Music On Vinyl Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band - Safe As Milk (1967)

Captain Beefheart's debut album, originally released in 1967, is the most accessible and pop-inflected from his entire catalogue. Still, Safe As Milk is a very strong and heavily blues-influenced work but it also hints on many of the features that would later become the trademarks of Captain Beefheart.

A nice fact is that 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.