Tuesday, November 2, 2010

THE RAREST BEEFHEART SINGLE

Thanks to Hakon Busterud, I was able to add pictures of the rarest vinyl 45 in the history of Capt. Beefheart, the testpressing of "Moonchild/Here I am, I always am".

There's only one copy known to exist. It was discovered in the vaults of A&M by Jeffrey Gold in 1984 when the preparation of the release of the The Legendary A&M sessions took place.

Hakon adds:
"What is very interesting is that when you study the matrix numbers you will discover that this 45 was intended as the second CB 45 from A&M. Why they didn't want to release the 45 with 'Here I am, I always am' as the B-side and changed it with 'Frying Pan' is a mystery because I think both songs are good enough.
If they had chosen 'Here I Am' as B-side on the release it would have been 'Frying Pan' that would have ended in the vaults. Both 45's use 1228/1229 as matrix numbers. The difference is that the Moonchild/Frying pan 45 has 1228-RE/1229-RE in the matrix. You can also see that there is a space in time between the intended release and the final one because the additional matrixnumber on Here I am is 63411 and the one for Frying pan is 63923 which 512 numbers later in the production."

2 comments:

  1. Hi Peter,

    It would be interesting to know what opinion has Hakon about this acetate:

    http://www.zappateers.com/bb/viewtopic.php?t=20264

    Thank you,

    Regards,
    Javier

    ReplyDelete
  2. That's definitely an acetate I would like to own, I haven't observed that it had been sold on Ebay last year. If I had I would have followed it to the end. What's interesting is if any of the tracks are different from the known versions and I suppose that's exactly what they are. I have two more acetates which are in the singles section. They are also considered as being known in only one copy each. The tracks on them are the same as the released once as far as I have been able to hear. It's the RCA release of Diddy wah diddy on 10" acetate and Moonchild on 7" acetate. They are funny because in UK RCA didn't release anything by CB and the PYE acetate later was released on A&M. Regards Hakon.

    ReplyDelete