Don Van Vliet (, born Don Glen Vliet ;

Noted for his powerful singing voice with its wide range, Van Vliet also played the harmonica, saxophone and numerous other wind instruments.

During his teen years in Lancaster, California, Van Vliet developed an eclectic musical taste and formed " a mutually useful but volatile " friendship with Frank Zappa, with whom he sporadically competed and collaborated.

Van Vliet has been described as " one of modern music's true innovators " with " a singular body of work virtually unrivalled in its daring and fluid creativity ".

Known for his enigmatic personality and relationship with the public, Van Vliet made few public appearances after his retirement from music ( and from his Beefheart persona ) in 1982.

Van Vliet died in 2010, having suffered from multiple sclerosis for many years.

Van Vliet was born Don Glen Vliet in Glendale, California, on January 15, 1941, to Glen Alonzo Vliet, a service station owner of Dutch ancestry from Kansas, and Willie Sue Vliet ( née Warfield ), who was from Arkansas.

He claimed to have as an ancestor Peter Van Vliet, a Dutch painter who knew Rembrandt.

Van Vliet also claimed that he was related to adventurer and author Richard Halliburton and the cowboy actor Slim Pickens, and said that he remembered being born.

Van Vliet began painting and sculpting at age three.

For some time during the 1950s Van Vliet worked as an apprentice with Rodrigues, who considered him a child prodigy.

Van Vliet later admitted personal hesitation to take the scholarship based upon the bitterness of his parents ' disencouragement.

Van Vliet remained interested in art ; his paintings, often reminiscent of Franz Kline's, were later featured on several of his own albums.

Van Vliet claimed that he never attended public school, alleging " half a day of kindergarten " to be the extent of his formal education and saying that " if you want to be a different fish, you've got to jump out of the school.

While attending Antelope Valley High School in Lancaster, Van Vliet became close friends with fellow teenager Frank Zappa, the pair bonding through their interest in Chicago blues and R & B.

Van Vliet is portrayed in both The Real Frank Zappa Book and Barry Miles ' biography Zappa as fairly spoiled at this stage of his life, the center of attention as an only child.

After Zappa began regular occupation at Paul Buff's PAL Studio in Cucamonga he and Van Vliet began collaborating, tentatively as " The Soots ".

" In a 1970 interview with Rolling Stone, Van Vliet requests " don't ask me why or how " he and Zappa came up with the name.

Van Vliet enrolled at Antelope Valley Junior College as an art major, but decided to leave the following year.

" After managing a Kinney's shoe store, Van Vliet relocated to Rancho Cucamonga, California, to reconnect with Zappa, who inspired his entry into musical performance.

Van Vliet was quite shy but was eventually able to imitate the deep voice of Howlin ' Wolf with his wide vocal range.

In 1991, he embarked on a serious acting career, portraying police detective Scotty Appleton in Mario Van Peebles ' feature film New Jack City, gang leader Odessa ( alongside Denzel Washington and John Lithgow ) in Ricochet ( 1991 ), gang leader King James in Trespass ( 1992 ), followed by a notable lead role performance in Surviving the Game ( 1994 ), in addition to many supporting roles, such as J-Bone in Johnny Mnemonic ( 1995 ), and the marsupial mutant T-Saint in Tank Girl ( 1995 ).

For touring purposes, Mascis first added Van Conner, and then Mike Johnson to handle the bass parts and embarked on several tours to support Green Mind, with support acts that included Nirvana.

The Wall Street Crash of 1929 threatened these financial interests, so Joyce and his friends, along with the Van Sweringen brothers, embarked on a stock-manipulation scheme to keep the price of CGW stock high.

Inspired by the success of the song and the positive reaction to Pet Sounds, and wanting to top The Beatles ' recently-released Revolver album, Wilson and lyricist Van Dyke Parks embarked on the Smile project, intended as an entire album using the writing and production techniques devised for " Good Vibrations.

Both Captain Van Valkenburgh and the embarked division commander, Rear Admiral Isaac C. Kidd, spent the next Saturday evening, December 6, on board.

Not long after Colonel Van Hamm had foisted me on the Watson staff I received a salary raise and a contract on the Hetman's recommendation.

and, in contrast, are present to a relatively immense degree on a segmental basis in the dog where lobules are absent ( Van Allen and Lindskog, '31 ).

In the past the club depended largely on Van Brocklin's aerials.

Van Emde Boas observes " even if we base complexity theory on abstract instead of concrete machines, arbitrariness of the choice of a model remains.

At Manzikert, on the Murat River, north of Lake Van, Diogenes was met by Alp Arslan.

Van Vogt was born on a farm in Edenburg, a Russian Mennonite community east of Gretna, Manitoba, Canada.

Harlan Ellison ( who began reading van Vogt as a teenager ) wrote, " Van was the first writer to shine light on the restricted ways in which I had been taught to view the universe and the human condition.

Depending on the distance Van Helden assumes Aristarchus used for the distance to the Moon, his calculated distance to the Sun would fall between 380 and 1, 520 Earth radii.

* 1965 – Vietnam War: Operation Starlite begins – United States Marines destroy a Viet Cong stronghold on the Van Tuong peninsula in the first major American ground battle of the war.

Johnson supported Martin Van Buren and early on expressed an interest in the public lands, eventually being considered a father of the Homestead Act of 1862.

* 1975 – General Cao Van Vien, chief of the South Vietnamese military, departs for the US as the North Vietnamese Army closed in on victory.

* 1975 – Vietnam War: President of South Vietnam Nguyen Van Thieu flees Saigon, as Xuan Loc, the last South Vietnamese outpost blocking a direct North Vietnamese assault on Saigon, falls.

A revival opened in the West End on October 6, 1989 at the Piccadilly Theatre, directed by Ian Judge, designed by Mark Thompson, and choreographed by Anthony Van Laast.

Tourists frequent the numerous white sand beaches, visit The Baths on Virgin Gorda, snorkel the coral reefs near Anegada, or experience the well-known bars of Jost Van Dyke.

Shielded as they were from observation by a slight fold in the land, their commander, Brigadier-General Van Pallandt, ordered the regimental colours to be left in place on the edge of the plateau to convince their opponents they were still in their initial position.

Broadway crosses the Harlem River on the Broadway Bridge to Marble Hill and then enters The Bronx, where it is the eastern border of Riverdale and the western border of Van Cortlandt Park.

A year later, while promoting Van Helsing, he mentioned on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno that he wanted to make the movie soon.

Under some circumstances, the signal radiated from the electron guns, scanning circuitry, and associated wiring of a CRT can be captured remotely and used to reconstruct what is shown on the CRT using a process called Van Eck phreaking.

Van der Heul went on to become a master's mate on a merchant vessel, and was never convicted of piracy.

An alternative system based on six recurring narrative themes was designed by Raymond Van Over:

* Clement, Russell T. and Houze, Annick, Neo-Impressionist Painters: A Sourcebook on Georges Seurat, Camille Pissarro, Paul Signac, Theo Van Rysselberghe, Henri Edmond Cross, Charles Angrand, Maximilien Luce, and Albert Dubois-Pillet ( 1999 ), Greenwood Press, ISBN 0-313-30382-7

Van Doesburg mainly focused on poetry, and included poems from many well-known Dada writers in De Stijl such as Hugo Ball, Hans Arp and Kurt Schwitters.

), Schwitters read his poems, Vilmos Huszàr demonstrated a mechanical dancing doll and Nelly Van Doesburg ( Theo's wife ), played avant-garde compositions on piano.