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Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band - Student Union Bar, Loughborough University (1980)

Track listing:
  1. Hair Pie: Bake III 2:49
  2. Nowadays A Woman's Gotta Hit A Man 3:53
  3. Abba Zaba 3:46
  4. Hot Head 4:19
  5. Ashtray Heart 3:36
  6. Dirty Blue Gene 4:36
  7. Best Batch Yet 5:23
  8. Safe As Milk 4:05
  9. Flavor Bud Living 1:44
  10. Her Eyes Are A Blue Million Miles 3:36
  11. One Red Rose That I Mean 2:22
  12. Entitled: Untitled 2:30
  13. Doctor Dark 2:56
  14. Bat Chain Puller 5:29
  15. Band Intro 1:24
  16. Old Fart At Play 2:08
  17. My Human Gets Me Blues 3:43
  18. Sugar 'n Spikes 3:17
  19. Sheriff Of Hong Kong 7:28
  20. Suction Prints 5:08
  21. Big Eyed Beans From Venus 4:42

Notes

Student Union Bar

Sound quality is excellent audience, stereo.
Audience>tape (probably 2nd gen)
Quality: 9/10

Captain Beefheart/Don Van Vliet: vocals, tenor saxophone, soprano saxophone, chinese gongs
Eric 'Black Jew/Kitabo' Drew Feldman bass, synthesizer, mandolin, mellotron, electric piano
Robert 'Wait For Me' Williams: drums, percussion
Richard 'Midnight Hatsize' Snyder: guitar, slide guitar, bass
Jeff 'Tapir/White Jew' Moris Tepper: guitar, slide-guitar
Gary Lucas: national steel dualion (on: Flavor Bud Living), reciting

By 1980 technology had moved on and the Loughborough tape is of excellent audience tape quality (B+?), the good atmosphere at this show is evident and the nature of the small Loughborough Student Union Bar make the music sound loud and effective. Audience noise is limited to people pushing through to the bar at the back of the room 'scuse me, scuse me' etc.

The audience was split between Beefheart fans who had come from all over the East Midlands to see their man and the regular student union crowd who would turn up on any Saturday night to drink at the bar and 'listen' to who ever happened to be playing. Even in 1980 there must of been a ten to twenty year age gap between the two halves of the audience. Being students they have tendency to show off and offer scant regard to any act that happened to be on. However it is wonderful to hear how the Captain won over this audience, helped by the glowers and threatening looks of the true fans who did not want some nerdy young students wrecking the set. The Captain was treated with due respect and given a rousing greeting when he came on stage, you can here him remark "Better than London". The students were a bit bemused by the poetry, this was not exactly ZZ Top and they found it difficult to concentrate, note the shout of "Who shot JR?" during the reading, an interesting contemporary reference since the Dallas Series was the big TV talking point in the UK at this time.