Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart (aka Don Van Vliet) enjoyed a musical relationship that stretched back into their Californian high school days. Lost in a Whirlpool is their earliest known collaborative cut.
Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart’s careers intertwined over the decades, each carving their own avant-garde path through the rock and roll landscape. Lost in a Whirlpool is their earliest known collab.
While attending the same high school in the 1950s, Zappa and Van Vliet dined on a healthy diet of R&B, blues and doo-wop.
In either late 1958 or early ’59, the pair borrowed a reel to reel recorder from Antelope Valley Junior College and put down Whirlpool.
It featured Van Vliet on lead vocal, Frank Zappa on lead guitar and Bobby Zappa on rhythm guitar.
Check it out below:
