Captain Beefheart: Safe As Milk (Vinyl 2xLP)

Captain Beefheart's debut album, originally released in 1967, is the most accessible and pop-inflected of his entire catalogue. Still, Safe As Milk is a very heavily blues-influenced work but it also hints at what was to come.

Not only did a 20-year old Ry Cooder play bass & guitar on "Abba Zaba" and "Grown So Ugly", he also arranged the latter as well as "Sure 'Nuff 'N Yes I Do". Also, Cooder's role in the recording process was 'to translate the Captain's wilder notions to the rest of the band and generally acts as musical director'. With him as a supervisor, the sessions proceeded more or less smoothly and Safe As Milk was recorded within a month.

Fun fact; the album appears in the 2000 film High Fidelity as an album that the character Barry, played by Jack Black, continually refuses to sell to a customer, whom he deems unsuitable to own it.

The 7 bonus tracks are taken from the sessions for the unreleased 'Brown Wrapper' follow-up album. These tracks had been recorded around November 1967, two months after the release of Safe as Milk's and were from the same sessions that yielded the songs on Mirror Man Session.

Gatefold sleeve reissue with bonus tracks (Sides C and D) on 180g vinyl.

1. Sure 'Nuff 'N Yes I Do
2. Zig Zag Wanderer
3. Call On Me
4. Dropout Boogie
5. I'm Glad
6. Electricity
7. Yellow Brick Road
8. Abba Zaba
9. Plastic Factory
10. Where There's Woman
11. Grown So Ugly
12. Autumn's Child
13. Safe As Milk (Take 5)
14. On Tomorrow
15. Big Black Baby Shoes
16. Flower Pot
17. Dirty Blue Gene
18. Trust Us (Take 9)
19. Korn Ring Finger