[Witness the birth of Beefheart!]
Revisiting A&M Records No. 20
Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band:
‘The Legendary A&M Sessions’ (January-March ’66)
When I decided to expand my endless journey down the rabbit hole of this label’s storied past, I set sights on the Summer of Love as a starting point. No sooner had I placed that marker, however, I then rediscovered a crucial detail from the year before, when the emergent Magic Band and its fearless leader first cut singles for A&M.
Not that I need to regurgitate this bit o’ history for longtime devotees of the legend that was Don Van Vliet. He was an un-categorizable provocateur and experimentalist, childhood chum and frequent collaborator of Frank Zappa, a very major influence on Tom Waits and PJ Harvey and Beck and virtually every notable post-punk band from either side of the pond as well as the very idea of psych-rock, and plenty more. (Like Matt Groening, to get non-musical. Spend some time with ‘Trout Mask Replica’ whether you wind up loving or hating it. Either way, you’ll never see ‘The Simpsons’ the same again.)
For everyone else, here’s why this is important:
The Magic Band had become an underground LA sensation by the end of ’65, attracting a following at local clubs (where they were often mistaken for English rockers) and winning a battle of the bands that year during the annual Teenage Fair at the Hollywood Palladium.
That got them signed to A&M for two 45s: a stomping cover of Bo Diddley’s ‘Diddy Wah Diddy’ (backed with a Vliet original, ‘Who Do You Think You’re Fooling?’) and ‘Moonchild’ with another new one on the flip, ‘Frying Pan.’ Get this: the second single was written — and the entire session produced by — David Gates, ‘70s soft-rock titan, soon to flourish with Bread.
Though performed in a more straightforward manner than what’s on Magic Band masterworks to come, those four songs — plus an even better, long-unreleased fifth, ‘Here I Am, I Always Am’ — display indelible traits ingrained in Beefheart’s sound forevermore, from his blues-rock firmament to that unique growl of a voice.
Yet all of this material principally sat in the label’s vault, unavailable except on hard-to-find 7-inches, until the label reissued them as this 12-inch EP in October ’84, not long after Vliet announced his retirement from music.
Neither record fared especially well. ‘Diddy Wah Diddy’ became a minor local hit and ultimately outpaced the Remains’s simultaneously released version to now stand as the rock era’s definitive rendition. But ‘Moonchild’ flat-out flopped.
A&M passed on offering Beefheart and his band a contract extension after hearing demos for a proposed full-length debut. Jerry Moss, still a year away from his Monterey Pop awakening, just didn’t get it, couldn’t fathom how the Magic Band’s eccentricities fit within his label’s gentle pop landscape — and naively didn’t think his teenage daughter should hear such sounds. (Vliet reportedly believed the snarling ‘Electricity’ was the finishing blow.)
But falling out with A&M and their first manager Leonard Grant led them to an arguably better launch, courtesy of Bob Krasnow, then an exec at maybe-mob-moneyed Kama Sutra Records. That fledgling endeavor had just launched an eclectic new subsidiary, Buddah.
And so it was that the label that gave the world and its transistor radios such bubblegum classics as ‘Yummy Yummy Yummy’ (you know, ‘I got love in my tummy’) and ‘Green Tambourine’ also became home to Captain Beefheart’s first album, ‘Safe as Milk.’ (Eventually his fifth as well, when Buddah issued the remainder of his ’67 sessions as ‘Mirror Man’ four years later.)