The legendary musician-artist, who passed away last week, began his 1965-82 recording career by fusing two seemingly incompatible baby-boomer fads, beatnik “jazz poetry” and hippie “dirty blues.”

Somehow he made it work, through his own, firmly enforced, artistic vision.

What might have sounded like wild improvisations emphatically weren’t. Like his high-school buddy and sometime colleague Frank Zappa, Van Vliet was a control freak. He would riff out the melody lines for a whole album in a single day, then spend a year coming up with the elaborate arrangements, which he would painstakingly teach note-by-note to his sidemen.

He never sold many records, but was cited as an influence by countless later acts that sounded nothing like him, or like one another.

I got to meet him backstage after a 1981 Showbox concert. It was his 40th birthday. He wasn’t tremendously lucid. I promised his manager I wouldn’t print the interview.

A year later, he released his last album. He had another career, painting, where he felt he was treated better.

Coindicence, or…? dept.: Van Vliet died on the same day as Larry King’s last show. Both were associated, at different times, with legendary Hollywood agent-lawyer Herb Cohen.