A disturbing premonition wrestled me from slumber hours before dawn.

And it won’t rupture the zeitgeist enough as it should.

But having the world mourn alongside won’t help ease anything, because for myself, and I believe most fans of Don Van Vliet’s enigmatic character, the actual listening experience was usually a solitary activity, due to the fact that no one else in the room ever wants to hear Hobo Chang Ba, even when the mood is too perfect.

I might try to take the day off though. Lounge around the house. Start with A&M Sessions, end with Grow Fins box.

But are men truly resurrected by the repetition of thoughts and memories? As if a fierce combustion of our chatty consciousnesses exploding across all corners of the globe could somehow be swept up and breathe actual life into the corpse.

After all, shouldn’t I be used to the idea by now that Beefheart is already gone. He’s been retired since the early 80s; he left music behind and moved somewhere desolate to focus on painting. No sudden announcement that he’s going to tour, appear on a television show performing, or release a new album is expected. Impossible. It’s never happening. And he doesn’t need to. His legacy is firmly cemented.

None of that dissuades the reality that the event won’t receive blanket news coverage by every media outlet, like the Michael Jackson fest this summer.

I know the two musicians are incomparable (it’s like comparing an orange to a platypus), yet for a good many the mourning will be similar in its intensity.

When Beefheart passes, it will make ripples.

But now imagine a world where the day it happens the resurrection simultaneously begins. Breaking News shows helicopter perspectives of the body being transported along sinuous roads. His photo on the cover of every mag, each article an exposition of the same information. News channels just cluttered with decades-old footage repeated for hours and hours, peppered with rambling interviews with old confidants, forgotten contemporaries, family members, sensationalizing critics, celebrity opinions. VH1 Honors Captain Beefheart featuring Mountain Dew Code Yellow and My Chemical Killers. The internet plastered with 100 word blogs about how important the man was and 200 word anecdotes of How I Got into Beefheart. Captain Beefheart commemorative chocolate bars, tribute albums, lost interviews, Captain Beefheart commemorative vacuum cleaner, Trout Mask Replica cell phone rings. Re-produced and re-mastered greatest hits collection, Captain Beefheart commemorative decorative plate, Captain Beefheart commemorative flamethrower, competing movie studios fast-tracking scripts about his life (“… we’ll just CGI the shit out of Phillip Seymour Hoffman”), Breaking News reveals helicopter perspectives of the funeral. Photobooks, Beefheart avatars in video games, scandalous biographies, authorized biographies, an amplifying squall of mass acceptance, maudlin appreciation, exaggerated rhetoric. His likeness sculpted into trinkets and statues…

But it was the Captain Beefheart waffle-mix commercial hosted by Billy Mays that was the closing image to my nightmare.

When Beefheart passes, it will make ripples. You know, like when Elliot Smith died.

So celebrate the man now while he’s still alive. Introduce a friend to his music. When it happens there’ll be someone to hang out with.

This article appears in Sep 30 – Oct 7, 2009.