A Saturday morning toons twofer: Beefheart and Cave

Yesterday we lost Don Van Vliet, better known (when known at all these days, alas) as Captain Beefheart. High school friend and later musical associate of Frank Zappa, inventor of a brand of blues/rock/avant-garde sixties music "too weird for the hippies," and influence on Nick Cave, Tom Waits, Franz Ferdinand, Oasis, Red Hot Chilli Peppers and The White Stripes and many others:

Here's the Oregon connection (citations in the original):

Cartoonist and writer Matt Groening tells of listening to Trout Mask Replica at the age of 15 and thinking "that it was the worst thing I'd ever heard. I said to myself, they're not even trying! It was just a sloppy cacophony. Then I listened to it a couple more times, because I couldn't believe Frank Zappa could do this to me - and because a double album cost a lot of money. About the third time, I realised they were doing it on purpose; they meant it to sound exactly this way. About the sixth or seventh time, it clicked in, and I thought it was the greatest album I'd ever heard." Groening first saw Beefheart and the Magic Band perform in the front row at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in the early 1970s. He later declared Trout Mask Replica to be the greatest album ever made. He considered the appeal of the Magic Band as outcasts who were even "too weird for the hippies". Groening served as the curator of the All Tomorrow's Parties festival that reunited the post-Beefheart Magic Band.

And while we're on the subject of influences, here's the song I was originally going to feature today: of all things, the Nick Cave song from the soundtrack of the latest Harry Potter movie: