Ice Cream for Crow is the twelfth and final studio album by Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, released in September 1982. After it was recorded, Don Van Vliet retired from music to devote himself to a career as a painter. It spent two weeks in the UK album charts, reaching number 90, but failed to make the Billboard Top 200.
The album cover features a painting by Van Vliet and a portrait photo of him by Anton Corbijn. A music video was made to promote the title track, directed by Van Vliet and Ken Schreiber, with cinematography by Daniel Pearl, which was rejected by MTV for being “too weird”. However, the video was included in the Letterman broadcast on NBC-TV and was accepted into the Museum of Modern Art, where it has been used in several of their programs related to music. In a 1982 interview on Late Night with David Letterman, Van Vliet explained that the album’s title represented the contrast between the black of a crow and the white of vanilla ice cream.
