Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band: Safe As Milk [★★★★½]

In Greek mythology, the Cyclops was a one-eyed monster named Polyphemus most famous for eating Odysseus’ men. In another, less common myth, the hapless Cyclops fell in love with a nymph named Galatea, and tried to woo her with song. But she rejected him, and his later run-in with Odysseus left him blind and wretched. Imagine that Polyphemus kept singing, and that this horrible, cave-dwelling ogre would growl and bellow the blues— the only voice which could compare to his existential discontent is the terrifying bellow of Captain Beefheart, also known as Don Van Vliet.

The passing of Don Van Vliet on 17 December 2010 came twenty-eight years after the Captain hung up his shell-shocked microphone and retired from a music biz career (which had earned him notoriety, critical acclaim, and no money) in order to sing through his paintings. Few ostensibly “rock” recording artists have longer shadows; Beefheart’s legacy rumbles on in pretty much any music which avoids the smooth ruts and well-trodden paths. Imagine an unholy mash-up of Howlin’ Wolf, Salvador Dali, e.e. cummings, Pablo Picasso, John Muir, and Ornette Coleman, and you start to scratch the surface of Beefheart’s art. He is most famous for his deep, bellowing, booming preternatural growl of a voice, an instantly recognizable and often frightening distillation of Howlin’ Wolf’s similarly bone-rattling holler, only amplified into an abstract poetry cannon. Besides his voice, which alone could have made him a career in the hard blues gutter, Beefheart was an astonishingly facile wordsmith, rich in puns and poetry and dazzlingly bonkers non-sequiturs full of nature and sex and blues and surreal metaphor. Behind him bashed his many aptly-titled Magic Bands, probably the most innovative aspect of his music. Deconstructing rhythms and turning song forms inside-out and backwards, Beefheart’s best music chugged along like a lopsided funky dumptruck with free jazz flat tires, and despite the wobbly, stop-start rhythmic attack, somehow everything held together in an abstract musical logic.

Beefheart’s first recording was a rowdy cover of Bo Diddley’s “Diddy Wah Diddy”, which featured one of the heaviest basslines ever to grace a 45. But beyond minor regional success, the single did not impress his record company, and so Beefheart would move on to Buddah to record his first full-length, Safe As Milk. At this point, the Magic Band—as evidenced from the ’66-’67 acetates and live recordings on the rarities box Grow Fins—was a heavy psychedelic blues band, and among the freakiest in the Los Angeles scene. But Beefheart’s vocal attack put him way beyond other white blues bands; contemporaries like Canned Heat, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, or even the Doors sound like kids in a sandbox compared to Beefheart’s lupine overdrive. It is interesting, then, to hear how varied and even well-rounded Safe As Milk is. As a record, it presages virtually all of the later moves he would make in his career. Hard blues opener "Sure 'Nuff 'n Yes I Do" recycles Muddy Waters’ “Rollin and Tumblin’”, and tracks like "Plastic Factory" commandeer traditional blues riffs. Gleefully demented noise like "Dropout Boogie" and "Electricity" point toward Beefheart’s friendship with fellow iconoclast Frank Zappa and anticipate the epic surreal weirdness of 1969’s Trout Mask Replica. But the heavier tracks are leavened with bouncy pop like "Yellow Brick Road" and "Abba Zaba", a tribute to a candy bar, and there is even commercial r’n’b like "Call On Me", which is almost Motown, and "I'm Glad", which sounds like the Impressions (and which helps explain his unbeloved 1974 records Unconditionally Guaranteed and Bluejeans & Moonbeams).

As would be the case throughout his career, his backing musicians deserve a good portion of the credit. Drummer John French would be Beefheart’s gloriously irregular heartbeat for several records, and guitarist Ry Cooder, who would quit the band shortly after, contributes excellent slide guitar. Sadly, the intense pressure of making this wildly uncommercial music would lead to constant personnel shifts and record company troubles. The record itself suffers from middling sound quality to a producer’s decision to switch from a state-of-the-art 8-track studio to a primitive 4-track; the sound is often muddled. There were no real outtakes from the sessions (other than the aforementioned acetates), and the very good CD edition (on a reborn Buddha Records) includes longer, less focused blues jams from October-November 1967 sessions. Safe As Milk (the title being, perhaps, a wry acknowledgment of the record’s potentially distasteful originality) would become a cult record, especially in the UK, and while few fans rate it as his best work, it is probably his most accessible creation, and the ideal first purchase for anyone who wants to visit one of the wilder corners of underground 60s rock.

MP3: "Dropout Boogie"

Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band: Safe As Milk (Buddah Records, September 1967)

Side one:

1. "Sure 'Nuff 'n Yes I Do" (Don Van Vliet, Herb Bermann) – 2:16

2. "Zig Zag Wanderer" (Van Vliet, Bermann) – 2:40

3. "Call On Me" – 2:37 (Van Vliet)

4. "Dropout Boogie" – 2:32 (Van Vliet, Bermann)

5. "I'm Glad" – 3:31 (Van Vliet)

6. "Electricity" – 3:08 (Van Vliet, Bermann)

Side two:

7. "Yellow Brick Road" – 2:28 (Van Vliet, Bermann)

8. "Abba Zaba" – 2:44 (Van Vliet)

9. "Plastic Factory" (Van Vliet, Bermann, Jerry Handley) – 3:09

10. "Where There's Woman" (Van Vliet, Bermann) – 2:10

11. "Grown So Ugly" (Robert Pete Williams) – 2:27

12. "Autumn's Child" (Van Vliet, Bermann) – 4:02

Comparable Albums

No one really sounds like Captain Beefheart, so it’s difficult to list similar albums. Beefheart’s next album, 1968’s Strictly Personal, was a somewhat sloppy foray into psychedelic blues jamming. Beefheart’s high school buddy Frank Zappa released Absolutely Free in 1967, but other than its aggressive stance toward commercial pop and staid ‘60s culture, it bears little in common musically. If Beefheart had had the inclination, he could have probably made a pyschedlic blues album like the Doors’ first, or Disraeli Gears by Cream, but thankfully he followed his muse. For other examples of unhinged counterculture of the I-can’t-believe-these-guys-got-to-make-a-record variety, see anything by the Fugs, or the Deviants’ Ptooff!