Time Capsule: Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band, Safe As Milk

There are a number of bands I like that no one else in my orbit likes, but my appreciation for Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band has always put me on something of an island. That’s not a knock against the folks I’ve surrounded myself with. Very few people born after 1995 voluntarily align themselves with the Beefhearts and the Frank Zappas of the world, especially when a record like Trout Mask Replica was absent from streaming until the summer of 2021. I came of age just before streaming really took off, and I cut my teeth on YouTube queues more than MP3 downloads. And, thanks to the Cindy Lee phenomenon in 2024, perhaps the labors of curation and music discovery will make a full-fledged comeback.

YouTube is how I discovered Captain Beefheart, in a “What’s In My Bag?” video Amoeba Records did with the Black Keys’ Patrick Carney in 2015. I imagine there are others like me, who combed through all 80 minutes of Trout Mask Replica from in front of a desktop computer screen before the uploads got taken down post-copyright strikes. I’d play the album through those shoddy PC speakers and, to me, it was the sonic equivalent to all of those pulleys and levers behind Oz’s curtain—this grand, chaotic and frenzied collage of juxtapositions, experiments and kooky whims. The world around me felt a little more organized whenever I listened to Beefheart; more sounds felt possible as Beefheart, Drumbo, Antennae Jimmy Semens, Zoot Horn Rollo, Rockette Morton and The Mascara Snake marched through avant, maniacal scenes of unstructured bursts.

But it was that “What’s In My Bag?” video that turned me on to a much different Captain Beefheart record: the band’s 1967 debut, Safe as Milk. It was much bluesier joint, one that doused itself in revue textures of R&B, acid, garage and folk rock, doo-wop and even the very same exploratory psychedelia that fueled the wiggly, gummy bones of Trout Mask Replica. Before Safe as Milk, Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band had released a few singles—a cover of Bo Diddley’s “Diddy Wah Diddy,” “Who Do You Think You’re Fooling,” “Moonchild” and “Frying Pan”—with Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss’s A&M Records. The Magic Band had wanted to do their first record with A&M, who’d found success with Alpert’s Tijuana Brass, Chris Montez, Burt Bacharach and Jimmie Rodgers, but, upon hearing Beefheart’s R&B demos, the label deemed the budding California group to be “too unconventional.” Beefheart himself claimed that label execs heard “Electricity” and called it “too negative,” while Moss thought the music was “too risqué” for his daughter’s ears.

After leaving A&M, Captain Beefheart went to Kama Sutra Records’ Bob Krasnow, who signed them to the company’s brand new subsidiary, Buddah Records. Beefheart was changing the Magic Band’s lineup at the time, replacing Doug Moon with a 20-year-old Ry Cooder, moving Alex St. Clair from drums to guitar, hiring John French to man the kit and retaining Jerry Handley on bass. Cooder had been making a name for himself in the industry by that point, thanks to his work with Gary “Magic” Maker and Taj Mahal in the Los Angeles band Rising Sons. At one point, Beefheart even believed that Maker would act as Safe as Milk’s producer, but his involvement sputtered after the demoing stage. The title, a sarcastic reference to the contamination of breast milk with DDT or strontium-90, stuck—you could buy Safe as Milk on vinyl and get a bumper sticker with the title and a baby’s face on it.

Safe as Milk came into the world holding a heavy Delta blues influence within it. There are nods to Muddy Waters and Cannon’s Jug Stompers (“Sure ‘Nuff ‘n Yes I Do”) and Robert Pete Williams (“Grown So Ugly”), and the candy bar-inspired, Dadaist track “Abba Zaba” packs that wiry Delta sound with punchy bass playing and labyrinthine guitar notes. Beefheart wanted to name the record “Abba Zaba,” but the candy’s manufacturer, Cardinet Candy Co., refused to give the band permission. Still, the album’s cover designer Tom Wilkes snuck a black-and-yellow checkerboard pattern onto the back sleeve, an homage to the candy bar’s wrapper. “Abba Zaba,” for my money, is a great way to indocrinate somebody into the weird and cosmic world of Captain Beefheart, as its surreal poetry was often nonsensical (“Mother say son, she say son, you can’t lose, with the stuff you use / Abba Zaba go-zoom Babbette baboon / Run, run, monsoon, Indian dream, tiger moon”) yet bright and astonishing like an intricately-woven tapestry.

Herb Bermann, a lyricist and writer whose screenplay co-written with Dean Stockwell later inspired Neil Young to make After the Gold Rush, is credited as a co-writer with Beefheart on eight of the album’s 12 tracks, though Beefheart never officially employed him. What his role was in bringing these songs to life remained somewhat of a mystery for over 30 years, his connection to Safe as Milk and After the Gold Rush being one of the very few records of his existence. The Magic Band has even implied that there may very well have been no Bermann at all—that Herb’s name was nothing more than a pseudonym for publishing reasons. But, in 2003, he was identified and his contributions to Beefheart’s debut were confirmed. There’s even a photo of him in Mama Cass’s Topanga Canyon living room with his pet parrot Peaceful Herb, perched on his head.

Safe as Milk found virtually no success in the United States, failing to chart here as well as in the UK—the latter of which would later prove to be nourish a good spark of fandom for the Magic Band, as Trout Mask Replica would peak as high as #21 on the country’s albums chart in 1969. DJ John Peel was an early supporter, likely helping the band’s stature rise across the pond. John Lennon enjoyed Safe as Milk, too, and Rolling Stone loved Beefheart’s singing in particular (though they criticized the album’s failures, writing that it “laps[es] into dull commercial rock on the order of Love’s early efforts”). Someone online described it as “Howlin’ Wolf’s first album after arriving in Hell,” while it garnered something of a “WTF” reaction from most folks who weren’t totally down with acid blues and the genre’s own shortcomings. Safe as Milk was not the counterculture testament that Trout Mask Replica could be categorized as, though I’d argue that the “Summer of Love” was never a proper fit for the figure-eight guitar spasms disintegrating from the Magic Band’s fingertips.

But Safe as Milk is Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band lingering in an accessible reverie of sights and sounds from the very decade the record stems from. Cooder’s guitar twang on “Sure ‘Nuff ‘n’ Yes, I Do” is a big-rig of tumbleweed-evoking country-and-western music, while Beefheart sounds like Wolfman Jack on the galvanized and gonzo proverb of “Electricity,” sound like a strung-out preacher delivering bone-dry, metallic scrapes of loose blues. There’s the baroque wash of the Chess-conjuring, “Smoke Stack Lightning”-idyllic glued to the harmonica-blazing euphoria of “Plastic Factory,” and closer “Autumn’s Child” stands on the shoulders of this great, angular concerto of whirring, cosmopolitan exorcisms: Beefheart can pull the evil out of your soul with his dirges, poetics delivered ferociously like a man with a bible caught in his throat.

“The following tone is a reference tone, recorded at our operating level,” a stranger’s voice announces before the sugary, waltzing guitar riff of “Yellow Brick Road” chimes in. It’s a rosy tune not overworked by Beefheart’s habit of lapsing into experimental, disembodied free-falls. The songcraft is potent, yanked from the doldrums of oft-exhausted blues mimicry. Safe as Milk clears the Creams and Ten Years Afters of the same timeframe, the album’s milieu existing in the same lineage of intrigue as most of what Canned Heat was making around then. Come to think of it, a double-feature of Safe as Milk and Hooker ‘n Heat would feed families. In the margins of Beefheart’s debut exists the very same band that would pluck themselves out of the confines of trends and fashions and enlarge their own brilliance on Trout Mask Replica. Simon Reynolds calling their sound “Cubist R&B” makes sense in the context of a record like this one—even its most recognizable shapes blur at the edges.

The record’s bluesiest appendages—like “Grown So Ugly” and “Dropout Boogie”—make sense in the lexicons of bands like the Black Keys, but these wide-eyed, compositional tangents fell deeply into the sounds of punk and new wave bands like Public Image Ltd, the B-52’s and Devo. Anyone left-of-center had three hots and a cot in Captain Beefheart’s music, even in the free-association, primal-scream factions of Safe as Milk—like “Electricity” and “Abba Zaba.” But Safe as Milk would deliver conventional songs, too, like the thorny garage-rock of “Call On Me”—which, during the song’s breakdown, boasts a melody that is distantly similar to the Crystals’ “Then He Kissed Me”—and the staggering, soulful, distorted absurdity of “When There’s Woman.”

But just as I return to Captain Beefheart’s 1970s output for “Her Eyes Are a Blue Million Miles,” I am beckoned back to Safe as Milk by “I’m Glad,” one of Beefheart’s greatest pre-Trout Mask treasures—a track that, even amongst the band’s not-yet-mastered disarray, fashions itself into this dramatic, soulful tether between doo-wop’s golden age and the primitive, transformative wave of Mersey Beat-roused rock music. It’s a hackneyed attempt at a soul song, because it sounds like a garage band doing a Clarence Carter impersonation, but it works oh so very well. It’s gaudy and full of light, unhindered by its lack of uniqueness yet fully wild and predictably mischievous. I understand why so many people regard Trout Mask Replica as one of the most important projects in the history of experimental music, but to get there—to this frenzy of arbitrary, incoherent, orchestral digressions stacked upon themselves—Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band had to make Safe as Milk first; they had to build-out their eccentricities before blowing them to smithereens two incredibly long years later.

And Safe as Milk is one of the best-sounding records I’ve ever encountered—one that is raw-hemmed and gloriously wide-screen. Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band were the whacko inverse to a band like the Yardbirds, coming at blues sideways and putting it through just about every meat grinder they could find. They were more Country Joe & the Fish than Grateful Dead, preferring to take apart the music they admired rather than stretch it out into some inconceivably long-winded jam. Listening to Safe as Milk in 2024 is a maddening but plentiful experience. Beefheart and his crew were antagonistic even at their most approachable, never letting you sit comfortably in their noise.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.