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.

Or was it her own first ball as mistress of this big house, a Van Rensselaer bride from way upstate near Albany, from Rensselaerwyck.

A member of the IRSAC staff ( E. Van De Walle ) was recently delegated to cooperate with AIMO in the development of demographic statistics in this territory.

Skorich was considered the logical choice after the club gave Norm Van Brocklin permission to seek the head coaching job with the Minnesota Vikings, the newest National Football League entry.

Van Brocklin, the quarterback who led the Eagles to the title, was signed by the Vikings last Wednesday.

Moseley, after discussions with Bohr who was at the same lab ( and who had used Van den Broek's hypothesis in his Bohr model of the atom ), decided to test Van den Broek and Bohr's hypothesis directly, by seeing if spectral lines emitted from excited atoms fit the Bohr theory's demand that the frequency of the spectral lines be proportional to a measure of the square of Z.

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.

Van Vogt's first published SF story, " Black Destroyer " ( Astounding Science Fiction, July 1939 ), was inspired by Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin.

Van Vogt was always interested in the idea of all-encompassing systems of knowledge ( akin to modern meta-systems ) -- the characters in his very first story used a system called ' Nexialism ' to analyze the alien's behaviour, and he became interested in the General Semantics of Alfred Korzybski.

Van Vogt was also profoundly affected by revelations of totalitarian police states that emerged after World War II.

Van Vogt systematized his writing method, using scenes of 800 words or so where a new complication was added or something resolved.

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.

Despite Van Buren's defeat, Johnson was instrumental in keeping Greene County in the Democratic column.

The name Van Mahotsava ( the festival of trees ) originated in July 1947 after a successful tree-planting drive was undertaken in Delhi, in which national leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru, Dr Rajendra Prasad and Abdul Kalam Azad participated.

Although the press reported that he was engaged to vaudeville dancer and choreographer Rose Rolanda in 1924, Hopwood's close friend Carl Van Vechten confirmed in later years that it was all a publicity stunt.

Henry Moseley's work showed experimentally in 1913 ( see Moseley's law ) that the effective nuclear charge was very close to the atomic number ( Moseley found only one unit difference ), and Moseley referenced only the papers of Van den Broek and Rutherford.

Gus Van Sant's 2000 Finding Forrester was quickly billed " Good Will Hunting in the Hood.

Mike Judge has stated Van Driessen was his favorite character, after Beavis, to voice.

" Later, a Lady Gaga video convinced Van Toffler of the tenability of a Beavis and Butt-Head revival: " I felt like there was a whole crop of new artists — and what the world sorely missed was the point-of-view that only Beavis and Butt-Head could bring.

Slavoljub Eduard Penkala invented a solid-ink fountain pen in 1907, a German inventor named Baum took out a ballpoint patent in 1910, and yet another ballpoint pen device was patented by Van Vechten Riesburg in 1916.

She then studied for two years with the painter Francis Adolf Van der Wielen, who offered lessons in perspective and drawing from casts during the time that the new Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts was under construction.

It is not clear, however, if Van der Heul exercised this degree of responsibility because Kidd was nominally a privateer.