Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band - Bat Chain Puller (1976)
After recording the album 'Bongo Fury' with Frank Zappa, Don Van Vliet formed a new Magic Band and began recording 'Bat Chain Puller' for DiscReet and Virgin Records. Zappa described the proposed album as Beefheart's best since 'Trout Mask Replica', but when Zappa discovered that Herb Cohen, DiscReet's cofounder and Zappa's business manager, had paid for the album's production costs with Zappa's royalty cheques, he ended their business partnership. Cohen and Zappa each demanded to be paid an advance by Virgin, leading to Zappa withholding the master tapes, and resulting in Cohen suing Zappa. Due to the lawsuit, Beefheart re-recorded the 'Bat Chain Puller' tracks for Warner Bros. Records under the title 'Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller)'. In 1982, Cohen settled his lawsuit with Zappa, while at the same time Beefheart was recording 'Ice Cream For Crow', for which he'd intended to use half of the tracks from the original 'Bat Chain Puller'. Zappa, however, refused his request, and so 'Ice Cream For Crow' ended up comprising almost all new material, the one exception being the a cappella track '81 Poop Hatch', which he included from his own copy of the 'Bat Chain Puller' tape. Copies of the original album have since been issued on numerous bootlegs, but this particular dub was made from an ANA(1) copy given to a record company employee by Beefheart himself. This same tape has been bootlegged with excessive noise reduction, but this fresh new transfer is completely unedited, and is the best quality copy around. If you're a Beefheart fan you will have probably heard most of these tracks already, although there are a couple of exclusives, but obviously these are different recordings to those which eventually appeared on 'Shiny Beast', and so are worth hearing just for that.
Track listing
01 Bat Chain Puller02 Seam Crooked Sam03 Harry Irene04 Poop Hatch05 Flavor Bud Living06 Brickbats07 Floppy Boot Stomp08 A Carrot Is As Close As A Rabbit Gets To A Diamond09 Owed T'Alex10 Odd Jobs11 The 1010th Day Of The Human Totem Pole12 Apes-ma
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