Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band Live @ The Starship, Milwaukee, WI – 12/13/1980

Archive is an on going feature focusing on ‘vintage’ live recordings from Milwaukee (and eventually the surrounding areas). If you have a tip on a live recording you’d like to share, holler at us. As always, you can right click + ‘save as’ to download the files.

Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band brought their infamously inspired live show to Milwaukee’s Starship on December 13th, 1980. I was negative 3 years old when this show happened, so I was unable to attend… but! I was incredibly excited to stumble across this bootleg. It’s amazing that people actively taped these now historic shows. Big high-five 80′s taper dude!

The show starts off a little slow with heavy noodling-soundchecking and stage/crowd banter (some awesome snips from Beefheart on Milwauke, “nice people here”, the room being incredibly hot and asking for someone to “open a door” or “break a window pane” and even some disappointment in the (then) president Reagan) for around the first two tracks. Right around “Hot Head”, the set starts to kick into motion and is pretty great throughout.

Enjoy!

01 Hair Pie (Bass Sax)
02 Nowadays A Woman’s Gotta Hit A Man
03 Hot Head
04 Ashtray Heart
05 Dirty Blue Gene
06 Best Batch Yet
07 Safe As Milk
08 A Carrot Is As Close As A Rabbit Gets To A Diamond
09 One Red Rose That I Mean
10 Doctor Dark
11 Bat Chain Puller
12 My Human Gets Me Blues-414
13 ~~Sugar ‘N Spikes~~
14 Sheriff Of Hong Kong
15 Kandy Korn
ENCORE
16 Suction Prints
17 Big Eyed Beans From Venus