"Captain Beefheart's debut album, originally released in 1967, is the most accessible and pop-inflected from his entire catalogue. Still, Safe as Milk is a very strong and heavily blues-influenced work but it also hints on many of the features that would later become the trademarks of Captain Beefheart.
A nice fact is that not only did a 20-year old Ry Cooder play bass & guitar on Abba Zaba and Grown So Ugly, he also arranged the latter as well as Sure 'Nuff 'N Yes I Do. Also, Cooder's role in the recording process was 'to translate the Captain's wilder notions to the rest of the band and generally acts as musical director'. With him as a supervisor, the sessions proceeded more or less smoothly and Safe As Milk was recorded within a month.
Fun fact; the album appears in the 2000 film High Fidelity as an album that the character Barry, played by Jack Black, continually refuses to sell to a customer, whom he deems unsuitable to own it.
The 7 bonus tracks are taken from the sessions for the unreleased Brown Wrapper follow-up album. These tracks had been recorded around November 1967, two months after the release of Safe as Milk's and were from the same sessions that yielded the songs on The Mirror Man Sessions [MOVLP260].