Long-Shelved Captain Beefheart Album Set for January Release

Captain Beefheart performing in May, 1975.

Colin Fuller/Redferns

A long-shelved Captain Beefheart album is set for release January 15th, on what would have been the 70th birthday of the outre bandleader (born Don Van Vliet).

Bat Chain Puller was scheduled for release in 1976 but was caught up in legal issues between Beefheart's friend Frank Zappa, who produced the record, and his onetime manager, Herb Cohen. The album has long been popular among bootleggers, and some of its songs were eventually rerecorded for Beefheart's 1978 album Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller).

Van Vliet, who was a highly regarded painter as well as a musician, died last year on December 17th. 

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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