Creativity Quote by Don Van Vliet

Don Van Vliet talks like he makes art: sideways, pun-heavy, allergic to the straight line. On the surface he is riffing on "train" as both discipline and locomotive, but the joke has teeth. Training, in the conventional sense, implies a system: an engine (authority, technique, tradition) pulling a set of cars (habits, rules, expectations) toward a predetermined destination. Van Vliet wants no part of that itinerary. He would rather "play a tune on a horn" than become a well-oiled component in someone else's machine.

The sly pivot is his insistence that "it's better to train the caboose". A caboose is the tail end, the thing that follows. So he is proposing a creative method that runs backward: let impulse, instinct, and the messy last car lead; let the supposed fundamentals chase after. That's a manifesto for outsider experimentation, and it maps neatly onto the Captain Beefheart mythos - the artist who prized raw perception over polish, surprise over mastery-as-compliance.

Then comes the sting: "You train yourself, you strain yourself". It's not anti-work; it's anti-self-policing. He is calling out the way discipline can curdle into self-surveillance, where you stop listening for the music and start listening for mistakes. The deeper intent is protective: preserve the jagged, pre-professional part of the mind that hears things wrong on purpose. In a culture that treats craft like a credential, Van Vliet argues for keeping art uncredentialed, even if it stays unruly.