work of control freaks. Sounds spill around; mistakes become motifs. On a capella Beefheart classics like "Orange Claw Hammer" and "The Dust Blows Forward 'n the Dust Blows Back", you hear Van Vliet hitting pause on the tape recorder and starting lines over again. One signature Trout Mask Replica moment best demonstrates this dynamic. At the beginning of "Pena", Beefheart and Victor Hayden (aka "The Mascara Snake") recite an absurd routine, with Beefheart leaning so hard on Hayden that the latter exasperatedly grunts "Christ!" under his breath. Would a control freak have left such moments unedited? No, but Beefheart was more interested in the conflict and tension than seamless craft.

Which means that any artist hoping to balance control and chaos can still learn something from Beefheart's pioneering juggling act. If you've ever watched a band devolve into abstraction only to suddenly shift into tight, complex focus-- from Faust to Boredoms to Animal Collective-- well, they've probably listened to Beefheart. Lately, it feels like less of that dynamic is around in underground music, with technology and the Internet shifting innovation towards intangibles like memory, mood, and atmosphere. Those are interesting angles-- angles Beefheart himself was pretty good at too-- but the tension he reveled in is missing. Fortunately, these things move in cycles. So if there's a silver lining to Van Vliet's passing, it's that his music will inevitably return to the spotlight, at a time when we could use more bands that listen to and absorb Captain Beefheart-- even if they could never hope to sound like him.