Beans Barton

Painter/musician Beans Barton -- he of the tuneless, late-period Jim Morrison croak, sundry crazed alter-egos, and layer upon layer of freakish, ill-fitting costumes -- is an aberration borne of the best intentions. A doting father who spends weekend nights dressing up like some Sesame Street character gone horribly awry, Barton deftly walks the line between cheap laughs and high art. He and his backup band, the Bi-Peds, are Houston's precarious link in a fractured chain of gonzo-pop performance artists who include Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and Pere Ubu. Like the first two, Barton is a product of the freewheeling '60s, blessed with an irrepressible imagination and an irreverent sense of humor to match. As such, the bloated rock experience of that era is his medium. Although his Bi-Peds may never take their music to the experimental extremes of Zappa's Mothers of Invention, or Beefheart's Magic Band, they provide an adept conduit for the channeling of Barton's many and varied artistic ideas. A good band, after all, isn't easy to find, and no one knows that more than Barton, who spent the better part of 15 years searching for his. Sometimes -- as with his infamous early-'70s stint fronting Bruiser Barton & the Dry Heaves -- a group Rolling Stone dubbed the worst band in Texas -- he simply settled for what he could get, bonding with anyone sympathetic to his cause. Born in Ohio, Dale "Beans" Barton arrived in Houston when he was eight, his family uprooted to Texas by his salesman father at the height of the Cold War. He was a shy child, but exceedingly artistic, taking up drawing at a very young age as a means of escape. When he got to college, he started with poetry -- wild, unhinged stuff that his buddies at the University of Houston couldn't begin to fathom. He...