Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band
Beacon Theater
New York City, NY, USA
November 28, 1980

Lineage: 1st generation cassette recorded through Sony mono cassette deck >recording studio mixing board>EQ>compressor>Audiomedia II card>Mac IIci>Soundesigner 2>output to CD-R>ripped in iTunes>>conversion to 24-bit in Peak>imported to Pro Tools>Izotope Ozone rock master preset>16-bit bounce to AIFF>chopped into individual songs in Peak>FLAC conversion in xAct

01 Intro Apes-Ma.flac 1:23
02 Bass Motif Medley.flac 4:47
03 Nowadays A Woman's Gotta Hit a Man.flac 4:05
04 Abba Zabba.flac 3:40
05 Hot Head.flac 3:58
06 Ashtray Heart.flac 3:55
07 Dirty Blue Gene.flac 4:07
08 Best Batch Yet.flac 5:29
09 Band Introductions.flac 1:01
10 Safe As Milk.flac 4:20
11 Flavor Bud Living.flac 1:42
12 Her Eyes Are a Blue Million Miles.flac 3:36
13 One Red Rose That I Mean.flac 2:30
14 Untitled.flac 2:39
15 Doctor Dark.flac 3:24
16 Bat Chain Puller.flac 5:54
17 Old Fart At Play.flac 1:45
18 My Human Gets Me Blues.flac 3:17
19 Sugar In Spikes.flac 2:48
20 Sheriff of Hong Kong.flac 7:20
21 Big Eyed Beans From Venus.flac 6:25

TOTAL TIME: 78:04

ARTWORK INCLUDED.

The story behind this recording: A friend of mine had tickets to this show and was willing to take my mono Sony cassette deck and record it. There is some roominess to the sound but overall I think it sounds quite good given the equipment used and the venue. The photographs were taken at the show by another friend of mine.

Review from The New York Times:

Pop: Captain Beefheart at the Beacon

By Robert Palmer

Don Van Vliet, who is better known as Captain Beefheart, writes some of the knottiest, most extravagantly off-center music ever played on amplified instruments. One can remember earlier Beefheart concerts and be familiar with his recordings and still be unprepared for the sheer physical impact of two or three electric guitars, bass and drums hammering out rhythms that seem to trip over themselves in perfect unison, and of Mr. Van Vliet declaiming helter-skelter in a voice that veers edgily from a falsetto hiccup to a buzz-saw rasp.

Captain Beefheart has been writing this knotty music, and teaching it to various editions of his Magic Band, since the late 60's, with varying degrees of recognition. A number of new-wave rock performers are beginning to absorb some of his ideas, and to cite him as an influence, and that's made him temporarily au courant, but like Carl Ruggles, Henry Brant and other American maverick composers, Mr. Van Vliet listens to his own antic muse and never seems to concern himself with how "Hip" he may happen to be.

At the Beacon Theater on Friday night, Mr. Van Vliet's latest Magic Band, which has been playing his music for several years now, gave a performance that was tight, committed and often devastating. The Captain's sensibility-his personifications of inanimate objects, his genial misanthropy and rather disturbing tendency toward misogyny-will never be everyone's cup of tea, but one doesn't have to identify with the man to appreciate his genius. Through some remarkable personal alchemy, he has used elements from rock's roots-blues riffs, various syncopations, slide-guitar licks, the eternal backbeat-to kick the music headlong into the future.

(From the New York Times, November 30, 1980)