From KCRW, this is Lost Notes.

Hey friends, I'm Solomon Giorgio.

I was born in the desert, came on a from Walling.

There was something deeply American about Don, and you can hear that in the music he created.

This is Christine McKenna, a music journalist, one of the greats.

The LA Times, New Music Express, Rolling Stone, she's written for all of them and more.

And she's talking about her friend, Don Van Fleet.

By the time he was 25, I think, he'd taken the stage name Captain Biffart,

and he released his first album, Safe As Milk, with his group, The Magic Band.

That was in 1966, and the world sat up and took notice of that record.

I find Captain B. Fart's music almost impossible to describe, but Christine can.

His music had a lot of layers.

There was free jazz in there, Delta Blues, Tin Pan Alley.

He had a really elastic approach to composing, and he had a really wide knowledge of music.

After and he had a really wide knowledge of music. He had a five octave vocal range, so he could really go all over the place when he sang. And his music had really complex time signatures, and that made it very challenging to play.

He had certain themes he returned to again and again.

Nature and the ecological disaster were all living through.

That was a thing for him that he went back to again and again.

Women, he thought, were vastly superior to men.

He wrote a lot about women.

And he had a very kooky sense of humor.

And there was a lot of that in his music, too.

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