Captain Beefheart: Safe As Milk (2LP, 7 bonus tracks) [MUSIC ON VINYL]

Why you'll love it

This Music On Vinyl 2LP set marks the album's 50th anniversary with seven bonus tracks on 180g vinyl. Safe As Milk appears in 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, and Mojo's Jon Savage called it a towering achievement.

This edition

• 2LP set
• 180g vinyl
• Seven bonus tracks
• 50th anniversary edition
• Insert included
• Numbered

About the album

Before the legend, before the paintings and the long, strange records that followed, Don Van Vliet made a blues album. A rather wild one, granted. Bob Krasnow signed Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band to the new Buddah label, and Van Vliet brought in a 20-year-old Ry Cooder, fresh from the Rising Sons with Taj Mahal, to play guitar and write some of the arrangements.

The Delta is there from the first bars: "Sure 'Nuff 'n Yes I Do" is built on Muddy Waters' "Rollin' and Tumblin'," and Cooder arranges Robert Pete Williams' "Grown So Ugly." "Abba Zaba" is named for Van Vliet's favourite candy bar; the band once meant to call the album after it, and the black and yellow checkerboard Tom Wilkes put on the back sleeve still echoes the wrapper. "Electricity" and "Zig Zag Wanderer" crackle, "Autumn's Child" drifts, and the bonus sides add "Safe As Milk (Take 5)," "Big Black Baby Shoes" and "Trust Us (Take 9)."

John Peel championed it on British radio from the start, and John Lennon kept two of its promotional stickers on cupboard doors at home. We can't offer you Lennon's cupboards, sadly, but we can do the record.

Also at Kops: more Captain Beefheart on vinyl · browse Rock

Tracklist

Listen

On Buddah / Music On Vinyl (cat# MOVLP343), a reissue of the 1967 album.