Rock music journalist Mark Ellen tells this story. One time in the late 1960s Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet) was short of money and selling vacuum cleaners door to door for a living. He knocked on a door in southern California and recognised the man who answered the door: science fiction writer and prophet of psychedelia Aldous Huxley. Beefheart slowly looked down at the vacuum, up at Huxley, and said, "Sir, this sucks."