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 Bill
Harkleroad sits across the table from me on a damp November day
at a pizza joint in Eugene. Looking at the 50-year-old Harkleroad,
it is hard to believe that this is Zoot Horn Rollo, guitarist
from one of rock's most bizarre groups ever — Captain Beefheart
and the Magic Band. Beefheart christened Harkleroad Zoot Horn
Rollo because he felt that everyone in the band needed a stage
name. Harkleroad's stoic face and serious demeanor give no clue
of the wild experiences he had playing with the experimental Beefheart
group. Beefheart (actually named Don Van Vliet) was a musical
dictator who controlled the group both musically and mentally.
The unique compositional process that Beefheart employed required
complete assimilation into his creative world. The individual
musicians ceased to exist and a cult-like collective emerged to
facilitate his eccentric vision. Today Harkleroad has other things on his mind. He is preparing his local record store's computer system for the Y2K bug, teaching guitar lessons to his twenty-six students, and practicing two hours a day before going to work. Most of his students don't know that their teacher was at one time a member of one of music's most bizarre bands in history. Harkleroad played guitar on several Beefheart albums, most notably 1970's Trout Mask Replica, a Frank Zappa produced album of unparalleled inventiveness which has been inspirational to experimental musicians from Tom Waits to Sonic Youth. In 1998, Harkleroad published an autobiography called Lunar Notes: Zoot Horn Rollo's Captain Beefheart Experience. He is currently gathering material for a Zoot solo record. OV: Describe yourself at age 18.BH: The first half I was still in high school and the second I was pretending that I was going to go to college. And I figured that was a way of getting out of Vietnam. It was 1967. So I started taking some music classes. I had a good idea I was going to end up in the Beefheart band even then because a couple older friends of mine ended up in the band, so I knew what was going on. I joined a band and moved to Lake Tahoe. And then I joined Timothy Leary's LSD cult. We weren't directly connected. He lived in Laguna Beach at the time. He had this thing called the Brotherhood. Basically it was just a way of selling LSD and hash and whatnot. And that was what we did. We had this little hippie store that sold records, beads and incense. And we were big omers, big meditators. We took a lot of drugs actually. I joined the band in '68. I went from one cult to another.OV: Being the youngest in the group, being young in the Brotherhood, it appears that mentors played a big part in your development.BH: Yeah, I think it could have happened to a lot of people and it did. I think that it was in vogue at the time, whether it was Mararishi for the Beatles or L. Ron Hubbard for whoever else. I feared for my life because I had friends come home in boxes, I didn't have a mechanism to deal with that. I was like, I don't want to die, but I don't want to move to Canada and I'm sure as hell not going to jail. This LSD cult was good timing. We ran out of money. We were in this band and living in Lake Tahoe, it's four below zero outside and we had no money. We were trying to figure out how to live. I was ripe for the Beefheart band transition. Since then I haven't really had any gurus (laughs).OV: What about Frank Zappa?BH: He was nine years older than me. He and Don (Van Vliet, a.k.a. Captain Beefheart) were the same age. I knew about him because I was even into music as early as 12 and 13 years old and I remember sneaking into gymnasiums where we would go play basketball and he would be rehearsing, playing drums at the time. I didn't hear about him again until 1964.OV: Did Frank Zappa produce the Trout Mask Replica Record?BH: He should get the credit because he was the one risking the money, but producing, no, he just sat around there.OV: He wasn't a musical influence on it?! BH:
Not at all. He would make his comments. Frank would mention that
there was this anthropological thing going on. There was a condescending
nature about these zoo kids, doing this weird wild thing, and
I think also an appreciation. He used us as a whip on his own
band. He'd say, “you see how those guys are practicing,
you lazy assholes.” But then he'd come over to us and think
we were crazy, and then film us like it was this zoo that he was
on the outskirts of. I liked the guy, he was very nice to me,
very sensitive with how he dealt with us, but there was also a
big snob in there too. Most people didn't command that much attention.
He was a huge influence on me. Both him and Don were my favorite
musicians, other than John Coltrane. OV: How would you compare the two? Both guys were older than you, both control freaks, both considered geniuses in their own right.BH: Yeah, I hate that.OV: You don't buy it?BH: No. Maybe Einstein, leave it there. Frank didn't reinvent the world. Don came closer. Smart guys. Frank worked harder, Don slept a lot. They had R&B and music in common, and probably pimples and boners in common, because they went through that phase together. Frank worked very hard, never did drugs. That set them apart.OV: Zappa drank a lot of black coffee and smoked a lot of cigarettes.BH: That's right, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.OV: He didn't eat well.BH: He ate like shit his whole life.OV: He didn't sleep much.BH: And he didn't sleep. Four hours a day. Worked twenty hours. Frank controlled in a very self-assured, cocky way. Don's creativity and craziness came from a lot of paranoia and fear. There was some real early stuff that happened to him, losing his father and so forth, that set this very intelligent, sensitive kid on the road. Here's this big guy that really should have been four foot, 100 pounds, that would have been perfect. But this big guy is supposed to carry the load. And really he was a very sensitive guy. He had the Napoleon complex in this big body. And so the whole mixture of this fear and this super creative and sensitive thing became a protection mechanism . . . He whipped it up and controlled it out of this evasiveness. And Frank was like, (Frank voice) We're going to do this! So they were really very different.OV: It's been said that they played musicians, not music.BH: They did! But Frank knew music and Don didn't know shit.OV: What, then, gave Don the authority? He did play piano, didn't he?BH: He didn't play piano.OV: You must have had a lot of ideas of your own going around in the band.BH: No. Well, maybe, but he was my hero when I joined the band. And he did create that sound. How could he have done it with so many different bands? Listen to Safe as Milk, the first album. It's a really good album. Are you kidding? The Mothers of Invention are doing Abba Zaba and the Beatles are doing “I Want to Hold your Hand.” Wait a minute! Don would use imagery to get things across. He was an established sound.OV: A sound sculptor, right?BH: Yeah, exactly. He was established that way before I got there. So then as that cash of Don's sound,the Beefheart sound, was there, all he had to do was say, ”hear that, play that.” And he could whistle, he was the Picasso of whistling. He could blow smoke rings and whistle bebop. He should have had a magic show, he would have been a nicer man. So he knew what he liked. Don was very opinionated, so much so that everybody sucked except us. Maybe four notes of Coltrane and Ornet Coleman, but that was it. Part of that was controlling us, part of that was what he thought. He knew what he liked but he didn't have a specific intention. He used us to tool those things. And that was a totally different way to compose. He would beat it out on a piano in this rhythmic sense. There was a lot of jazz licks in him and these push beats — but the notes were fucked up. And then we were trying to transcribe that, put that on an instrument because, it's Don. And because he'd keep us awake for two days and wouldn't feed us. We were brainwashed.OV: Brainwashed?BH: Yeah, he went to the library reading books on how to brainwash people — I'm not lying. He had an idea of what was good and bad and would sculpt things after the fact, which is a really different way to work. If I was to go back to a band, I would do that again. Say, “Let's try to get that to sound more tortured, rather than, “it's a G chord” and let everyone just grow their own G. Let's try to create a real lasting thing that's touching the sides of everybody else. I would do that again. That's what bands sound like when they're on the road. Sometimes they sound bored while others sound real creative and elastic. So he really had that. Problem was that he claimed to be Stravinski and that he knew every note. Anybody who ever saw him live knew that he didn't know any of his words or melodies or songs.OV: He left it up to you guys.BH: Oh, yeah, and we were the culprits when something went wrong. It couldn't be Don's fault, he invented the planet. |